*Film producer Effie Brown is finally getting a chance to comment on the controversy sparked by Matt Damon’s comments to her on racial diversity during HBO’s “Project Greenlight.”
The show recruited Brown for its reality series that follows a first-time filmmaker directing his first full-length movie. Brown, one of several producers on the project, was shown in a meeting with the film’s executive producer and “Project Greenlight” co-creator Matt Damon. The actor was shown interrupting Brown during a discussion on diversity, to say, “When we’re talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not in the casting of the show.”
“That was shocking and all of that, but what was interesting is the aftermath of that. That filmed in November, and I saw a cut of that in July,” she explained at a diversity panel at the 2015 Produced By: NY conference, held at New York City’s Time Warner Center and sponsored by The Harnisch Foundation. “Once I saw that, I said, ‘Y’all are really gonna let that in?’ … I was so surprised, I flagged it. I said, ‘That’s not gonna go over.’ I felt [my flagging] wasn’t necessarily heard; I think they thought they were starting a conversation, but they didn’t think they were starting this conversation. … It set up the context for the rest of the show.”
“Black Twitter is real, and that’s what I told HBO. You know what was beautiful? Black Twitter showed up, and so did everybody else,” Brown continued of the social media movement, with Project Greenlight director Jason Mann in the audience. “These things, people can turn on a drop of a hat, but everybody kept really strong with that. [Social media] is a big call-and-response, a new millennium call-and-response. You can’t do something shady right now and think that nobody’s gonna hear about it.”
Still, she’s proud of the diversity she was able to facilitate in the show’s latest season, because “you’re actually able to see a qualified group of crew members that look like America.”
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