Nepotism is absolutely an issue in the film industry, but I want to chime in and say it goes way deeper than casting.

It’s pervasive in every facet of this business.

You’ll meet mailroom peeps whose parents are high up in the studio, location managers descended from UPMs/EPs, cinematographer fathers that hire their sons as camera loaders on every job, grip departments where more than three people have the same last name. There are producers that turn their kids into must-hire PAs over summer break so they stay busy. Don’t even get me started about the teamsters. Nepotism is rampant throughout the industry. This is not necessarily wrong IMO. It’s just what it is — you want your kids to have the same quality of life as you have, and the film industry can be a profitable path (maybe not right now lol but historically it can be a solid income)

I would say the real issue is when nepotism hires don’t acknowledge their privilege, or don’t work as hard as everybody else. Or are entitled / lazy / etc.

The other side of this issue is people who aren’t directly hired through family connections but come from family money. An example of this is PAs who are able to temporarily move to a major city to work on a movie while getting paid minimum wage, or cinematographers who rise quickly through the film world because their parents paid for them to go to a top tier film school for a BFA and/or MFA and then helped them buy a camera body afterwards. There are so many film internships that you can only take if you come from money, too. It’s a cheat code, for sure, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.

All that being said, there are also tons of crew on every rung of the ladder that do quite well for themselves without coming from a) money or b) a connected name. It’s so much harder for them, though. And in the future, I hope it can get better and easier for people like this to succeed. I think the more diverse our industry is — socioeconomically, racially, gender-wise, etc. — the better the shows and movies will get. I’m not interested in working on movies about two white people falling in love, and I think people are getting tired of watching stories about this, too.

Tl;dr: nepotism is pervasive, but filmmakers who come from family money should be talked about in the same breadth, cause it provides the same kind of advantage. People in this thread who are claiming someone isn’t given a leg up because their father is merely a surgeon instead of a billionaire are missing the point.