What Those of Us Who Aren't White Dudes Do

Profuse thanks to whoever made this sign and to my friend Athanasia Syrengelas for taking the photo at No Kings 2.

A few weeks ago, I was on a commercial with a director I had never worked with before. At first, he seemed like most of the commercial directors out there: just another older white guy. I am seeing a lot more women and people of color directing in TV and movies, but commercials are still primarily the domain of white guys. Even the new, young, directing teams include at least one. And on this job, it was clear why: the client was a financial institution — is there a whiter and or guy-er industry? — and so, of course, the ad creatives who wrote the spot were also older white guys.

But it was also immediately clear why it shouldn’t have been that way: because all of the talent in the spot that he needed to direct were Black women and girls. The star of the spot was one of the original WNBA players (name redacted because NDA), and the rest of the cast were meant to depict her at different ages and stages of her life and career. Clearly they’d had a terrific casting agent, because these girls/women, ranging from 12 to 25 or so, were super focused and professional, and wow could they play. Which makes sense, considering that they were representing incarnations of a trailblazing superstar, but still, it’s rare to see young actors who so fully have their shit together. It speaks to the power of sport for these young women who are coming up, and the importance of the role models they have in these incredible players.

The director, unfortunately, was a different story. As in, he was an asshole. From the start, he was rude to everyone on the crew, going out of his way to treat each of us individually like we didn’t know how to do our jobs and were just dying for him to tell us.

To me: “No no, don’t boom this, I don’t want the boom in the shot!”
(As if my entire job isn’t about getting the sound without having the boom in the shot.)

To the makeup artist spraying on beads of fake sweat: “Spray her again! You have to keep spraying, you can’t just spray it once and walk away! Here, give it to me!” (Because he is an expert at squeezing that little spray bottle, whereas she has only done this literally thousands of times.)

Then, when talking to the young actors, he gave them orders like they were at worst stupid and at best in the military.

“Run back! No, when you get there, don’t stop, run back. Don’t just stand there! Why are you doing that? Why is she doing that?”

This finally got to a point where the dolly grip turned to him and said, “Be civil.”

Which led to the inevitable response, “I’m the director! You don’t get to tell me what to do!”, and then the perhaps not-so-inevitable but entirely unsurprising, “You’re gonna talk to me that way? Do you want to step outside?”

Fortunately (or not, for those of us who would have immensely enjoyed watching this director get his ass kicked by a man much younger and fitter than himself), the dolly grip just repeated, “Be civil,” and went back to work. And when the director went to complain about him to the key grip, the key grip just ignored him. (When I saw that key grip on the next job, he told me the dolly grip handled it very well. Perhaps because, as I later found out, another grip I know had once had to restrained from punching this director in the face.)

The star of the spot was the only one the director was remotely cordial to, and even with her, it was clear that he wanted to talk to her like a human, but didn’t remotely know how. His attempts at friendly joking or making complements felt super awkward, and when he had to actually direct her? Well, that’s when things really broke down. She had a bunch of non-intuitive and weirdly-written lines to read (because they were trying to make a touching ad for a financial institution), so there was a teleprompter standing by — but the director didn’t want it, insisting that it would distract his star. When she realized that there was a teleprompter, and asked, “Why aren’t we using that?” and he said, “It’s not natural, this is better, you’re going to get it.” So he just kept repeating the lines to her, and having her say them back, no matter how clear it became that this was not at all working for her, she just kept flubbing the lines and getting more frustrated. When the teleprompter person finally put the teleprompter on a stand for her to use at least for reference — because lots of people, myself included, process words much better if they read them first — the director angrily told the operator, “Get rid of that! She’ll just look at it and be distracted!” He even refused to break the lines up into pieces to make them easier to remember until we’d literally been at it for over an hour. We just kept deeper and deeper into overtime, making everyone annoyed and exhausted, because he just had to prove that he could do it his way, rather than, God forbid, asking her what she needed. When we went to the star’s dressing room to wire her for her final scene, it was clear that she was completely over it, but she was still lovely to us, and only commented, with an eye roll, “You know what? We’re just going to get through it.”

You know why? Because I’ll bet you she, like me, has been dealing with this shit her entire life. The world is full of incompetent and narcissistic white dudes who don’t know how to do their jobs — particularly when those jobs involve showing respect for and collaborating with others — but who have still moved up to high positions because they are esteemed by other white dudes for this exact type of rigid, bullying behavior. Because that’s how they all learned to get ahead in the world — in a way that would never work for anyone else. I mean, I went up to a camera operator last week and said it would be great if he could communicate better with me, and he threw a hissy fit and went to my boss. It’s 2025, and I still have to smile and voice my concerns delicately, “be sweet,” as one of my bosses told me once, because being a complete dick is totally acceptable if you’re a guy, but forthrightly asking for what you need with no sugar-coating is just never, ever going to work out well with certain men if you’re a woman.

I mean, for those of us who have worked our way up in our careers having to work around this type of man, it’s just so hilarious to hear all the talk these days about DEI. The longer we watch these white dudes, the types who blame DEI for everything, be so bad at their jobs, the clearer it becomes that there is no way they would have gotten where they so clearly don’t deserve to be without the privileges that come with being white dudes (or, in limited cases, white women who lay on a trowel-full of lipstick to smooch their white-dude asses).

But no matter how hard they work to stop it, the world is changing. For now, you know what? We’re just going to get through it. We’re going to do the work they don’t have to do to get to where we want to be, and come out the other side twice as good as they are at all of it. Because that is what those of us who aren’t white dudes do.

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