In the fourth-season premiere of Project Greenlight, a primetime decision meeting meant to select a directing team exploded into a public argument about race, representation and who gets to judge a story. Effie T. Brown — by then an established film producer and a rare Black voice at the table — urged the show's decision-makers to consider how a forthcoming character named Harmony, the only Black character in the script, would be treated by the filmmakers under consideration. The finalist team in question paired an Asian American man, Leo Angelos, with a white woman, Kristen Brancaccio; Brown worried about the power dynamics around a sequence in which Harmony, a Black sex worker, is struck by her white pimp. Her intervention put her at odds with producers and stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and Damon countered by arguing that “when you're talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not the casting of the show,” noting that the directing candidate himself had no issue with the script's controversial elements.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2000s
Effie T. Brown and the 2000s Project Greenlight Showdown Over Race, Casting, and Who Speaks for Characters of Color
Effie T. Brown / Project Greenlight (Season 4) / 2000s
In the fourth-season premiere of Project Greenlight, a primetime decision meeting meant to select a directing team exploded into a public argument about race, representation and who gets to judge a story. Effie T. Brown — by then an established film producer and a rare Black voice at the table — urged the show's decision-makers to consider how a forthcoming character named Harmony, the only Black character in the script, would be treated by the filmmakers under consideration. The finalist team in question paired an Asian American man, Leo Angelos, with a white woman, Kristen Brancaccio; Brown worried about the power dynamics around a sequence in which Harmony, a Black sex worker, is struck by her white pimp. Her intervention put her at odds with producers and stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and Damon countered by arguing that “when you're talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not the casting of the show,” noting that the directing candidate himself had no issue with the script's controversial elements.
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