Screen Forever 2024: “We feel like we need to be palatable in order to stay in the room”

How difficult is it for writers and artists from diversity to stay authentic to their community in a Writers’ Room and is there pressure to give decisions the tick of approval?

Writer / Performer Nina Oyama (Latecomers, You’re Skitting Me, Squinters, Love Me, Tonightly, The Weekly) told Screen Forever last week sometimes it was a tug of war over keeping a job and remaining authentic.

She recalled one Writers’ Room where an Indigenous consultant resisted a creative choice being proposed for an Indigenous character.

“The consultant was like, ‘I just don’t think that would be realistic and I think that will do more damage to the community. I’m not happy to represent this.’ And then the next week, there was another Writers Room for the same show and that consultant had been replaced with a different consultant that said, ‘….I guess that sort of makes sense,'” she recalled.

“As someone who had been there the whole time, it was an obvious replacement until they got the right model minority who said ‘Yes.’

“I think that happens all the time. So it’s this thing where ‘I want to get hired. So I do sort of want to say yes to this terrible idea?’

“Do I betray everything I believe in or do I work with this company again? It’s not a nice compromise to be making.”

Actor Bridie McKim (The Heights, Bump, Joe. vs Carole, Dive Club, Christmas Ransom), who has cerebral palsy, agreed people from diverse backgrounds often wrestled with such decisions.

“We feel like we need to be palatable in order to stay in the room, in order to get the jobs,” she said.

“I feel like often I need to be the ‘good little disabled girl’ and not be too tricky and not ask for too many adjustments. Because so often, if somebody discloses disability -because it can be non-visible- we lose a job. We’re too hard. It’s too expensive. And that’s not the case.

“We’re not too expensive, adjustments don’t cost that much money in the scheme of a wider budget. On average, they cost $500 bucks and that can be covered by the government. But again, it comes back to bias, it comes back to misconceptions and it really creates this environment where people are hired to be authentic, but then we feel like we can’t be authentic.”

Bridie McKim said a simple conversation early on could make the work environment much easier and deliver better results.

“I’ve had amazing experiences where production will sit down with me and be like, ‘Okay, so you’re disabled. Cool. What do you need to do a good job?’ It sounds so basic, but that simple conversation means the world…. I’m very lucky. I just need a chair to sit down between camera set-ups, you know filmmaking, there’s a lot of waiting around. I need to conserve my energy so I need to sit down. And I need a railing attached to stairs or platforms that I’m on. So it’s very basic,” she explained.

“But often I’ve gone to other jobs where I’ve had that exact conversation … and that information is lost. So my needs aren’t addressed and I don’t do a good job.

“Well, I still do a good job but I could do a better job and they could get the most money out of me and I could soar.”