‘I spoke up and got smacked down’: Producer Effie Brown recalls backlash after her conflict with Matt Damon over diversity went viral
On-screen disagreement between Damon and Brown made headlines in 2015
By Ellie Harrison
June 19, 2020
Producer Effie Brown has revealed the “huge” industry backlash she faced after a confrontation she had with Matt Damon about diversity went viral.
In 2015, Brown appeared on the series Project Greenlight, a reality show where first-time directors compete to get their films made.
On the show, Brown urged Damon and his fellow judges to select a diverse directing team for one of the movies being made, pointing out that “the only black person” in the cast was a “hooker who gets hit by her white pimp”. Damon dismissed her call for Bame representation behind the scenes, saying: “When we’re talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not in the casting of the show.”
Later in the episode, Damon again suggested diversity should not be an issue when considering the film-making team: “I think the whole point of this thing is that you go for the best director, period.” He later publicly apologised for his comments.
In a new column in The Hollywood Reporter, Brown said she struggled to get work for some time after the incident.
“After I did Project Greenlight, I suffered a huge backlash,” she wrote. “I didn’t work for a while. People didn’t want to work with me because I spoke truth to power. People who speak up are usually marginalised and pushed back, called difficult, confrontational, you name it. I spoke up and got summarily smacked back down. I did not get embraced with open arms, nor did it work in my favour… at first.”
Brown explained she was eventually offered a job by screenwriter Lee Daniels, but even the studio was reluctant to offer her a position until Daniels persuaded them to give her a chance.
“That’s what often needs to happen, you need someone with power and the courage of their convictions to help. That’s what Lee did and so did my allies and Black Twitter – they had my back 1,000 percent. It took five years to be released from that stigma.”
Brown added that even when you “take Matt Damon out of it”, black people are “suffering microagressions” every day.
“People just saw that one conflict, but there were others,” she said.