Every Single Word is a Tumblr blog and YouTube channel that features videos on all the lines spoken by people of color in both contemporary and classic films. Created by Dylan Marron, the videos are an attempt to highlight the lack of casting and involvement of POC in Hollywood produced films, in addition to highlighting his own experiences in attempting to be cast in films as a Venezuelan American. The reasons for such low amounts of casting of POC in films is stated by Marron to be about fear, because the "people who finance the movies are not going towant to throw millions behind a movie of a non-famous person of color". In addition, default casting for films, even for works or scripts with no specified races for the characters, is to choose white actors. The novel The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is noted by Marron as a work with no races given for the characters and one that has had worldwide success in its book form, but the main cast for the film were chosen by the producing studio to be entirely white. Manohla Dargis, writing for The New York Times, noted that Marron's videos show that even when POC are cast in films, they are often cast in stereotypical roles that function as tokenism for the casting quota. The Boston Globe compared Marron's videos with other statistics presented in the "2015 Hollywood Diversity Report", which showed that scriptwriters and directors are also rarely POC, along with lead roles in films. Several celebrities have praised and shared the blog with their fans, including Aziz Ansari, Junot Diaz, Kerry Washington, and Chirlane McCray. The blog was named by Tumblr as the most viral blog of 2015.
History
Marron began producing the video cuts inJune 2015 and the popularity of the blog began to increase soon after beginning the project. The idea for the blog came after Marron started a play titled "Every Single Word" for his theater group, called the New York Neo Futurists, which involved a large number of short play pieces by different members. Marron's act consisted of him saying every line by Anjelah Johnson-Reyes in Enough Said. In 2014, while re-watching the film, he realized that the writer was unable to view POC as separate from service jobs and caused him to form his act for the group. This act eventually led to his investigation of other films and the creation of his video cut blog. The coverage of POC representation in the Harry Potter series by Marron resulted in some controversy. Some fans were upset that the videos pointed out the low representation, "5 minutes and 40 seconds long – out of 1,207 total minutes of run-time" and the whitewashing of the character Lavender Brown from the black actresses that had played her in the first five movies to the "blond woman" from the sixth movie on, when the character has a heavier involvement and lines in the plot. After doing videos on a number of popular movies and series, Marron decided to do a series of videos on every Academy Award for Best Picture winner since the first award in 1929, in chronological order so that any differences in POC casting can be seen in relation to historical time period. Marron also created a series of videos looking at all the films directed by Nancy Meyers, six films in total. He found that POC representation across all of the films made up only 0.7% of run-time and that most of the characters were not named and were presented as working service jobs. A "Every Single Word: The Oscars" live event was conducted by Marron on February 28, 2016 in New York City, where the words spoken by people of color during the Oscars was live cut during viewing.
Media featured
*The films and television shows below are presented in chronological order except for those released in the same year, which are presented alphabetically:
