CR 043: Julie Ann Crommett on the Transformative Power of Inclusive Storytelling
The CEO, storyteller, educator, and podcast host discusses her efforts to bring a diversity of stories to the screen.
You might not recognize Julie Ann Crommett by name, but she is a powerhouse in media and entertainment. For 16 years, Crommett has been a champion of inclusive storytelling, spearheading initiatives at NBCUniversal, Google, and Walt Disney Studios to increase diversity and representation both behind the camera and on the screen. While at Disney, she and her team contributed to numerous acclaimed projects, including Encanto, Soul, Coco, Black Panther, Raya and the Last Dragon, and West Side Story. Before that, she was the Entertainment Industry Educator in Chief at Google, where she worked to shift perceptions of computer science in mainstream media. (Thanks to her work, Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls learned to code.)
Now, Crommett is the President of Collective Moxie, a consulting agency she launched in 2021 in order to assist companies and brands in developing more impactful, culturally inclusive narratives—work that she says is not optional, but mandatory.
“The only way that you are going to stay relevant and continue to make money as any kind of content creation engine, company, or organization is to be serving a global audience that is diverse and nuanced,” she says. “If you are not doing this work of what is now hot words of equity, inclusion, et cetera, then you’re going to be missing the mark. You’re going to become irrelevant and eventually you’re going to go out of business. That’s the reality. So to me, this is core business strategy and core creative strategy.”
Though this year has been a particularly interesting one for anyone working in the D.E.I. space, Crommett says that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” becoming buzzwords of the moment isn’t a hindrance to her work. In fact, it may just bolster the work that she’s been doing all along. “I remember a time where nobody knew what the heck I was talking about when I said diversity, equity or inclusion,” she says. “I would spend 30 minutes at a party explaining what I did for a living back in 2009. So, in a weird way, this is a blessing. We’re actually at the place where we can evolve the work, even if it’s under duress. We can evolve the work into a place where maybe we are, and should be, more accurate. Maybe there are ways that we should be thinking about this that should evolve. I’m meeting this moment as an opportunity to reaffirm our values and why we believe this work is important.”
I recently spoke with Crommett about her proudest achievements, the importance of inclusive storytelling, and how an animal attack reenactment show led her to her current work.
You’ve had such a fascinating career. How did you get into this line of work?
I grew up outside of Atlanta, Georgia, a Puerto Rican and Cuban American raised in the American South. I found my voice in theater as a young person. When I went to college, I started producing theater for the first time. I’d been acting up to that point. I was inspired by the Black theater troupe at Harvard, Black C.A.S.T., and I was like, “Wait a minute. How do we not have a Latin theater troupe?” So I decided to start it. It’s been going now for 20 years, Harvard College TEATRO.
I always pin this as the moment where I actually started doing this work: I went to pitch the club to the Office of the Arts, and I got asked, “Will enough people audition, and will enough people come to the show?” I was 20 years old and incredulous. I thought this was a ridiculous question. There are Latin people everywhere, on top of the fact that non-Latin people also love Latin literature and plays. So I was like, “Well, yes, of course.” We had 50 people audition, we sold out by closing night, and about half of our cast and crew was from the Boston community, as well as about half of our audience. So we really extended outside the university. That, for me, is the inciting incident in my mind into advocacy, looking at diversity of voices in the arts. And you couldn’t tell me that there wasn’t financial and creative success in it. The first endeavor I ever did proved that out. What’s amazing is to have seen a bunch of students keep that theater troupe alive, which says that the need is still there.
When I left school, I knew I needed to make a living and unfortunately in theater you can’t do that as easily as in other mediums. I had, the summer before my senior year, interned at DreamWorks Animation on Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld as a production intern. And when I graduated, I worked at Pixar as a post-grad intern. Then the recession hit.
I ended up taking a job on a reality show called I’m Alive for Animal Planet. It was an animal attack survivor show, which is exactly what it sounds like. We did animal attack reenactments. About three months in, I was in an elephant park in Palmdale, California, in the middle of the desert with fake blood on my hands, which was corn syrup and ketchup. I looked at my hands and I went, “What am I doing with my life?” [Laughs] The next day, I called the only person I knew in L.A. at the time, Jose Andino, who worked in HR at NBCUniversal. He had been a family friend. I said, “Jose, I’ve got to get out of this gig. What do you have?” And he changed the course of my entire life and career. He said, “There’s a job in diversity and drama programming at NBC.” I had no idea what any of this meant. This is 2009. All I thought was, “Well, I’ve been an advocate for different stories being told and stories coming to light. And I love television.” So I went in, convinced them that I could solve problems, answer phones, do emails, and I wrote analysis of a script, and three days later, I had the job. That started my now 16-year career in creative inclusion work, creating more opportunity and equal opportunity for people of all different backgrounds to be able to share their stories and to work in storytelling industries.
So we really have to thank that reality show for getting you to where you are today.
A hundred percent. Season one of I’m Alive is why I am in this work. [Laughs]
I love that. I’m going to ask what seems like a ridiculous question, but I think it’s important: Why is diversity, equity, and inclusion so critical in film and television? Can you give some examples of how onscreen representation has had real-world impact?
We believe things about ourselves or about other people based on the narratives we consume, and the way we consume narratives can vary, from film and television to news stories to the interactions we have with different people as we’re growing up. We’re made up of narratives in many ways. This is why, when you work in storytelling industries, it is so important to think about the narratives that you’re putting out there and how you’re thinking about those in a very responsible way, knowing the power that you have to shape people’s brains. I always say great storytelling doesn’t tell people what to think. That’s actually terrible storytelling. What it does is it allows for different conditions to exist in somebody’s brain so that new weather patterns can emerge. That’s what I believe we do as storytellers, and that’s why there’s so much responsibility in it.
I have read about some amazing work over the years where this has been the case. The most famous example is in the forensic science space. When CSI: Crime Scene Investigation first premiered in 2000, five years later there was an over 50% increase in forensic science majors in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s dubbed “the CSI effect.” And what was really remarkable was that there was an over indexing of women in those majors after CSI premiered, because there were so many prominent women in the show. So there was a direct impact from this TV show launching to people thinking a career path was for them. And to this day, forensic science remains the only major area of science, technology, engineering, or math that has gender parity. This is why stories can be so impactful—it can guide people to think about who they are, who other people are, and what’s possible for them, and maybe even a whole career choice that they hadn’t considered.
D.E.I. is such a weirdly hot button topic this year. When it comes to your work, have you had to change your language or what you do in order to not scare people away?
I’ve never been married to any particular set of words. I’ve had so many different versions of titles over the years, but the work has fundamentally remained the same, and I approach this moment in a very similar way, which is that I have no problem shifting language and being more precise in my language if it helps to continue to get the work done.
Tell me about Collective Moxie. Why did you decide to launch the company?
In 2021, I had reached a point in my time at Disney where Bob Iger was leaving...for the first time. We didn’t know he was coming back. [Laughs] But he was leaving, and we were having a leadership change. I felt like I built what I came to build. I built a team from [just] me to 10 people. We worked on incredible projects—Soul, West Side Story remake, Raya and the Last Dragon, Coco, Encanto, Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I had done some of my own reflection and really wanted to go back out into the world and get involved in other areas of work, which staying within a corporation would make really challenging. So I made the decision with Bob that I would depart at the same time.
So I took my leave and about a month later I was reading my LinkedIn profile, and I read the paragraph that I had written when I was 22 years old, which was still the paragraph on LinkedIn. The first sentence was, “Build my own production company that is dedicated to the voices of those who have been historically underrepresented in media and television and elevate those voices and create opportunities.” Some version of that. And I went, “Wow. I haven’t done that yet.” So that was the moment where I said, “I think this is the time to launch my own thing.” So I launched Collective Moxie in March 2021.
What I figured was taking the work that I had been involved with inside corporations and saying, “How could we apply this to every kind of story telling modality out there?” We didn’t want to just work with film and television, because the media industry as a whole is changing rapidly right now. So our team said, “Collective Moxie [should] not focus just on film and television. We’re going to go into gaming, we’re going to look at advertising, we’re going to look at sports and at brands across industries.” We thought there is an opportunity to teach people how to do this in a way that is going to deeply resonate with the audiences and the consumers that they have to reach in order to continue to grow their businesses. And we know how to do this well, because we’ve done it for major brands and companies to billions of dollars in success. So let’s take it and go see what we can do.
Collective Moxie the name comes from the fact that I love the word moxie. It is an old expression that was usually applied to women—you’ve got moxie, she’s got moxie. I wanted to revive it, because I believe that making change and thinking about change-making within any sector takes a little bit of moxie. It takes a little bit more elbow grease. But we can’t do it alone. We have to do it together, in partnership with each other, across every area of intersection of identity, and that’s where “collective” comes from. It actually takes our collective moxie to make change and to see the world that we want to build and make better for the people who come after us. So that’s the genesis and premise of the organization. Our tagline is, “We’re shaping the future of storytelling every day.”
That’s awesome. What are some of the films and TV shows that made an impact on you growing up?
Oh, gosh. I love film and TV. I’m so glad you asked this. The number one most impactful show is Ugly Betty. When Ugly Betty came on in 2006, I was in college and it was the first time I had ever seen somebody reflected onscreen that I could identify with very directly. This was a young Latina woman who was working at a media company, trying to make her mark as a writer. Clearly this was an office environment that was not built with her in mind, but she came as her authentic self all the time, and she would go home to her very Latin family. The revelation now, in hindsight, for me, was, “Oh! I don’t have to choose between parts of myself to be successful in this world.” So Betty really made a transformative impact for me in the long run. I’m getting teary eyed because you asked, how can what we see impact what we believe? Well, that was the moment for me, and probably for a whole lot of other people, too, who saw themselves in some aspect of Betty, whether or not it was the cultural one.
I think a lot about the why of what I do, and it’s very connected to the idea that everybody should have their Betty. Every single person at some point in their life should have a Betty moment, if not multiple times, where they really connect with a story that they’re watching, and it can affirm who they are in this world. I believe that’s another job we have as storytellers.
And in terms of what I have enjoyed, I think writers are the unsung heroes of the creative universe and some of my favorite shows are where the writing was just at another level. I would put The West Wing on that list. I would put Mad Men on that list. I would say that Abbott Elementary is doing some incredible work from a comedy perspective. I still re-watch Cheers, which to me is maybe the best comedy pilot of all time. And in terms of film, The Devil Wears Prada I re-watch about every other month and find something new and delicious, including Stanley Tucci. I’m a huge Stanley Tucci fan. I stan the Tucc. Some older films that really had an impact with me as a theater kid were Singin’ in the Rain, which I re-watch at least once a year. And Casablanca will remain one of my favorite romance stories of all time. So it really is a wide aperture, but I think reflects my own tastes. I will also say, if I ever rewatch the first 15 minutes of Up, which I also worked on, I will cry every single time. I think that is some of the most beautiful cinematic work that has been done at the opening of a film.
When you reflect on your career so far, what are you proudest of?
I’m most proud of all the writers and directors whose careers I helped launch when I was at NBCUniversal 15, 16, years ago, where we were able to see them at the early stage, the talent was there, and it was just an opportunity question, and now their talent has proven out. So many of them are now showrunners or creating the shows that we’re watching. I don’t think there is anything more rewarding than seeing somebody come into their own greatness, come into their own potential, and then share their gifts and talents with the world. That, for me, has probably been the most impactful thing to have seen in my career thus far.
One of the projects that I’m most proud of, specifically, is Encanto. I worked all four years I was at Disney on that project, as did my team, and I am so proud of the translation of that film to so many people and to seeing themselves in some member of the Madrigal family and of the process we did to make that movie, which was such a culturally inclusive and intentional process in so many ways—from external consultants to internal Disney employees to the amazing folks at Walt Disney Animation Studio, including the directors and the writer, who all did incredible work to make sure that every aspect of that movie sang in every way. And thank you, Lin-Manuel [Miranda], for the catchiest songs, including like, why are we still talking about Bruno? We were told not to talk about Bruno, but here we are. Also, I’m really proud of the variety of representation of being Latin that is in that film within one family, which is very normal in Latin America. And for me, how proud I am that we were able to normalize that just a bit more to everybody through the telling of the Madrigal family.
Is there anything that you hope to accomplish someday that you haven’t done yet?
I’ve started producing, which I’m really thrilled about. I’m executive producing my brother’s first film. He is an award-winning documentary cinematographer and he’s directing a documentary for the first time, following young people doing model rocketry competitions around the country. They’re the future of science and space, and it’s incredible to see them coming into their own, which is really what the film ends up being about. So Lift Off is probably one of the most exciting things I have coming up. I’m also executive producing two animated short film projects, and there’ll be more things from us to come.
The other thing I want to do is write and publish a book. I’ve been working on that for a while, and I hope to have that come out soon. It’s a bit of a riff on the concept of having moxie and using your moxie, and hopefully will be informative for folks, kind of like our podcast You Got Moxie!, where we talk about the how of changemaking. My hope is that the book will be an echo of that and really help people have the skills they need to continue to make positive change in whatever ways they want to and understand that they have the power to do that, that actually sits within them, that they have the moxie, and now it’s just a question of using it.
To learn more about Julie Ann Crommett, visit the Collective Moxie website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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