Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business.

Studios are bringing in consultants to ensure their shows or films do not raise any warnings.

The summer of the year 2020 was a time for a change. Just after the death of George Floyd spurred a racial confrontation within America, Carri Twigg’s phone continued to ring.

The actress. Twigg, the founding partner in a production company known as Culture House, was asked repeatedly whether she would review the script for a movie or television show and alert anyone to any red flags regarding race.

Culture House, which employs predominantly black women, has been a specialist in documentaries. After a few months of receiving inquiries about scripts, the company decided to make an enterprise. They created a department that is solely focused on consulting work.

Raeshem Nijhon, left, and Carri Twigg, founders of Culture House in Los Angeles.

“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was as if we have for this to be a permanent thing we can offer regularly — and that we get paid for.”Though Culture House has been providing consulting services for just a little over an entire year — with clients such as Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney, and MTV — the work is now 30% of the company’s revenues.

Culture House is hardly alone. Entertainment executives have pledged to show an honest commitment to diversity in recent times. However, they are often criticized for not meeting. To show they’re making efforts to tackle the issue, Hollywood studios signed agreements with various nonprofits nonprofits and companies to protect themselves from the negative reputational impact that can result from having a film or an episode on a television show be accused of bias.

“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To bring it to the world, and the only thing that people want to discuss is the ways in which it fell short. We’re working to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”

Consulting work can cover the entire production. Consulting companies are often called upon to discuss casting decisions and marketing plans. Additionally, they might look through scripts to find limited evidence and study how characters are presented within a story.

“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.'”

If a consultancy firm has a retainer agreement, it could also be guaranteed a monthly payment from the studio. It’s also a revenue stream created just recently.

Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit.Credit…Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times

“It exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment which is a nonprofit nonprofit. The organization, dubbed CAPE, is contracted to several of the largest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony, and A24.

The CAPE has consulted on the 100 projects CAPE has worked with in the past. Sugihara said roughly 80 percent had been completed in the last year, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2024. “That ramped up attention on our community,” she added.

Mrs. Sugihara said her group could be active throughout the process of production. In one instance, she stated that she had told the studio that all the actors who played the protagonists in a scripted show were lighter-skinned East Asian people. In contrast, the antagonists were played with darker skin tones by East Asian actors.

“That’s a red flag,” she declared. “And it’s important to discuss how these images might cause harm. Sometimes, it’s something that people aren’t aware of until you make them aware.”

The actress. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project nor the studio behind the project. In interviews with her, most mentioned confidentiality agreements with studios and a fear of shame of a filmmaker as the reasons why they were unable to disclose details.

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.A.D. The L.G.B.T.QL.G.B.T.Q. The advocacy organization, said that her group was doing consultation work regularly for a number of many years with studios and networks. Then she decided to begin charging studios for the timework she had compared with “billable hours.”

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the advocacy organization, at its office in Manhattan.Credit…Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” stated Mrs. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I joined G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.A.D. we didn’t have enough money to pay our expenses. In the meantime, we’re working with the largest networks and studios worldwide and helping their clients tell stories that have been successful. It isn’t logical.”

She also founded her organization, the G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.A.D. Media Institute. in case studios or networks needed assistance, later on, they’d need to join as a paid participant in the institute.

Initially, there was some opposition, but the studios and the networks would eventually agree. In 2018, the number of members was zero of the G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.D. Media Institute. In 2024, at the close, the number of members had increased to 58, with almost every major network and studio in Hollywood currently a paid G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.A.D. Media Institute.

Scott Turner Schofield has worked as consultant for G.L.A.A.D.G.L.A.A.D. and has provided advice to studios and networks on accurately portraying transgender individuals for a long time. However, he claimed that the work was overgrowing in the last few times that he was asked to come in as executive producer for a new horror film by Blumhouse.

“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he told me.

People interviewed claimed there was a win-win deal between the consulting firms and the studios.

Studios such as Paramount Pictures have been hiring consulting firms like Culture House and CAPE.Credit…Alex Welsh for The New York Times

“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, head of the advocacy group Color of Change. “Making money is often hampered by poor decision-making and not having the appropriate people in the room. Therefore, studios are likely to look to get this.”

However, he did warn that simply hiring consultants is not an excellent alternative to the structural changes that many people would like to be seen in Hollywood.

“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” said the host. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”

But, the rapidly growing sector of cultural consulting could be here to stay. Mrs. Twigg, who helped create Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, stated that the number of inquiries she was receiving was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”

“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she added.