The inclusion rider is co-authored by Fanshen Cox, a producer and development executive, and Kalpana Kotagal, a civil rights and employment attorney. But after McDormand’s 2018 Oscar speech, it was the academics at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a think tank at the University of Southern California, who led the charge publicly advocating for the rider — perhaps ineffectively. Getting buy-in not only from industry professionals but also general audiences requires a spirit of openness. That wasn’t the case early on; not long after McDormand’s speech, a actor on Twitter asked if the Inclusionists could provide a list of Hollywood people who had committed to the inclusion rider, only to be brushed off. The Inclusionists later declined to be interviewed by the Tribune but did acknowledge, after some protracted back and forth, that they were not, in fact, keeping a database to track any of this.
