By Yohana Desta From Mashable

A simple video series could forever change the way you watch films.

Actor and writer Dylan Marron takes films and boils them down to only show every single word spoken by a person of color, then posts the clips to YouTube. The series, called “Every Single Word,” is also shared on his Tumblr page.

Most of his edited clips end up being less than a minute long, highlighting just how rare speaking roles are for actors and actresses of color.

Marron himself is an actor, performing in the theater group the New York Neo-Futurists. Podcast fans might also recognize his voice — he plays Carlos in the eerie Welcome to Night Vale.

“Every Single Word” originally started as a play he performed about a year ago for his theater group’s show “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” He performed every single word spoken by actress Angelah Johnson-Reyes in the film Enough Said. Reyes plays a maid and is the only person of color in the film.

“I was watching that last year on a plane and I was like ‘Wow, the writer of this is completely unaware of how people of color exist beyond service roles,'” Marron tells Mashable.

The actor has faced roadblocks in his own career, sitting in meetings with agents who told him there “weren’t many roles for my ‘type.'”

“When you’re young and you hear that you just accept it as truth,” he says. “I think a lot of people have been discouraged because of that.”

Though Marron has been aware of the lack of diversity in film since he was young, he says working on this video series has still surprised him. It put him face to face with the uncomfortable truth about the dearth of speaking roles for people of color.

And it’s not just confined to the films he analyzes. A USC Annenberg study found that out of 500 films released from 2007 to 2010 and separately in 2012, three-quarters of all speaking characters were white.

“I’ve watched so many of these movies and didn’t even notice it. I think that’s what’s so dangerous,” Marron says.

One film that didn’t slip under his radar, however, was the fairytale musical Into the Woods. The clip he created for that film only lasted seven seconds. There were no people of color who spoke onscreen.

“The fantasy genre is one of the most unacceptable to me,” he says. “You’re asking me to believe in magic, you’re asking me to believe in fairy tales…you are not beholden to any historical accuracy.”

One thing Marron wants to make clear is that he’s not singling out films because he dislikes them. Quite the contrary, in fact. Her and The Fault in Our Stars were two films he loved and enjoyed.

The latter, for example, was based on a John Green book where the race of the characters isn’t specifically mentioned. However, the film adaptation only has one person of color, actress Ana Dela Cruz. All of her speaking parts combined make up less than a minute of the film.

At the end of the day, the film tells a universal story about love and loss, but then uses “whiteness as the default race,” as though to suggest people of color “can’t take part” in these universal stories as well, Marron says. That’s where the true harm lies.

His ultimate goal with the video series is to show people how prevalent this issue is.

“As long as it’s starting a conversation, that’s what matters,” he says. “That’s the real root of change.”

IMAGE:
Actress Yvette Nicole Brown in a scene from ‘500 Days of Summer.’IMAGE: FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

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