will conduct a survey next month of entertainment industry workers so it can put into place a wide range of strategic initiatives being developed to address the twin issues of harassment and bias. Based on the results of the survey, those initiatives are expected to be launched by the end of the year.
The code of conduct “is in development now,” Arrington said. “We are developing the drafts. I anticipate that that model policy will be developed by the end of the year. Recommendations for what the reporting and response systems will look like will also be completed by the end of the year. The survey is critical to the entire system design.”
“The idea of a survey,” she said, “is something that is so important to me because it is very frustrating to hear over and over stories from people who say, ‘I literally had no place to go,’ or ‘I tried to access the system and I just couldn’t really figure out how to engage it.’ That is one of the most frustrating things I have heard over and over again.
“What we’ve been looking at and what we concluded very early on is that there is no one thing that is going to start to eliminate the problems that really brought this commission together,” Hill said. “And that’s true whether we’re talking about the code of conduct, or the reporting and response system, or the resources or the training – these are elements of an entire system of response.
The reporting protocols will also include a hotline, she said. “That’s another one of those pieces that we’re working on, and making sure that it’s not just a hotline that people call and that’s the end of it. What else do we need to do to follow up on that? What kind of information can we gather from that that will then go back into our other processes – training, etc.
For decades prior to the Weinstein scandal, the so-called “casting couch” was often laughed off as just the way business was conducted in Hollywood. But not anymore. “That this is no longer a laughing matter is encouraging,” she said. “This is the moment. And that’s why we’re excited about the work that we’re doing. We’ve got a lot of work to do. And just this part of it alone is something new. So we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.