IMDb Can Still List Actors’ Ages After Court Rules California Censorship Law Unconstitutional
Federal judge says law violates First Amendment
Jeremy Fuster | February 20, 2018 @ 12:06 PM
Last Updated: February 20, 2018 @ 12:29 PM
A U.S. District Court judge struck down a California law allowing actors to request that their ages be removed from their IMDb pages, declaring the rule to be unconstitutional.
The law, which was backed by SAG-AFTRA and signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown last year, was meant to mitigate age discrimination in Hollywood, but was challenged in a lawsuit filed by IMDb against SAG-AFTRA and California Attorney General Xavier Bercerra. Today, District Judge Vince Chhabria granted IMDb’s request for summary judgment, saying that the law not only violated the First Amendment, but was not properly designed to tackle the problems it was meant to solve.
“Even if California had shown that the law was passed after targeted efforts to eliminate discrimination in the entertainment industry had failed, the law is not narrowly tailored,” writes the judge. “For one, the law is underinclusive, in that it bans only one kind of speaker from disseminating age-related information, leaving all other sources of that information untouched.”
“Even looking just at IMDb.com, the law requires IMDb to take down some age-related information – that of the members of its subscription service who request its removal – but not the age-related information of those who don’t subscribe to IMDbPro, or who don’t ask IMDb.com to take their information down.”
Chhabria also wrote that the problem that needs to be addressed isn’t age discrimination, but gender discrimination.
“Movie producers don’t typically refuse to cast an actor as a leading man because he’s too old for the leading woman; it is the prospective leading woman who can’t get the part unless she’s much younger than the leading man,” he wrote. TV networks don’t typically jettison male news anchors because they are perceived as too old; it is the female anchors whose success is often dependent on their youth. This is not so much because the entertainment industry has a problem with older people per se. Rather, it’s a manifestation of the industry’s insistence on objectifying women, overvaluing their looks while devaluing everything else.”
“The defendants barely acknowledge this, much less explain how a law preventing one company from posting age-related information on one website could discourage the entertainment industry from continuing to objectify and devalue women. If the government is going to attempt to restrict speech, it should at least develop a clearer understanding of the problem it’s trying to solve.”
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.
7 Actresses Who've Demanded Equal Pay, From Emma Stone to Viola Davis (Photos)
After Patricia Arquette's Oscar acceptance speech and Jennifer Lawrence's Lenny essay last year, more and more actresses have spoken out about pay inequality.
Patricia Arquette
Arquette delivered a moving speech about pay inequality during her 2015 Oscar acceptance speech for her role in "Boyhood," but she didn't stop there. In August 2016, she told TheWrap, "Look, inequality is in 98 percent of all industries, so I’m not surprised it’s still in Hollywood. That’s just part and parcel with what’s happening across the nation."
However, she is seeing some progress: "A lot of studios are actually really making it a priority. There’s incremental changes as far as Hollywood goes."
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Hilary Swank
In October 2016, Swank told Chelsea Handler on "Chelsea" that "Boys Don't Cry" didn't pay enough to cover her health insurance. Then she revealed that she earned only 5 percent of what one of her male counterparts earned on another movie.
"But the male hadn't had any kind of critical success, but had been in a movie where he was 'hot,"' she said. "And he got offered $10 million, and I got offered $500,000."
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Emma Stone
The "La La Land" actress told Vogue in November 2016, “We should all be treated fairly and paid fairly. I’ve been lucky enough to have equal pay to my male costars. Not ‘lucky.’ I’ve had pay equal to my male costars in the past few films. But our industry ebbs and flows in a way that’s like, ‘How much are you bringing into the box office?’"
“What are we at [nationally]? Seventy-nine cents to the dollar?” Stone continued. “It’s insane. There’s no excuse for it anymore.”
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Michelle Rodriguez
In May 2016, Rodriguez invoked the S word in discussing Hollywood's gender pay gap. "It’s like being born a slave. You know it’s like, ‘Oh, damn. Darn my luck. I wish I was born somewhere else or maybe some other way,'” the actress said. “But it is what it is.”
Robin Wright
The "House of Cards" star demanded to be paid the same as co-star Kevin Spacey and threatened to go "public" if Netflix didn't cough up the dough. "I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,'” Wright told media at the Rockefeller Foundation earlier this year. "There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in ‘House of Cards.'”
She added, "I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,'” Wright said. “And they did.”
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Viola Davis
In February 2016, the "How to Get Away With Murder" actress told Mashable, "I believe in equal pay, first of all. I’m sorry, if a woman does the same job as a man, she should be paid the same amount of money. She just should. That’s just the way the world should work. What are you telling your daughter when she grows up? ‘You've got to just understand that you’re a girl. You have a vagina, so that’s not as valuable.’ What are you telling her?"
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Emmy Rossum
The star of "Shameless" nearly scuttled Showtime's plans for an eighth season when she demanded to be paid the same as series co-star William H. Macy, who plays her father on the show (a move that Macy supported). The gambit worked: She wound up getting a new deal.
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Many stars rallied against gender pay gap in Hollywood — and “Shameless” star Emmy Rossum actually won
After Patricia Arquette's Oscar acceptance speech and Jennifer Lawrence's Lenny essay last year, more and more actresses have spoken out about pay inequality.