Many of the video scripts I wrote as an employee of the Humongous Electronics Company (HEC) were dramatic scenarios meant to illustrate the right and wrong ways of doing things.
One script involved a sales manager who comes close to getting HEC into legal trouble because he didn’t understand the arcane laws restricting trade with countries deemed to be inimical to the interests of the USA.
Fortunately, a more savvy employee discovers the brewing catastrophe and educates the sales manager about his potential error. I say “his” potential error because the clueless manager would be a male. More precisely, a White male.
The savvy employee who saves the day for HEC could be of any race. If White, however, it would be a woman. Yes, this seems to echo current “woke” doctrine, but I’m talking about the 1980s.
I hasten to assure the reader that I had (and have) no problem with such casting choices.
For that matter, as a Sicilian-American, I never had a problem with the Sopranos, the Godfather Trilogy, or any other TV show or movie based on the Mafia stereotype.
In fact, I reasoned that a client’s concern that I might be potentially dangerous would help ensure prompt payment of my invoices. Where was I? Yes, casting for HEC videos.
The simple formula outlined above (stupid white guy, savvy Black/Asian/Hispanic/female) worked well for most of us, most of the time. But on occasion the commitment not to offend drifted over the line into arrant nonsense.
Here’s an example: One of the HEC producers, Rodney Sherborn-Huff III, was assigned to create a video featuring HEC employees. It was feel-good piece, meant to portray HEC as a happy and welcoming place to work.
As a recurring visual motif, the camera would enter an office or cubicle and discover an employee working diligently, at which point the person would turn and smile at the camera.
In reviewing the rough cut, the clients (two women from Human Resources) opined that some of the females might be excessively attractive and that their smiles could be misinterpreted by the camera’s presumably male gaze.
They began by insisting that certain women be edited out of the video. Arguments ensued over which women crossed the line from professionally personable to inappropriately provocative.
Finally, the clients simply instructed Rodney to “take out all the attractive women.” I have no idea how Rodney went about making those determinations, which, inevitably, must have been subjective at best.
Perhaps he did an initial pass to target indisputably attractive women for removal, with a final decision on borderline cases to be made with the clients at the customary last-minute, all-night editing session.
I wonder what they might have decided in the case of an indisputably attractive Hispanic, Pacific Islander, or African-American woman, which almost certainly would have posed a dilemma.
In my post-HEC career, casting videos for global concrete firm Empresa de Hormigón Huerta (EHH) was much simpler.
I refer now to the post-Las Abuelas[1] period, when the annual stockholders meeting videos began to focus on the digital sophistication of the company, as exemplified by the hi-tech command and control suite in Riobamba del Norte.
Casting criteria at EHH stood in stark contrast to prevailing standards at HEC. To reassure the audience of Nervous Investors®, the actors portraying workers in the Riobamba del Norte facility were, without exception, ruthlessly efficient Nordic-looking men and indisputably attractive Asian women.
The End
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