Well, this NYT story (“The Women Who Run the ‘Star Wars’ Universe”) explains a lot.
Have a strong stomach reading it.
Five days a week, in the foggy hills of San Francisco, 11 writers and artists discuss the minutiae of storm troopers. This is the Lucasfilm story group, and its members hold the keys to everything “Star Wars”: Under their guidance, the franchise’s narratives are linked no matter the platform, whether it’s television, games, theme parks, publishing, merchandise or, of course, film. With their ideas shaping each character and setting, they don’t see themselves as gatekeepers but as partners furthering the stories their creators want to tell.
Kathleen Kennedy founded the group in 2012 when she succeeded George Lucas as president of Lucasfilm, putting Kiri Hart, a former film and TV writer, in charge of the unit. Ms. Hart’s first move was to make the story group entirely female, starting with Rayne Roberts and Carrie Beck…
In Los Angeles, before they made the move to the Bay Area, the three women sat around a fire pit in Ms. Hart’s backyard, along with John Swartz, a producer at Lucasfilm, and talked about their hopes for the future of “Star Wars.” They wanted to tell beautiful stories, fulfill the expectations of loyal fans and create meaningful female characters.
“As a writer I was very hungry to create female characters who felt real, and I was interested in telling stories from an outsider’s perspective,” Ms. Hart said, recalling Hollywood in the early 2000s. “There wasn’t a lot of receptivity to the things I really wanted to write about at the time. I think there is increasing openness to those things now, which makes me really hopeful.”
Then, the bizarre liberal obsession with Coalition-of-the-Fringe accounting takes place:
Today, the Lucasfilm story group is a diverse outlier in Hollywood: five of its members are people of color, and the team includes four women and seven men. This is a rarity in 2017, where women account for 13 percent, and minorities represent 5 percent, of all writers working on the top-grossing films. In addition to maintaining the continuity of the “Star Wars” universe, they aim to increase its diversity…
A new, unpublished analysis of “Star Wars” films shows striking progress in their representation of gender and race. Using computer software that analyzes the content of movies, Shrikanth Narayanan and the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab found that women spoke 6.3 percent of dialogue in “A New Hope,” the 1977 film that kicked off the franchise. In contrast, women accounted for 27.8 percent of all dialogue in “The Force Awakens” in 2015. Even more promising, in “Rogue One” (2016) nonwhite characters accounted for 44.7 percent of all dialogue, a marked increase from zero in the 1977 original.
“Rogue One” has 44.7% of its dialogue spoken by nonwhite characters! Yay!
While writing “The Last Jedi,” the writer-director Rian Johnson moved to San Francisco, spending three months working closely with the story group to develop ideas for the film. Ms. Hart credits Mr. Johnson with the decision to introduce diverse characters for “The Last Jedi.”
Normative demographic accounting instead of story continuity and coherency.
Truly pathetic.
