Dee Tuck Coder is on a mission to help diversify Hollywood
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Dee Tuck has it listen to all the excuses. “I want to hire more women, but I don’t know where they are.” Yes. “I want to hire more people of color. I don’t know anyone.” That too. She has been working in technology for over a decade and has often been the only black female engineer on her team. He reviewed the hiring practices of companies and pointed out that “maybe you’re seeing a lot of people who can’t get rid of the Code with eight non-color bugs in Zoom.” Tuck doesn’t want to hear any more excuses.
Last November, he was selected to be the director of technology for collective filmmaking at Array Director Ava DuVernay. Its main goal: to launch the Array Crew, a database of color and women that studios can use for film and television staff. The goal is to see if the industry will diversify its level by removing the “We can’t find anyone” barrier. “When we actually diagnosed the issue, it wasn’t that people weren’t ready to do it, that people weren’t uncomfortable doing it,” DuVernay says. “So what we’ve tried is to create a platform that’s been very easy. So now we’re in a space where, in fact, if you haven’t done it yet you never wanted to.”
Hollywood he has spent many years with the over-ability of white male directors and stars. But it is less noticeable that few women and people of color appear in what are known as bottom-line jobs — those in the lower half of the production budget. Over the decades, the industry has focused on hiring people who already know them for these concerts, leaving aside parts of qualified applicants. “It’s harder to manage in terms of production, because hundreds of productions come to each studio every year,” says Kevin Hamburger, Warner Horizon Television’s head of television production. Array Crew, was released online in February and will be available as a mobile app in June. Job seekers can create a profile that includes their resume, location, images, reels, and contact information so that producers can pick up all the candidates close to their film. set; it also has tools to help managers track the people they hire for each shoot.
On the face of it, there is tension over how Array uses it to solve the problem of inclusivity in Hollywood. Now we have search engine optimization optimized to find everything from pets to dinner (for better or worse), but it’s much harder to leave something as complicated as the diversity of work in the hands of machines. That’s why repairing the Array is easy enough. The results of the database are organic; there is no algorithm that drives some people and not others. Someone who directs a film can look for certain positions (makeup artist, handle), locations (Los Angeles, New York), names, union membership, and level of experience, but that’s it. Unlike Google’s results, Crew’s list of candidates appears in the most analogous way possible: alphabetically. Recruitment managers can sort by first or last name or by newly added ones, but from there it’s up to you to select a team.
Zooming out of his Atlanta home, wearing a Tuskegee University alma mater sweatshirt, the CEO of Array talks about the best way to get rid of obstacles. Tuck has seen barriers to hiring throughout his career, and from the start his team was intent on seeing and eliminating them. “We have conversations about the smallest things,” he says. Like this search function. Arrays could search for all fields in a user’s profile, but doing so would only exclude someone from the results because they didn’t have a particular keyword. “We realized that it could create a kind of barrier for people to enter,” Tuck says. This places a role on the online producer to analyze the list of candidates. But that’s the point: look somewhere they weren’t looking.
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