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Making Room For Diverse Voices With The Duplass Brothers

Imran Siddiquee
The Establishment
Published in
8 min readJul 13, 2017
flickr / Till Krech

Can money and privilege make way for new stories in Hollywood? Filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass have vowed to find out.

SSince the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a ton of discussion surrounding the “forgotten” voters of middle America. One popular theory is that these people, often mistakenly reduced to “working-class whites,” were unfairly overlooked by media institutions during the campaign (and subsequently swayed the election in Trump’s favor).

Mark Duplass—director, screenwriter, and actor—who has been creating TV and film alongside his brother Jay for over a decade, has been paying close attention to that dialogue, and wondering what he can do as a filmmaker to address the current fractured political climate.

The brothers Duplass

“I think we’re obviously in a place where tons and tons of people are feeling misunderstood and not heard at all,” says Duplass. “That, coupled with the fact that technology has gotten so good, has really gotten us interested in what can come out of empowering people who aren’t being reached.”

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The Establishment
The Establishment

Published in The Establishment

The archives of culture + politics site, The Establishment. Media funded and founded by women — Nikki Gloudeman, Kelley Calkins and Katie Tandy with Ijeoma Oluo, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jessica Sutherland. The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice.

Imran Siddiquee
Imran Siddiquee

Written by Imran Siddiquee

writer and filmmaker | on gender, race, and pop culture | email: siddiquee.imran@gmail.com