What percentage of Hollywood film professionals are nepo babies?

Last week I gave a keynote at the Locarno Film Festival, following a request by the organisers to give the well-connected audience a ‘slap in the face’. This is exactly the kind of brief I relish, so I covered the hard realities of profitability, gatekeepers, and nepotism.To prepare, I gathered the biographies of the 6,921 people who wrote, directed, or starred in the 100 top-grossing films of each year since 2000 (2,600 films in total). I then looked at who had a family member already in the entertainment industry before they joined. I was excited to share the results, although I wasn’t quite ready for the reaction. As the Hollywood Reporter put it “the surprise, or shock, of the audience was audible”. I thought it was fairly well known just how nepotistic the top of Hollywood is, but it seems that most people were not expecting the scale the data revealed.So let’s dig into the findings.What counts as a ‘nepo baby’?The word ‘nepotism’ entered English in 1669 via a scandalous book…