REID HOFFMAN:

Well said. Any questions that you think we should cover?

FRANKLIN LEONARD:

I think there's a fundamental question, why does film and television matter? And it's one that I think I understood instinctively as a kid, and I think it's why I watch them, and it was my portal to other worlds when I was a Black kid in the deep South, who wasn't terribly social because he was a big math nerd. But I'm more and more aware of the extent to which Hollywood, but film and television, but Hollywood in general, defines the conversation around how we perceive ourselves and each other, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

When you think about the number of people that consume the stories that this industry creates, and what it means when those stories are over and they walk back into the world, and how they perceive each other. It's hard for me to escape the reality, for example, that 66% of gang members in film, I think, over the last 10 years are Black, but only 33% are Black, according to the FBI. I wonder if that has anything to do with why people think that I'm dangerous, or George Floyd was dangerous, or any of the Black men and women that have been killed by police were dangerous when they were not.

It's hard for me to escape the fact that 50% of the Latinx immigrants, who were shown on television over the last 10 years, were shown engaged in some criminal activity. Are we surprised that people were chanting, "Build the wall."? Those folks don't know Latinx criminal immigrants, they saw it on TV, and they think that's the truth, and it's not. In fact most studies show that Latinx immigrant communities are safer crime bases than your standard American community.

I think that whatever happens over the next couple of years in regards to the pandemic, we can all agree that this is a singular event in human history. We have this thing that is affecting everybody on earth, and simultaneously we are aware that it's affecting everybody on earth.

Even the Spanish flu, it's not the same thing, you couldn't have known that the British Prime Minister was going to the emergency room within 10 minutes of his arrival in 1918. But now we all knew, hundreds of millions of us knew it, within moments.

Working in this industry now, and particularly working in this industry in the position that we're in, it's a really sacred responsibility that I think I take really seriously because it's not just, "How do we get these movies made? How do we get these writers into the system? How do we make money on this content that we're creating?" It's, "How do we create a sustainable culture that allows for the best storytellers of our time to tell their stories and have them heard?"

And it sounds really high minded. When I say it, it sounds uncomfortable in my mouth, but fundamentally that's what this is. And it can't just be about profit. And it can't even just be about content. It's no different than the ways in which we went to church on Sundays, or Mosque, or temple or whatever. There's a ritualistic quality to it. And film and television has that position. It is a business, but it has a far greater role in the world in which we live.

ACTION POINT: Are you only after profits, or is there a “real mission”?