Women & Hollywood is going to take some downtime, will try to unplug (it will be hard) and maybe read a couple of actual books that are printed on paper (radical!) I also need to watch about 25 films for the Athena Film Festival and spend time organizing the book on women directors.
I’ll be back after Labor Day.
Please send me anything you think I need to know that I might miss while I am unplugged.
See you soon. When I return we will celebrate 3 years of Women & Hollywood’s work.
Had a chance last week to talk with Lindsay Doran producer of the Oscar winning Sense & Sensibility and the current Nanny McPhee Returns about a bunch of different topics.
As a person who does a lot of interviews, I found Lindsay’s answers and insights to be very, very interesting. Hope you do too. Her bio is at the end.
Women & Hollywood: You grew up a child of Hollywood. What was it like?
Lindsay Doran: I was born very late in my father’s life. He was 55. He was a studio executive for nearly 50 years working on films like Sunset Blvd. My mother typed scripts for Preston Sturgess. My brother was the publicist on 2001: A Space Odyssey. So it was all around me and what I saw was people who loved it and people who did not have to compromise who they were to be successful in the movie business. Filmmakers wanted to work with my father. He was an executive producer in the original sense of the word meaning he was an executive but also a producer. He was home every night at 6:45 and we all had dinner together. I grew up listening to people talk about story. There was always the sense that the story was the thing that mattered and that was always the thing I loved most.
There were no women though. There were no women executives. There were no women directors. There were no women producers. There were no women anything. There were no role models as far as that went.
The Emmy folks like the Oscar folks give out their technical and “smaller” awards on a different night from their high profile TV event. The big Emmys are next weekend.
Betty White who killed on Hot in Cleveland all season won an Emmy for hosting Saturday Night Live and Ann-Margaret won for guest actress on Law & Order SVU.
But most importantly, another glass ceiling was broken by composers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman who won for title theme music for Nurse Jackie. They are the first women to win on that category.
Here’s something that is making me angry this morning- sites are picking up on a story about how young women across Hollywood are auditioning to be Andrew Garfield’s love interest in the new Spiderman reboot.
Here’s the title from the Hollywood Reporter piece:
Will one of these women be Spiderman’s love interest?
There is just something inherently wrong with a process that talks about a female character in this way. It’s setting her up to be nothing more than a piece of meat. I just wish that people would understand the implications of creating this dynamic.
The guy is the superhero star, and the young woman is just the love interest with no name according to the story. Yet every up and comer wants to play this part.
So glad we also have Lisbeth Salander to look forward to cause Spiderman and the girl who will have two lines and have to look like she is in peril just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Susanna White took some time during the press junket for Nanny McPhee Returns to answer some questions for Women & Hollywood. Nanny McPhee Returns opens nationwide today.
Women & Hollywood: How did you get the script for the film?
Susanna White: I was sent it. I was out in Africa. I can remember the day very clearly. I was researching the moment when the American Marines crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq. And I came in and washed the sand off me and was completely transported. I fell in love with the writing. It’s such a departure from what I’ve done before. I really engaged, mainly with the character of Mrs. Green, a mom who’s desperately trying to hold it all together, do a job, run the house, look after her kids, and care for the old people in the village and not really coping and desperately in need of a nanny. I thought, although loosely set in World War II, it felt like a contemporary story I wanted to tell.
My sister, Rohi, and I have long fought against cultural norms — she, as the producer, and myself as a filmmaker. When I first started writing this film, it was because of Rohi’s friend, Rashi Shyam, whose father had shot himself. No one within the South Asian community even knew how deeply he was struggling with depression. No one acknowledged his depression even
after that, when he was hospitalized. So we decided to make this film, hoping to de-stigmatize mental illness and bring awareness of the issue to all cultures.
Mary Kay Place is nominated for an Emmy for her work as Adaleen Grant on the HBO show Big Love. The ceremony for her category — guest actress in a drama series — takes place this weekend on August 21st.
Women & Hollywood: Congrats on the Emmy nomination. I’ve loved your work for so long and I’m flattered that you like my site.
Mary Kay Place: It’s just very interesting. There’s a lot of good stuff on there.
W&H: What are you working on now?
MKP: We’re shooting the 5th season of Big Love.
W&H: You’ve been a writer, director and actor.
MKP: I wrote before I acted. I was studying acting when I moved from Oklahoma to LA. I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t even know the right acting classes to get into. I started out in production and before that I worked for Tim Conway. I also worked as a typist in music clearance and learned about publishing.
“I don’t know how to sell this movie.” These were the words, said by my foreign sales agent, which threw me into a state of chaos and panic in early June. I had just finished stumbling through version 1.0 of the pitch for my newest project and that was his reply.
At first the statement made me mad – wasn’t he listening? I told him about the movie and it was pretty cool. He clearly did not get it. Plus, wasn’t figuring out how to sell movies his job as the foreign sales agent? Why was I responsible for doing his job for him?
Then I just froze. I walked around in a daze for days, hearing his voice in my head. How would I sell this movie? I started thinking about my (sales) pitch – “it has dance and fighting and all this cool stuff; it is sort of the same characters except we are paying attention to other people…” – and I realized that I was confused by my pitch, so no wonder that he was confused too. While my sales agent articulated himself in terms of his job, he was really asking a larger, more fundamental question:
There’s been a twitter conversation this morning about how few shows on HBO have women leads. While they might not be great with series about women, they have done a number of fantastic and interesting documentaries about women.
That continues tonight with the premiere of Woman Rebel which tells the story of Silu a woman who fought in the Army (which was 40% female and one of the focuses was women’s rights) and then once the revolution was over became a member of parliament.
Director Kiran Deol answered some questions about the film.
I spent most of my childhood as a girl educated at a Jewish Day School inundated with Holocaust imagery. We got it so much that after a while it became kind of rote. Not a great way to educate. The legacy of my education is that many Holocaust images are seered into my brain.
It’s now some 25 years later and the survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing and those first hand memories of this horrible atrocity is receding with their deaths. One thing the Nazis were good at (well they were also good at killing lots of people, not just Jews) was documenting their work — because that’s what the mass extermination of an entire species of people was to them.
The point to me is not that male critics like the film — male and female critics both like and dislike the film — it’s that there is surprise in the fact that some male critics actually like the film. Not mentioned is that some women dislike the film, but that doesn’t seem to be as big a sin than men actually liking a film about a woman.
I seriously can’t believe that this conversation still goes on. The job of a reviewer is to look at a film and say whether they like the film, the characters, you know the whole package. The fact that it stars a woman or is about a woman should not automatically let men off the hook because really, how are they supposed to like a film about, oh my god, A WOMAN.
Can you imagine the reverse sentence ever being written?
What Does it Say about US Womanhood: Female Critics Actually Like The Expendables? (or substitute any of the hundreds of movies that star men.)
IndieWIRE is reporting that 19 new films were announced for the Toronto Film Festival including the closing night film which is the eagerly awaited Last Night by Massy Tadjedin starring Keira Knightley.
From what I can tell (there is no release up yet on the TIFF site) Tadjedin’s film is the only new female directed film added.
It’s kind of a shame that the brilliant new show Huge from Winnie Holzman (My So Called Life) and her daughter Savannah Dooley is airing during the summer when people are busy, outside, not watching TV and many of the targeted audience kids are at actually at sleep away camp.
But anyone not watching this show is seriously missing something special.
Every time I watch the show I feel my heart fluttering because the writers just get it. They get what it’s like to be a kid and not fit in. They get what it’s like to be an adult who has struggled her whole life to fit in.
Here she is folks, here she is world, here’s Lisbeth (borrowing from Sondheim’s Rose’s Turn)
Don’t know anything about her except that she’s the sister of Kate Mara (who’s an actress too), grew up in a family that owned the NY Giants Pittsburgh Steelers, and will be in this fall’s highly anticipated film about Facebook- The Social Network which will open the NY Film Festival and is also directed by David Fincher.
Welcome to the big time. You are now officially a female franchise. Talk about pressure.
The New York Film Festival which is the centerpiece of NY’s fall film season announced its lineup today and only two women are on the docket with film’s of their own.
That’s 7.4%.
I took out the film Revolucion which has 10 directors (and two are women.) 20% of that film is women directors. If I add back in Revolucion and count the amount of directors the percentage of directors is 11%.
Julie Taymor’s The Tempest is the centerpiece of the festival (yeah!) and Kelly Reichert’s Meek’s Cutoff is also being screened.
Mariana Chenillo and Patricia Riggen are the two women director’s whose work is featured in Revolucion.
Couldn’t we do a little better? This is NYC. I expect more (but I guess I shouldn’t.)
Last weekend was Blogher 10. In the six years since it was started it has blossomed into a beast (and I mean that in a good way.) Women are very much into social media. The stats released at the conference show that 87.1 million women between the ages of 18 and 76 are online. 67.5 million women use some form of social media. 55.6 million women read blogs. Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins the founders of Blogher are some seriously smart women. They are also visionaries. They saw a need and filled it. I love and respect them greatly.
Had a chance last week to talk with Lindsay Doran producer of the Oscar winning Sense & Sensibility and the current Nanny McPhee Returns about a bunch of different topics.
Susanna White took some time during the press junket for Nanny McPhee Returns to answer some questions for Women & Hollywood. Nanny McPhee Returns opens nationwide today.
My sister, Rohi, and I have long fought against cultural norms — she, as the producer, and myself as a filmmaker. When I first started writing this film, it was because of Rohi’s friend, Rashi Shyam, whose father had shot himself. No one within the South Asian community even knew how deeply he was struggling with depression. No one acknowledged his depression even
Mary Kay Place is nominated for an Emmy for her work as Adaleen Grant on the HBO show Big Love. The ceremony for her category — guest actress in a drama series — takes place this weekend on August 21st.
There’s been a twitter conversation this morning about how few shows on HBO have women leads. While they might not be great with series about women, they have done a number of fantastic and interesting documentaries about women.
I read this blog post yesterday 
It’s kind of a shame that the brilliant new show Huge from Winnie Holzman (My So Called Life) and her daughter Savannah Dooley is airing during the summer when people are busy, outside, not watching TV and many of the targeted audience kids are at actually at sleep away camp.
The New York Film Festival which is the centerpiece of NY’s fall film season announced its lineup today and only two women are on the docket with film’s of their own.
