For The Hollywood Reporter’s largest shoot ever, members of Black Women Who Brunch, a networking group co-founded by Lena Waithe, gather to discuss how the industry can better understand black women in Hollywood: “We have to be exceptional.” In 2014, Nkechi Okoro Carroll was an executive story editor on Bones when she met an up-and-coming scribe named…
Hollywood has long had a problem with representation and diversity, especially concerning anyone female and nonwhite. In the first half of the 20th century, black women were largely relegated to playing mammy and jezebel roles. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic “Birth of a Nation” even depicted African Americans as rapists and imbeciles, leading to a resurgence…
The biggest “surprise” of this past weekend box office was also totally predictable: a film with a predominantly Black cast drew a bigger audience than industry analysts expected. Box Office Hit Universal’s “Girls Trip,” a women-on-the-loose comedy starring Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish and Jada Pinkett Smith, made $30.4 million in its opening weekend, about…