Pride and Privilege
What does the word 'privilege' really mean?
It’s Monday, June 8, 2020, and here’s where we are…
Can you imagine the world where the biggest thing we’re all talking about today is the opening weekend box-office gross for Wonder Woman 1984?
What a privilege that would be.
You don’t want to read me talking about the protests right now or the death of George Floyd or the defunding and restructuring of police departments because there is nothing that I am going to contribute to that conversation that is of any real merit. I can opine, sure. Everyone’s doing plenty of that.
What I can do, though, is speak to the way my particular puzzle piece fits into this and the way evolution happens in people’s personal ideas. Mine, specifically.
People love to pretend that they arrive fully formed as moral human beings and they are never wrong and they never change. That is, of course, preposterous. I am not the person I was at 40, or at 30, or definitely at 20, and while I am not ashamed of who I have been at any point upon that timeline, I would be if I had never allowed myself room to grow. I have been profoundly changed by the people and the events in my life, and I have slowly but surely become the person I am. There are ideas that have been part of my personality as long as I’ve been conscious, and there are ideas that I am still trying to incorporate into my daily practice. To be honest, it’s a daily thing right now, trying to come to grips with how much of who I am is a reaction to the privilege I’ve been wrapped in since birth.
No one explained the meaning of privilege to me when I was young, but I think I’ve always had a keen awareness of it because I was adopted. My parents never treated that as an unusual or exception fact, but they also never made it a secret. It was just part of my identity. Your name is Drew. You have blue eyes. You are adopted. To me, that framed things a certain way. I’ve always thought of myself as lucky, as someone who was picked. I may not have known the specific term “privilege,” but the way I thought about it was like I won the lottery. And not just once. I won the lottery several times. First, I was born white. Second, I was born American. Third, I was born to a young unmarried mother at a time when she easily could have chosen not to carry me to term. Fourth, I was adopted by a loving family who wanted me. That’s a whole lot of luck before I ever even showed up to the party, and I acknowledge that.
I think some people hear the phrase “privilege” and they think that their life has to be great for that term to apply. There are degrees of privilege just as there are degrees of anything. What you do with that privilege is up to you, and in my case, I have definitely benefitted from it while also failing the responsibility of having it.
For example, I am privileged to have a fairly inconsequential history of interactions with the police. My apartment was broken into one time, and when the police came to examine the scene, they did precisely jack and shit to help us. They didn’t even pretend that they might resolve things or find our stuff. Nothing. I’ve been pulled over a few times over the years, twice because I let my tags expire, and in every case, I’ve been given warnings, even when I should have been ticketed. Beyond that, my experience with the police consists of an afternoon spent in the park in Toronto during the film festival. I was smoking weed with a friend, and we didn’t notice two bike cops sitting about ten feet away from us. They watched us and knew exactly what we were doing, and when they confronted us about it, we really couldn’t pretend we weren’t doing it. The punishment was swift and brutal; they made us empty out our pipe and promise not to smoke in that particular park anymore.
I mean… I was in another country. I was working. If I had been arrested, that would have been a huge problem for me, on so many levels, and I was 100% unafraid of those consequences because of where I was and who I was. And even when I say “huge problem,” it’s more about the ways it would have inconvenienced me or made things momentarily difficult. It was never life or death. And sure enough, nothing happened. We went to our next movie, and we had a funny story to tell our friends for a few days.
There is nothing I can add to a conversation about personal experience with police violence, but I can add plenty to a conversation about white privilege, and perhaps the most illuminating example I can offer is one that I used to offer as a point of pride, but which I now recognize as a moment of profound privilege, one in which I failed completely.
The rise of social media is going to be a moment in history that they study at some distant point, providing we don’t tweet ourselves to death before that happens. The Internet changed the world, and living pretty much half my life on either side of the advent of the Internet gives me a perspective on it that is both optimistic and pessimistic in equal nature. I think the Internet is a remarkable experiment and watching it rewrite everything about culture in real time while even contributing to the way that change took place has been startling at times. It’s clear that I have met people I would have never met online, and I have been able to share day to day experience with people around the world who I would have never spoken to in a pre-Internet world. I feel like I’ve become far more open-minded and open-hearted in general since I first signed online in 1995, and I feel like the world itself has gone through the same transformation. But the result of that is that the people who are most threatened by open hearts and open minds have become louder than ever, using the same tool to organize and weaponize their hatred.
The first half of the ‘90s, before social media and the Internet, I was just getting settled in LA and pushing hard to find my way into the business. Everything I wrote was high concept stuff designed to net me one of those big-ticket spec sales that were making headlines at the time. I wanted to be Shane Black so badly, and I wrote clever scripts with clockwork hearts. Mechanical scripts. Even though I went to school for theater, I never considered that my career goal. At the time, Florida State University didn’t have a film school, so I focused on theater. My thinking was that the basic tools are similar. Performance. Script. The staging and blocking of scenes for maximum effect. So many film schools emphasize the technical first that I even saw some value in working in the other direction. I considered it valuable, but it wasn’t where my heart was, and I didn’t really think about writing for theater for the first few years we were in LA.
Then we met Jerry Levine.
I recognized him first from Born on The 4th of July as one of the close childhood friends of Ron Kovic. Jerry was a customer at Dave’s Video, a laserdisc store that catered mainly to industry clients. He rented a lot of movies from us, like any general movie fan, but on occasion, he’d come in to study up for something. That’s how we started talking, actually. He had an audition for a film and the script had a full page at the start about the various inspirations the director had drawn on. He wanted me to help him put together a viewing list before his audition. Some of the names, he didn’t recognize at all, and I was able to hook him up with at least one film from each filmmaker named. In the end, Chris Penn got the role of Nice Guy Eddie, but at least I got to read the Reservoir Dogs script about a year and a half before the buzz on the film began.
More importantly, it started a conversation with Jerry about that script and about writing in general that led to him getting involved with a script of ours. My writing partner and I had a project we’d been kicking around for about two years by that point, a comedy/drama about a group of hitmen who spend two weeks at a hotel in D.C. preparing to kill the President. It was designed to be edgy but in a big studio down-the-middle kind of way. We were twenty-year-old kids writing about the Secret Service and Vietnam veterans and the Mafia and we were so confident that we had something to say. Weirdly, Jerry agreed. He liked the characters and he was confident we could turn the script into an actual film. He was the first person to take us seriously, the first person to work with us at all.
As we were plugging away on the script, Jerry and his partner Risa Bramon Garcia put together a theater festival of one-act plays. It was an ambitious plan. They were going to put on a festival every year, and that festival would serve as a sort of farm league for feature films that could be developed for indie production. Jerry had just finished shooting a one-act-play-turned-short-film called Big Al, and he was convinced this was a great way to really workshop a piece of material. Risa was best known at that point as one of the best casting directors in the business, but both she and Jerry were directors as well, and they loved theater. This wasn’t just a short-cut to making movies… the festival was the point. They opened up the process, putting together a search committee, and they started going through thousands of submissions. Jerry mentioned the festival to us, and we started talking about whether or not we had something that might work as a play.
We didn’t, but we were living in LA, and it was impossible to avoid certain conversations. The LA riots were in 1992, and we were here for them. It was impossible not to have the same conversations that are being had right now, but I was a very different person back then. I was 22 years old when those riots happened, and while I considered myself to be a very open and liberal person back then, I didn’t know what that really meant. For the most part, I spent my early 20s telling people that I chose to stay out of politics completely.
Imagine that. Imagine the absolute luxury of thinking that you don’t have to have any opinion about politics in America. You know who does that? People who are born with enormous privilege. It is a privilege to be able to say you don’t care about politics because you know in your heart of hearts that your interests will be served whether you participate or not. You know how you know that your interests will be served? Because you are the default. You are the norm. You are the one who society was built to serve, and all you have to do is be born and take the ride. That’s what it’s like to be white in America.
While I still thought of myself as apolitical, I definitely felt like I had an important opinion about the way the use of race language in mainstream culture was changing. I felt like I could thread the needle on political correctness and show people how it wasn’t about the words but about the intent behind them. I felt like political correctness wasn’t about respect; it was about hiding the ugly truth of what people were saying. I appreciate a certain bluntness in language (he said, surprising no one who has access to his Twitter feed) and would rather know who someone is than watch people learn certain code phrases that they feel like absolve them of any responsibility for any real change in their heart.
I put on a good show when I talked about, but the truth is, I saw “political correctness” as an assault on my speech and my ability to express myself. I wanted to be able to use any word I wanted in my art.
And, yeah, you know what word I mean.
Oh, but, see, I used it the right way. I meant well, so my play where the word is used about 483 times is a good thing, not a bad thing. Because I meant well.
Look, I still think “Sticks and Stones” is a clever play. The premise is very simple. There’s a cop. He shot a kid. He was heard yelling racially-charged language while he was chasing the kid. Now he’s in the hot seat, and he needs a lawyer. The one-act takes place in the office of a lawyer he’s interviewing. The cop is a cauldron of anger and racist resentment, and the lawyer is clearly disgusted by him, so the interview is back-and-forth debate about what you can or can’t say and what the weight of our words really is.
We started rehearsals with one cast but had to start over only a few weeks before we opened, and we ended up with Jonathan Silverman as the lawyer and a terrific actor named Lou Mustillo as the cop. It was our first produced piece of work of any kind, and it couldn’t have been a better overall experience. Jerry directed the play beautifully, and both Jonathan and Lou were incredible. They executed our script perfectly.
When the festival ended, Hollywood did indeed come calling. We got our first agent out of the festival. We got our first meetings. We suddenly found ourselves in room after room after room after room. Our new agent made sure people came and saw the festival, as did Jerry and Risa, all of them working to give us every advantage, and the reviews were really good, and we were suddenly seen as “socially conscious” writers. That was almost entirely not what we had in mind, and instead of leaning into what was working, I made sure we told every person in every room that we went into that we were more interested in the Star Wars end of the pool, confusing everybody thoroughly in the process.
Showtime Networks saw something in the play, though, and they had a relationship with Jerry after their experience on Big Al, and within a few months of the play closing, we had a deal with Showtime to turn our one-act into a full-length film. That process was my first time working with studio notes, and it was also the end of our relationship with Jerry by the time things were done.
It’s my fault. No question about it. Jerry was committed to making the movie. He’d already been paying his dues as an actor for a while, and he saw this as an opportunity to jumpstart his directing career. Jerry had a great ear for dialogue and he was relentless on making us write to character and theme. When we started developing the script for the feature, we knew that the cop couldn’t be the lead character, and intentionally built it so that we were focused on three leads, all of them carrying equal weight in the story. One was the cop. One was the lawyer. And the third was a young black journalist for the LA Weekly.
Bottom line: we were not ready to write that film. We also weren’t old enough or mature enough to know that we were in over our heads. We got the basic shape of the thing on paper, and, man, it was white guilterrific. The lawyer wrestled with his conscience, the cop ranted about political correctness and dropped the n-word and didn’t feel bad at all, and the black journalist made sure to absolve all the good people in the story while shaking his finger at the bad ones.
It was awful. Objectively speaking, it was awful. And it’s only now, with the distance of time, that I am able to truly pinpoint what it is that disturbs me about the entire experience. First, there’s the choice we made about the kid who the cop shot. I thought that because I’d read my Richard Price that I knew how to write street kids authentically as well as hardened police officers. I thought it was a dramatically interesting choice to make the kid guilty. That way, it wasn’t the story of a cop killing an innocent person. See, this kid, he deserved it, so that way, the debate was just about the language he used.
Holy shit. I mean… holy shit. No. There’s a way to write that which might be interesting, but not by me, and certainly not at the age of 24. “Deserved it” isn’t really a point I’m comfortable with anymore. I think the larger question about the way deadly force is used by our major metropolitan police is so important that you have to remove “deserved it” from your vocabulary. That has to be the most extraordinary circumstance, and clearly at this point, it’s not. And once deadly force has become normalized, you need to examine that in your drama instead of just passively accepting it as the way things work or even glamorizing it. Me even thinking the term “deserved it” is vaguely acceptable is the problem.
Second, there was the way we responded to the process itself. Here’s where I feel like I really fell down. There were a variety of executives that we had to deal with at Showtime with no single producer riding herd over the process. Showtime’s original dramatic department lived in the very large shadow of HBO’s critically-acclaimed programming, and there was a fair amount of pressure on the executives we worked with to start turning that around.
As a result, they went over every page of that script with a fine-tooth comb, and they challenged us on every choice we made. And when you’re 24 and you’re sure that you’re brilliant and that what you say is important because did you read the reviews I mean it’s clear we’re super smart so who the fuck are all these people suddenly telling us how to do what we do? We took every note personally. We saw them all as people telling us how to talk about these things, and wasn’t the entire point of our brilliant play that you shouldn’t argue about the words as long as the intent is okay?
Lord god. I was so young. I was so arrogant. And, yes, I was absolutely drowning in privilege. After all, my experience was enough to give me authority over every character in the film. When they brought on the first black executive a few drafts into the process, instead of viewing that person as a collaborator whose job was to help me find the truth in my project, I saw him as an insult, the network suggesting that I couldn’t possibly write the black characters in my script accurately.
Wanna guess why they felt that way?
Look, there were plenty of people at that network that did not know what they were talking about. There was one executive producer whose vanity poster hanging behind his desk was a giant four-quad for Barry Manilow’s Copacabana: The Movie, and he would give us insane notes in sessions that would last for hours. One time he yelled at us for having an old woman take a $20 bill out of an ATM. “She wouldn’t have that kind of money!”
I was puzzled by the note. “What do you think comes out of ATMs?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never used one.”
What a circle jerk. I will see your privilege and I will exponentially raise you, good sir. Here’s a 24-year-old white kid who knows nothing arguing with an old white guy who knows nothing, all in service of a script that’s going to tackle some of the most pervasive and important issues in our society. That’s Hollywood in a nutshell.
And to my eternal shame, I eventually burned the bridge completely. I got so worn out by being bounced from one executive to another, each of them coming at us with an all-new set of problems with this rickety thing we were building, each new phone call feeling like a refutation of our right to be there. Privilege is being told that you know what you’re talking about because your experience is centered in society to such a degree that a network would hire a pair of 24-year-old suburban Star Wars kids to write a film about police violence and the abusive power of race language. Privilege is being so sure that you’re right that you can look at a black executive a decade older than yourself and tell him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I talked over everyone in that process, and when that didn’t work, I yelled over everyone in that process, and when that didn’t work, I was so confident of my right to be in the room that I told everyone else to go fuck themselves.
There was one afternoon in particular. Jerry was at our North Hollywood apartment. We were set to get our latest round of notes after turning in another rewrite, and we were touchy about everything. No, scratch that. I was touchy. If I’m honest, I have to own the fact that I was the source of the emotional weather in that working relationship. When there was a hurricane, I was the one creating the storm. And on this particular day, I was looking for a fight. I felt disrespected. Didn’t they understand that I liked the script, and that was enough? Why was everyone pushing us to listen to all of these different voices?
The execs called, they gave us their notes, and I argued. I argued mightily during the phone call to such a degree that they ended it early. Then I argued with Jerry. And Jerry, who could see the writing on the wall by that point, kept trying to get me to listen to reason. I saw it as a betrayal, that we were supposed to be united against the suits, and instead of seeing how hard he was working to try to make a film we could all be proud of, my ego and my privilege pushed me to a breaking point, and I threw him out of our house.
That was it. We never really spoke again outside of a few cordial encounters many years later. Jerry has worked consistently for the last thirty years, and not because he is married to one of the town’s most powerful women. He’s worked because he was always a guy who seemed excited to collaborate with artists of every type, open to whatever voices might help improve the work. He tried so hard to show me how it worked, and I couldn’t get out of my own way.
Privilege is a hell of a drug, and you see people who are positively drunk on it online these days, out of their minds, out of control, unable to understand how they look to anyone else. They are so sure that they are the star of the story that they can’t truly see someone else’s perspective. That’s a terrible quality in people of any profession, but for someone who wanted to be a writer, it can be deadly and toxic, and I look at that 24-year-old kid, standing there shaking from rage because someone suggested that they didn’t know how to create a fair and empathetic portrait of a black kid a decade younger, and I wish I could tell him to just listen.
I’ve spent the 26 years since that incident working to hone my craft. I still think that my greatest fault as a screenwriter is that I’m more clever than honest, which is baffling, because I value honesty and voice over anything else in everyone else’s work. Even now, I feel like I have lived a life of enormous privilege. My anger and my toxic behavior would have burned down the career of a black writer instantly, but because of who I was, I was given second and third chances by people. If I’d been a woman, I would have been labeled difficult so fast that I might have never made it through the door at all. My behavior could be excused because of who I was and how I looked, and if I’m really honest with myself, I think I even cultivated that reputation a bit. After all, our culture tells stories about how talented people abuse the people around them and treats it like the price of doing business. I bought into the myth of the Great Man, the person who was so talented that any other behavior had to be accepted as part of the package.
I am probably fortunate that I did not have immediate and overwhelming success. And, no, you don’t have to tell me “You were in no danger of that.” I am my own worst enemy, evidently, and I’m sure I would have screwed it up eventually. But let’s say they had made our wafer-thin Stick and Stones script and it had worked somehow. Let’s say we quickly climbed that ladder and let’s say we actually made those films we were signed to direct at 25. Let’s say they clicked.
My guess is I would have stopped developing as a person right there. That would have reinforced everything I already thought about my own privilege. That would have sent me the message that I was right about things, that my perspective was the right one. If I had won those fights, I would have felt justified to be twice as brutal the next time I had to fight for something.
I was too young, but I also hadn’t really fully engaged my empathy yet. It wasn’t until I switched to criticism and started writing about film that I truly found my voice. It wasn’t until I started trying to communicate with other film fans online that I learned how to center empathy in my writing. And even then, it wasn’t instant. It took me many years, with many mistakes along the way. I’ve been a jerk. I’ve been belligerent. But most of all, it has taken me a long time to really learn to listen, and to learn who I should be listening to in the first place.
My role does not seem to be writing stories that I don’t have the experience to write well. Instead, I can serve a much better role as a critic by helping to give platforms to films that were made by people who can speak directly to these ideas. There’s something of a poetic nature to the idea that I spend my time now working to discuss and digest the ideas and the work of other people, because I was so driven by ego at the start of my career, determined to start talking before I truly had something to say.
What a gift it is to have a job where my greatest concern is whether or not I’m going to do an interview with someone or when the embargo date for something is or how many people are willing to pay me to simply send them newsletters. What an enormous, preposterous privilege it is to be able to publish this newsletter. What an enormous, ridiculous privilege it is to have devoted my life to writing about my favorite art form on my terms. And, yes, I know this newsletter took a break for the last week, and this is the longest I’ve gone without publishing since it began. I had to really think about how to use this privilege at a time when it feels urgent to steer into these conversations, especially when they make us uncomfortable.
This life I’ve made for myself isn’t a compromise, and it’s not a secondary career in place of the one I really wanted. This is where I can actually use my voice and my experience and my platform in a way that makes sense and in a way that leaves room for me to listen. Every time I put on a film, that’s what I’m doing. I’m listening, and I want new voices and new perspectives. I want that not only because it will benefit those filmmakers but because it will benefit me. Almost 30 years down the road from when I wrote “Sticks and Stones,” I feel like I’ve heard and seen so much that would have changed what I wrote, and all of it is a positive thing. Every time I’ve been challenged on a mistake I’ve, I’m better for it. Every time I’ve been pushed to understand how my words land with my whole audience, I’ve grown from it.
Just this past week, I was talking about Attack The Block on Twitter. I love that movie, and I love that it came out of an incident where Joe Cornish felt threatened. It’s easy to see when you look around the world today that many people react with fear when they feel threatened, and Cornish may have felt that way temporarily, in the moment, but that’s not how he reacted. He reacted by writing a film that challenges traditional ideas about who gets centered in heroic storytelling in pop culture, and I think it benefits enormously from the terrific performance by John Boyega as Moses.
In most movies, Moses and his crew would be dead fifteen minutes into the film, justifiably eaten by the monsters from outer space because they were muggers. That’s how it works, right? All you have to do is show the audience the code for “criminals,” and we don’t really care what happens to them. It’s that same lazy default thinking that drives so much of the genre, even in films I like. It’s a short cut most of the time more than it is active malicious racism, but it really doesn’t matter. Passive racist messaging is still racist, reinforcing a hierarchy of whose perspective is the most important. The scene where Moses and his crew hold up Jodie Whittaker is meant to be scary, and the first time I saw it, it was clear that she feels like she’s in real danger. I had her experience, because of course I did. That’s my default.
But the second time I saw it, I had the knowledge of the rest of the film to lean on, and I watched the way Cornish stages it, and it’s clear that the kids are just as scared as she is. They’re not hardened criminals. They’re just playing the role they think they’re supposed to play, the role they’re told to play. They’ve been told who they are and what they can expect from life, and they’re leaning into it. The film eventually reveals Moses to be the hero of the film, and not by cheating or by downplaying choices he makes. The film isn’t about offering up an easy portrayal of anyone, and there are details throughout that make it clear that Cornish knows how privileged his own perspective is.
When I was talking about it on Twitter, I did that same thing that is so easy to do, centering the white Western experience. Here’s what I said:
And there’s nothing exactly wrong with it. But it does make a huge cultural assumption, that everyone reading my Tweet is starting from the same default, which is of course not the case at all. Even as I’m writing about what the film does right, I manage to do it in a way that makes the point about how automatically white audiences center themselves in things, even when the thing they’re talking about runs contrary to that idea. It’s beaten into white mainstream Americans culturally from when we’re very young, and it is not just important but absolutely essential that as I move forward, I continue to push myself every day. Yes… I am writing from my point of view, and part of the value I bring to a movie review is the context I can place on something. But in doing so, it’s also essential to constantly examine why I love what I love, why I watch what I watch, and what I prioritize in my own film diet. It’s important to use my platform to help steer the conversation, not just to promote the films that the mainsteam media anoints as “important.”
I have so many Green Books in my own personal library of unproduced work, movies that aspire to be one thing while really reinforcing another, and admitting that is important because I’ve been so critical of films that are afraid to step outside of that white-centered perspective. I remember in 1987 getting actively livid at the choices made regarding Cry Freedom, a film in which Denzel Washington barely gets to play Stephen Biko while we spend the majority of the running time on the story of a white journalist. That was the first time I noticed it, but once you realize how often it happens, and how traditionally that’s been the way these stories are told, it’s hard to miss.
These white-perspective movies about race are created over and over as a way for studios to tell themselves that they’re supporting films about diversity without really shaking up the status quo. It’s a profound misunderstanding, the same one I made when I tried to turn my play into a script. It makes so much more sense to simply expand the space you have to make room for more voices and to let those voices speak for themselves.
I wish I could go back to talk to the 22-year-old me. I wish I could have explained these things before I set the path of my professional career. I wish I could have warned me about all of my own worst tendencies. But if I had, then I don’t think I ever would have fully punctured that balloon. I don’t think I’d be the person or the writer I am today. And I don’t think I’d be as perpetually open to change as I am now.
We have to be open. We have to have these conversations. I’ll leave you with a thread from Twitter about Dave Chapelle and the way he addressed an outsized display of privilege from an audience member. Click this first Tweet and read the entire thread, and I will simply say that as much as I get freaked out or discouraged or depressed about groups or about institutions, I remain hugely optimistic about individuals.
I’ll be back tomorrow with my review of one of this week’s three big new releases, and I’ll have more for you every day this week as well. Thanks for understanding why this past week wasn’t the right time for idle chat about my movie collection.
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Fantastic read, Drew. Reading it I was reminded of Roger Ebert's Journal he started after he lost his physical voice. Thank you for sharing it.
This is a fantastic read. Can I share?