Comment from Jacobs, Jess EEOC-2026-0034

To whom it may concern, My name is Jess Jacobs and I am writing to you as an actor, a filmmaker (writer/director/producer), and the co-founder of Joint Venture, an independent distribution company built to get underrepresented stories in front of audiences. I've spent my career on both sides of the camera and, more recently, on the business side of getting films made and seen. What I've learned in that time is that the pipeline problem in this industry isn't a mystery. It's documented, and it's persistent. The stories that get funded, staffed, and distributed still skew heavily toward a narrow slice of storytellers, even though the audience buying tickets and subscribing is far more diverse than the industry serving it. Companies like Joint Venture exist because of that gap, though we exist to plug a hole that a healthier industry wouldn't have in the first place. The jobs at stake here aren't abstract to me. I've watched talented people — actors, crew, writers, directors, even executives — get shut out of sustainable careers not for lack of skill, but for lack of access. Those careers matter not just as paychecks, but as the ability to shape how our culture sees itself and imagines its future. An industry with this much cultural reach should be accountable for who gets to do that shaping. These EEO reports aren't paperwork for paperwork's sake — they're the only real evidence we have of whether the industry is living up to that responsibility. If this data disappears, so does our ability to point to the gap between the stories getting made and the audiences actually watching them. I urge the EEOC to withdraw this proposed rule and preserve the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reporting and record-keeping requirements. Thank you, Jess Jacobs