Marlee Matlin Says Hollywood Hasn’t Changed Since ‘CODA,’ but That Won’t Stop Her From Creating Her Own Projects: ‘I’m Still Knocking on Doors’

variety.com:

William Earl Marlee Matlin is an Oscar winner for her work in “Children of a Lesser God,” and starred in the 2021 film “CODA,” which won the Oscar for best picture, but she feels that Hollywood is so rigid that it hasn’t necessarily given her advantage when it comes to pitching projects. “I’m not happy with the way things are,” she says. “It’s simply because I don’t know how this industry works to this day.

You know, you win an Academy Award, everybody’s so excited. ‘Oh, that’s great. Things are gonna change. It’s fantastic. You’re gonna be working, offers are gonna come in,’ and they didn’t.

Yes, you’ll be on that high, it lasts maybe a short little time, and then something comes up again a little while later. So what I do is I have to do it myself.

I create my own projects. I have a lot of projects on my plate, and I’m still knocking on doors saying, ‘Hey, look, here’s this project, here’s this project, here’s this project.’ And studios, we set meetings and they’ll say, ‘Yes, well, we have a character who’s deaf in this one little project that’s animated, and we’ve checked that box off, so perhaps another time.’ And then we get the same answer from another studio, or this studio head leaves, and then that project falls by the wayside.” Matlin was just one creative pushing for change in Hollywood during the Variety & Vibe Reimagining Creativity presented by Google TV & YouTube panel.