Hollywood has an inclusivity problem. How is this possible, in 2024, you wonder, when films like King Richard or Sound of Metal or Everything Everywhere All at Once—all nominated for Best Picture Oscars—suggest otherwise. They are films rich in story, dimension, and purpose. They are also exceptions to a long-established rule: White men still run Hollywood. Women remain almost entirely shut out, compared to their male colleagues, while disabled and Black actors are underrepresented in all major employment arenas for theatrical film, according to UCLA’s most recent Hollywood diversity report.
In the face of this, Kamala Avila-Salmon wants better for Hollywood and its storytellers. Avila-Salmon is the head of inclusive content at Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, where she began her stint in 2020 and has since leveraged her experience as a marketing savant (she has held top-level roles at RCA, Universal Pictures, Google, and Facebook) to shift how the studio makes movies. At Lionsgate, her main directive is simple: to create a creative economy that allows for more attentive storytelling. Stories of magnitude and conviction, yes, but also ones with as much reach as possible. It begins, she tells me, by having an “audience-first” mindset.
This month she launched Story Spark, an online tool that helps creatives understand the limits of their scripts and hiring choices by pushing for inclusivity in all aspects (it resembles a BuzzFeed-style multiple-choice questionnaire). As AI threatens a shrinking workforce and streaming upends traditional viewership, Avila-Salmon believes Story Spark can be a bridge to a healthier future for Hollywood. “Story Spark isn’t telling you if the movie is good,” she jokes when we chat over Zoom. “I have no idea.” You don’t upload a script. There is no secret counsel of industry insiders judging your work behind the scenes. Story Spark is simply meant to challenge writers and filmmakers to create their most audacious work possible. And, yes, there will be plenty of notes.
JASON PARHAM: Why create a tool like Story Spark? Is it a response to a failure of representation onscreen?
KAMALA AVILA-SALMON: Story Spark is not a reaction to what we lack. It’s a response and a proactive offering to what I feel like we need. The idea behind it is: How do we make systemic scalable change that can really meet filmmakers where they are and help executives to meet them there as well? Sometimes there is this idea that I, as a Black woman and a person who has spent a lot of time working on inclusion, have some specific insight about what is inclusive that no one else can have if they don’t have my lived experience, right?
Right.
While it sounds like a great compliment, it actually is very stifling to move this work forward because it requires you to be like, I have to always find a Black woman or someone that works in DEI or someone that is queer for them to tell me if it’s inclusive or not. But there are a repeatable, predictable set of questions that I ask myself when I’m thinking about inclusion and that other people that care about inclusion ask themselves. If we can put that together in a tool that is easy to use but really thought provoking it can allow other people, regardless of their background, to be able to tell more inclusive stories, which we believe are not only more commercial stories but stories that are gonna make more impact, both financially and with audiences.
How did you go about making it?
We looked at what are the things that audiences, critics, academics, film execs, and storytellers talk about when they talk about inclusion. And it is the elements that we have in Story Spark. It’s everything from what is happening behind the camera, to the diversity of the character representations, to the dimensionality of the portrayals to “Are we subverting tropes and stereotypes?”
Did you stress test it using Lionsgate films?
We worked with this tool across 300 features, both those in development and completed features at our studio. We also used it externally a little bit to help us with some benchmarking to see what was resonating. The things that resonated well in Story Spark were the things that were getting talked about in culture. It’s about giving people the right tools. Inclusion is something that is within all of our grasp. All of us are needed to create a more inclusive industry. It doesn’t solely fall to DEI execs or queer filmmakers or Black showrunners to bring all of those stories to us.
You’ve worked in this space for a very long time and at a very high level. What do people get wrong about DEI?
For a long time, I’ve been doing this work without it being called that. We have to arrive at a place where we understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion are just core aspects of the business. They’re not side agendas or something that is siloed to an HR concern. A lot of the work that I did as a marketer was embedding that thinking in the work that I was doing.
How so?
When I worked in the music business, overseeing the marketing for Janelle Monáe and other projects at RCA, it was thinking about how to center underrepresented audiences. When I went over to Google and Facebook, I saw a gap. I came on as an entertainment marketer, but the way that I thought about the campaigns always really centered underrepresented audiences because that is who I felt was at the center of culture. So if we’re not speaking to them, it’s going to be very hard to build a hit show, a hit movie, a hit album.
Oh, totally.
But for us to do that well, we have to diversify the executive ranks. We also needed to build programs for development, mentorship, networking, and, over time, put together this hypothesis in the workplace to center DEI as a core business function activity.
So when I came in at Lionsgate, it was through that guise. In the conversations I had with leadership it was always from that POV of coming in to build something systemic. What does inclusive creative strategy look like? That is an approach that is able to withstand the general ebbs and flows of what happens in corporate America when DEI is in this year, DEI is not as in this year, back and forth. There is a cyclical element to it.
You’re right—it’s like whiplash.
Like flair jeans. But once we realize that we just always need pants, everything changes.
There’s a lot of performative action around DEI at certain companies, and more recent pushback in the culture at large as the US presidential election nears. Why is it so hard for people to see it as a core agenda to success?
Corporations don’t exist on an island. They exist in the broader society. “Diversity is good business,” has become a cliché, but being successful in business requires a keen understanding of who our audience is and what they care about. That will always be changing as new audiences come online and different concerns in culture arise. We won’t be a relevant business if we don’t stay keenly attached to our consumer, and our consumer cares a lot about representation, authenticity and who is showing up in which stories.
Like DEI, “representation” is one of those buzzwords that comes up a lot in Hollywood. How do you define it?
When people say representation matters, part of it is, I see myself onscreen and I see my challenges and my experiences and my triumphs represented, that is something that makes me feel affirmed as a member of the world. But I also think of it from the opposite lens. Part of what’s amazing about storytelling is being able to see people that are nothing like you. I need to see people represented that are not like me. We don’t yet live in the beautiful, pluralistic, equitably represented world where all through our lives we are encountering people of different races, socioeconomic backgrounds, regional and national identities, et cetera. We still use storytelling to really bridge that gap.
Completely.
So what I found is that for me, the impetus for why authentic inclusion matters is that it’s just as important for a little Black girl to see a character that looks like them or their mom or their aunt as it is for a little white girl to see that. That representation is valuable for both of those consumers, not just for one of them.
StorySpark is described as a tool “intended to spark conversations between creatives and development executives about the inclusivity of a story.” What conversations weren’t creatives and development executives having?
Scripts will go through a lot of different phases before they ever become the movie that we see onscreen. So you’re starting with, I wanted something that was gonna be right for the script stage, which is your most nascent creative stage. You’ve gone beyond the concept and the pitch, but you’ve now put it down on paper. There’s a set of characters, a set of conversations, a set of plot points, all of those things that unfold. And in the development process, all of that is being discussed: Are the characters being developed sufficiently? Are their motivations clear? Does the climax feel strong? Is there a strong story arc? What we wanted to do was to embed a set of questions about inclusion that we think aid a lot of those storytelling elements as a part of the conversation that happens every single time.
Did it spawn from things you saw at Lionsgate when you started?
Coming into Lionsgate, what I found was that a lot of the conversations that Story Spark is able to spark, some of them were organically happening. But sometimes momentum takes off and you don’t revisit a certain conversation.
How does Story Spark make sure that happens?
It’s allowed us to be able to have conversations at multiple different points. As the project continues to develop, maybe we change some story arc things or we attach certain cast members that then brings in maybe diversity that didn’t exist on the page. Do we unintentionally run into any tropes and stereotypes now that we’ve cast a certain person? Is it authentic? Does it still make sense? So it allows for a conversation that should be organic throughout to have a consistent way of showing up as opposed to being reliant on like, Did I remember that particular thing at that time?
What were the biggest insights from the 300-plus projects you tested it on?
What it really affirmed was that there is a very strong correlation between the elements of inclusion—considered through the lens of character diversity, intersectionality, narrative portrayal, etc.—and the level of creative team diversity that you have.
I was just looking at a gender study today that found that women who are empowered as directors or as series showrunners saw a significant increase in how diverse the cast was overall.
How do you keep Story Spark flexible so that it can be relevant for filmmakers who frequently keep inclusion in mind and those who need more guidance?
Not every note or insight that you get from Story Spark might be relevant to every single project. You have to take those insights and marry it with the storyteller’s intention and the universe where this story takes place and the time period and the things that the audience is asking for, but you’ll no longer, you know, have to be in a situation where you’re like, “If only someone had mentioned that I would have been more than happy to do it.”
What surprised you most about building this tool?
When we have the question around tropes and stereotypes, one of the things that occurred to us was like, there’s a set of tropes and stereotypes that you assume everyone’s familiar with. The angry Black woman. The token Black friend. The sassy queer best friend. But there are an additional set of tropes and stereotypes that exist that many people are not familiar with. By providing people with the resources to better understand what are the tropes and stereotypes that have plagued certain underrepresented groups and how they’ve been portrayed, we invite people to have a conversation from a place not of shame or blame, but from a place of curiosity and learning.
Which is important.
That question in particular seems to have a long tail impact on how executives read stories going forward. I’ve had many executives say to me, “I was unfamiliar with X, Y and Z trope, but now that I’ve read about it, I am seeing it in multiple projects that I’m working on, and it would not have necessarily been on my mind.”
One of the stated goals of Story Spark is to “broaden the commercial appeal” of a project. Why prioritize that so early on? That seems flawed to me. It’s easy to lose the soul of a project when money is a prime concern over the actual art.
There is a long-standing narrative about that. And there’s this idea sometimes that to be a creative of the highest form, you have to create in a vacuum and not think at all about the audience or any of the money that could come from it. I would challenge that. Many of the storytellers that we work with, that isn’t actually how they create. They may have their own conception of what it means to think about the commercial appeal of a story. But most storytellers want their story to be seen and are very interested in thinking about who the audience for it is.
That’s fair.
When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, disabled audiences, female audiences, I mean, we’re seeing so much evidence at the box office lately suggesting how difficult it is to construct a hit that isn’t a hit with BIPOC and female audiences. Unfortunately, we don’t have as much data on queer and disabled audiences from a box office perspective, but everything that I’m reading tells me that as those audiences become more vocal it is impossible to build a hit without them.
When we say we are trying to broaden the commercial appeal, it’s really trying to give you a lot of different entry points into different audiences from a more authentic point of view. So that when they see that character in the movie trailer, they feel as if real thought went into it as opposed to what feels like more surface-level or token representation that doesn’t really yield what you’re looking for.
What would you say to someone who calls Story Spark another AI tool studios are forcing on an already fractured industry?
There is no AI involved in Story Spark whatsoever. The only thing that is at work is your brain.
The original AI.
Right. Actual intelligence. One thing from my time in tech was learning how to build scalable solutions that people can use. You are not uploading a script. You are taking a script that you know well and you’re asking yourself a set of questions about it or you’re asking your creative collaborators a set of questions about it. To the idea of studios forcing things onto a fractured marketplace, I think that one of the lessons for me coming out of the strikes is that consumers are extremely discerning and part of the role studios play in a good partnership with a storyteller is finding those places of positive construction, debate, and dialogue. If the studio exec agrees with everything and has no notes, it’s probably not gonna be the best movie it could be. The same with storytellers—you don’t have to take every note, but you can’t take no notes.
Because if you don’t, what happens?
In my opinion, there would be nothing worse than showing up on opening weekend and all of a sudden there are narratives connected to your movie that never came up in development. We want to take that off the table and front-load those conversations.
Story Spark isn’t AI, but AI is coming for Hollywood regardless. OpenAI is courting many of the big studios with Sora, a text-driven video generator. Many filmmakers have strong reservations about the use of AI and its consequences. Would you say those reservations are justified?
What has always happened as new technologies come online is that there is the immediate sort of, Oh my god, VCRs mean that no one’s ever gonna go to the movies again. And then we realized, no, we actually still like going out and doing those things. Streaming means albums will never be listened to again. And it’s like, no, actually, we still enjoy listening to an artist’s work from start to finish. That’s how I listened to Cowboy Carter and to Renaissance. While the fear is reasonable, I think that it will create really smart limits.
How so?
We as humans, but also as creatives, have always been able to navigate and to leverage to our benefit, whatever these different technologies are. I don’t see any evidence that AI will be significantly different from that in the long run. For people on the studio side and on the creative side—and anywhere in between—my invitation would be to think about how AI is a tool in the tool kit, but it never replaces the person holding the tool. Because we have knives, does it mean we are useless now? No. I can cut those things faster instead of having to rip the chicken apart. I’m still a chef.
