News — #RepresentationMatters

Hollywood’s Writing Rooms EXPOSED

· By Anderson B. Cox

Hollywood’s Writing Rooms EXPOSED

What really happens inside Hollywood’s writing rooms? And why do independent, culturally-rooted stories so often get locked out? If you’ve ever wondered why certain stories dominate screens while others never make it past a notebook, the answer lies in the mechanics of Hollywood’s writing rooms — and the power dynamics baked into them. This post pulls from Writers Guild rules, diversity studies, lawsuits, and writer testimonies to reveal how the system works, why independent voices are excluded, and why the future of storytelling might not belong to Hollywood at all. What exactly happens in a Hollywood writing room? Hollywood likes...

Who Gets the Greenlight: Hollywood’s Stamp vs. My Own

· By Anderson B. Cox

Who Gets the Greenlight: Hollywood’s Stamp vs. My Own

Who Gets the Greenlight: Hollywood’s Stamp vs. My Own Opening Shot WIDE SHOT: A Hollywood boardroom. Suits at a polished table. Scripts stacked like bricks.SFX: A rubber stamp slams down — THUNK. One sound decides which stories live, and which die. CUT TO: Silence. For us, there was no sound. Only doors closed. This country banned Black love until the late 1960s. Whole families erased by law. At the same time, Hollywood enforced the Hays Code, a rulebook that banned interracial romance on screen. Even when we loved in real life, the screen said we didn’t exist. Our Stories on...

From the Block to the Broadcast: Why Telling Our Own Stories Matters More Than Ever

· By Anderson B. Cox

From the Block to the Broadcast: Why Telling Our Own Stories Matters More Than Ever

Early Morning Soundtracks & Story Roots Early Saturday mornings, music would blare out from the living room. That was the first alert—a full day of bleach, baskets, and the laundromat was ahead. Smokey Robinson serenaded my mom while she glided across the kitchen floor, pouring bleach into tubs and sinks like she was baptizing the house. Our LA apartment—romantically named the hood—wasn't much, but the music turned it into something sacred. That was our first cinema. That was storytelling, long before we had cameras or computers. See, for people like us, storytelling didn’t come from school or studios. It came...

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