I’m still traveling, but here’s something to keep you occupied, the recently released trailer of Julie & Julia. Yeah. Write it down. August 7th.
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
Rachel Helson
Rachel Helson is an inspired young woman. At 20 years old she’s a producer (Reasons to be Pretty), an actress and an NYU senior. She’s also a serious kick ass activist for breast cancer and is producing a benefit on Monday, May 4th for the Susan G. Komen Foundation in honor of her four breast cancer surviving aunts.
Here are the details:
The Young Professionals Committee of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, New York City Affiliate will present The Pink Campaign on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre (227 West 42nd St). This one-night only event will take place on Monday, May 4, 2009 and will be an inspirational Broadway benefit performance filling the stage with original music and theatre that explores the ways in which breast cancer touches people’s lives.
Tickets are $100 and $150 and are now on sale at Smarttix or by calling (212) 868-4444.
Directed by David Ruttura (White Christmas, Farragut North,) and hosted by Rachel Dratch the event will consist of musical performances of original songs by celebrated Broadway composers and artists in the music industry and short plays acted, written and directed by professionals of stage and screen; all written about various breast cancer experiences.
Performers include Susan Blackwell (title of show, Speech & Debate,) Patrick Goodwin (17 Photos of Isabel,) Seth Grugle (The Hunchback of Notredame, “American Idol,”) Rachel Helson (72 Blackeyed Virgins, The 24 Hour Plays,) Richard Kind (“Spin City,” “Mad About You,”) Terry Kinney (“Oz,” The Laramie Project,) Stephanie March (“Law & Order: SVU”), Zoe Perry (“Private Practice”), Kate Reinders (Wicked, Good Vibrations,) Sarah Ries (The 24 Hour Plays, “Grey’s Anatomy,”) Daphne Rubin-Vega (Rent, Les Miserables), James Leo Ryan (Annie, Show Boat,) Megan Sikora (Curtains, Wicked,) Mary Testa (Guys and Dolls, Xanadu,) Tamara Tunie (“Law & Order: SVU”), Steven Weber (“Wings,” “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”), and Kit Williamson (Talk Radio).
Playwrights include Theresa Rebeck (Mauritius, Spike Heels), Harrison David Rivers (Fell), and Robert Sternin & Prudence Fraser (“The Nanny”). Directors include Andrew McCarthy (St. Elmo’s Fire, “Lipstick Jungle,” Fat Pig) and Laura Savia (10 Million Miles, Celebration and the Room.) Composers and lyricists include composer and conductor Oran Eldor (Guys & Dolls), Marcy Heisler & Zina Goldrich (Ever After, Dear Edwina, Junie B. Jones), and Jeremy Schonfeld (Drift, Ministry of Progress, Home).
I’m traveling this week so there will be very few posts. Here is the piece I wrote for the Women’s Media Center on the date-rape controversy surrounding Observe and Report.
Rarely does a film incite responses as diametrically opposed as the new “dark comedy” starring Seth Rogen and Anna Faris, Observe and Report. The controversy stems from a date-rape scene included provocatively in the trailer, which exposed a cultural nerve and got the film noticed, to say the least.
Despite the old adage of all press is good press, the controversy looks like it might have had a negative affect on the box office in this instance. Recent Seth Rogen comedies have done well, including last summer’s Pineapple Express, which opened at $23 million, and 2007’s Superbad and Knocked Up, opening at $33 million and $30 million respectively. But Observe and Report, which got mixed and polarizing reviews, opened at just $11 million and decreased 62 percent in its second weekend.
Read full piece here: Reflections on the Observe and Report Date-Rape Controversy
Bea Arthur died today. Maude was one of the first prime time shows that dealt with the issue of abortion in a feminist way. Here’s a scene from Maude’s Dilemma which aired several months before the passage of Roe v. Wade.
Opening This Week
Treeless Mountain (Film Forum, NYC)
From the press materials: New York filmmaker So Yong Kim draws from her own childhood to tell this gentle and restrained account of two little girls in South Korea. When their mother leaves them to find their estranged father, six-year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are left to live with their neglectful aunt. With only a piggy bank and their mother’s promise to return when it is full, the girls are forced to acclimate to traumatic changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, they eagerly anticipate their mother’s homecoming. But when the bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, their aunt decides that she can no longer care for them and the girls are forced to discover the emotional resources needed to survive.
Films Currently in Theatres
American Violet
The Lemon Tree (NY)
Sunshine Cleaning
Duplicity
Everlasting Moments
Coraline
Pray the Devil Back to Hell- Charlotte, NC
Women Directed Films
Sugar- directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Some interesting things in the works:
Shana Feste (The Greatest) has been hired by Hilary Swank’s 2S Films to adapt the novel “You’re Not You” and direct it for the big screen. The debut novel of Michelle Wildgen, “You’re Not You” is about a dying woman and the younger woman who arrives to take care of her. (HR)
Screenwriter Liz Garcia (“The Necklace”) has been hired to adapt the first book in the series “The Au Pairs,” written by Melissa de la Cruz, for Warner Bros. De la Cruz’s best-selling novels detail the flirty fun of three teenage girls who answer an ad to become au pairs for the summer to a rich family with four kids. Sex, sand and shopping ensue in the Hamptons-set story. (HR)
“Sex and the City” alum Jenny Bicks has been recruited to pen a pilot script for HBO, that is loosely inspired by the Modern Love column in the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section. Pilot will revolve around the fictionalized male editor of the column and his family life as he endures a messy divorce, a strained relationship with his teenage daughter and a difficult return to the world of dating. (Variety)
Debra Messing is back at NBC. The network is in negotiations to pick up a comedy written by The Starter Wife team of Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott. Messing stars as a laid-off CEO who is as ill-prepared to be a full-time wife and mother as her husband is to provide for the family. (HR)
The Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 13th with actresses Isabelle Huppert as the head of the jury and of the 20 films in the official competition only three are directed by women:
Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnold (a teenage girl drama)
Bright Star directed by Jane Campion about the poet John Keats
Map of the Sounds of Tokyo directed by Isabel Coixet
There is only one woman director featured in Un Certain Regard, Mia Hansen-Love for Pere de mes Enfants. Lee Daniels’ Precious (formerly Push) will also play.
Where are the women directors?
This summer as usual is full of big action packed blockbusters AND for the second year in a row (and the last 3 out of 4 years) a Meryl Streep flick. I still wish we would get over the whole counterprogramming and fluke discussion. The thing I love most about this is that Meryl Streep was a movie star who became a box office success. Until a couple of years ago no one thought it possible but this woman who gets nominated for basically everything she is in, can now print dollar bills. In case you care the world wide gross of Mamma Mia! is up to $600 million.
I am more than excited to see Julie & Julia and I have never cooked a french dish in my life. I know very little about Julia Child but I do remember seeing her in passing on PBS when I was a kid. I love the fact that she went to Smith, and was a spy. I also think it’s smart that the movie (written and directed by Nora Ephron) uses Child’s autobiography as well as the memoir Julie & Julia for its basis.
USA Today and EW both help build the anticipation with recent pieces. USA Today calls Streep “the streep-inator” and this is from EW’s summer preview issue:
Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada and last year’s Mamma Mia!, Streep has become the queen of counterprogramming, a box office draw for predominantly female audiences hungry for movies that are pyrotechnics-free. ”It’s completely improbable, and no one in Hollywood can understand it,” says Streep of her newfound bankability. ”Which is so thrilling!” Adds Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal, ”Every now and then, the world rediscovers there’s a female audience — ‘Oh, my God! Women go to the movies!”’
OMG, women go to the movies! Duh! Put August 7 in your calendar now!
Meryl Streep was steeped in Julia Child for ‘Julia’ role (USA Today)
Nora Ephron cooks up a rich stew filming ‘Julie & Julia’ (USA Today)
Julie & Julia Summer Preview (EW)
What is up with these catfight movies? First we had women fighting over a wedding date and now we have Obsessed. Have you the commercials for this? Ali Larter from Heroes stars as an office temp who goes psycho in pursuit of the married to Beyonce Idris Elba. Two beautiful women fighting over a man. Literally fighting and beating each other up. What year is this?
Elba describes watching the two ladies go at it which probably sums up why this movie was made:
“Dude. I said this a few times but, honestly, it’s true,” he says in his sometimes lilting, sometimes rough-edged East London accent. “In one scene, I’m watching Beyoncé and Ali go at it, being catty to each other. . . . ‘Idris, it’s your line.’ ‘Oh, my God, yeah, sorry. Now where am I?’ “
This film is not my cup of tea. One line in the trailer said it all: “A lot of single gals use the workplace as their hunting ground…” Really? That’s why women work? To hunt? I thought it was to pay the rent and mortgage.
Beyonce described making the movie as “fun.” I wonder what the young girls who idolize Beyonce will think when watching this film.
Ugh.
Trouble the Water, the Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath premieres tonight on HBO at 8:30pm. It is a must see.
Here’s an excerpt from my write-up from last summer when the film was released.
“One of the things that is so remarkable about the film is that this was not the film that Deal and Lessin set out to make. They were in the area two weeks after Katrina working on a story about the Louisiana National Guard troops, and into their camera frame walked this amazing force of energy Kimberly Rivers Roberts who told them she had a story to tell. And boy did she. She and her husband Scott lived in the 9th ward just barely getting by surviving by any means necessary. As the storm approached she took out her new video camera that she had used only once before, and this amateur filmmaker with only a single tape and battery was able to record images of Katrina right from the storm’s center.”
Angelina Jolie is teaming up with Patricia Cornwell to play Kay Scarpetta in what will hopefully become a long term franchise says Variety. Women are not known to lead franchises, Jolie had a previous one with Tomb Raider. Other I can think of include, the Twilight books, and I would put Sex and the City into that category.
“Deal is a mega-marriage, with Jolie one of the most bankable female movie stars, and Cornwell one of the biggest selling female authors in the world.”
Columbia Pictures who had the rights since 1992 let them lapse without ever getting anything done and producer Mark Gordon picked them up for Fox 2000 which is ably run by Elizabeth Gabler.
Story says it won’t exactly stick to the book plots ala the Bourne movies but it will be a suspense thriller. This could be really big if a female-led suspense/thriller franchise takes hold.
Story also says that Cornwell wouldn’t do the deal (she really doesn’t need the money) until she met with Jolie and her team to make sure they were on the same page. I’m psyched to finally see Scarpetta on the big screen but still wish that it would have been Kate Mulgrew.
Angelina Jolie teams with Fox 2000 (Variety)
One of the most prestigious literary awards for women just announced its short list and the list is dominated by American women.
The list includes: Samantha Harvey for her first novel The Wilderness;
Marilynne Robinson for Home
Ellen Feldman for Scottsboro;
Samantha Hunt for the Invention of Everything Else;
Kamila Shamsie for Burnt Shadows;
Deirdre Madden for Molly Fox’s Birthday.
The winner will be announced June 3. Adding these to my reading list.
Debut novelist beats Toni Morrison on to Orange prize shortlist (The Guardian)
Orange Women’s Fiction Nominees- long list
Playwright Lynn Nottage won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday for her play Ruined which tells the story of the women of the Congo whose lives have been “ruined” by systemic rape and torture.
Nottage was inspired by Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage to tell the story of women who get forgotten once the headlines cease (if there were any headlines to begin with.) If you want to learn more on the topic check out Lisa Jackson’s documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.
Here’s what Nottage said to the Daily News about her intensions behind the play: “I hope it will raise awareness about the issues that the play raises. The war ended in 2002, but the conflict and violence against women continues.”
She will share part of her prize (which she probably desperately needs since playwrighting is not very lucrative) with the Panzi Hospital in the Congo which performs reconstructive surgeries on rape survivors.
I can’t say it enough- AWARDS MATTER. The Pulitzers and all awards matter to producers and to theatre goers. It’s much easier to produce a play on a difficult topic lie rape in the Congo if it comes with the words “pulitzer prize winning.” And it will be easier for Nottage to get her next play produced because she won the Pulitzer. That just the facts.
This year, interestingly, a woman was going to be honored in this category. The other finalists were Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ In the Heights,(ok the last one was a male-female partnership,but you get the point.)
Laura Collin-Hughes wrote a great piece on why these awards mattered that worth referencing here:
The Pulitzer isn’t important in itself; it matters because of its ripple effect. Quite simply, winners and finalists get noticed. They get produced. The Pulitzer changes the composition of our canon, the stories we as a culture tell ourselves. Women’s voices need to be a much more significant part of that.
And yet most of the time when the lights go down in a theater, we listen to a male playwright — generally a white male playwright — telling a story. Usually, that story is primarily about a man, or men, despite the fact that women are far more likely than men to attend musicals and straight plays.
Take Broadway, for example. A Broadway run — not necessarily a successful run, just a run — is a marker of success that, like a Pulitzer, gets a play produced elsewhere, sometimes all over the world. Broadway is also where the money is in theater, and that’s no small reason artists have it in their sights.
But male writers and composers have a far, far better chance of seeing their names in lights there. Right now on Broadway, an anemic seven out of 37 shows, or 18.9 percent, have female playwrights, book writers, composers or lyricists. One of them is “In the Heights,” with its book by Hudes, who was also a 2007 Pulitzer finalist for her play, “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue.”
In fact, the only current Broadway show that’s wholly written by women is “9 to 5,” which has music and lyrics by Dolly Parton and a book by Patricia Resnick. Yes, French hit-maker Yasmina Reza has a new crowd-pleaser in “God of Carnage,” but her translator, Christopher Hampton (whose own Broadway play, “The Philanthropist,” is in previews), is and has been very much a partner in her English-language success.
Off-Broadway isn’t much better for women, as female playwrights pointed out last fall when they banded together in protest of seriously ugly numbers. According to The New York Times, the women argued “that their male counterparts in the 2008-9 season are being produced at 14 of the largest Off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women are.”
This place where women fill most of the seats, then, is a weirdly blinkered world, its view focused by men. There’s seldom room for plays like “Ruined,” which is largely about the atrocities that happen to women and girls — African women and girls — in wartime. (It’s currently at Manhattan Theatre Club in a production by Kate Whoriskey.) There’s seldom room for plays by women at all. If not for the 2002 Pulitzer, there probably wouldn’t have been much of a welcome on the nation’s stages for Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog.” If not for that year’s shortlist, fewer people would have seen Dael Orlandersmith’s “Yellowman” and Rebecca Gilman’s “The Glory of Living.” But high-profile prizes help immensely.
A Pulitzer Shortlist Bursting With Women! (Yes, It Matters.) (ARTicle- the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program)
Brooklyn writer Lynn Nottage wins Pulitzer (NY Daily News)
Korean Women Filmmakers: A Screening and Discussion with Yim Soon–rye, Film Director, moderated by Yunah Hong, Documentary Filmmaker
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
6:00–6:30 PM * Registration and Reception
6:30–8:30 PM * Discussion
Location: The Korea Society , 950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor (Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)
Women represent only a small minority of the Korean film industry’s behind–the–camera talent, yet they make up an impressive number of the industry’s top filmmakers. Acclaimed director Yim Soon–rye explores the roles that she and her fellow women directors play in the industry in her documentary Keeping the Vision Alive: Women in Korean Filmmaking.
The Women’s Angle, an Atlanta based organization dedicated to get more women in the director’s chair will be screening several shorts at the upcoming Atlanta Film Festival.
A Peacock-Feather Blue will screen April 23 at 7pm
Wheels will screen April 22, 7:00 pm and Thurs., April 23, 4:30 pm
Happy Hour will screen on April 22 at 9:20.
Buy tickets here: Atlanta Film Festival
Premiere of Making Waves, Saving Lives
A film to benefit the organization Dolphin Anti-Rape and AIDS Control Outreach based in Kenya.
Dolphin volunteers travel around to schools in Kenya to teach girls rape awareness and a self-defense called rapid response to build their confidence and equip them with the skills necessary to fight off an attacker. Their great work, dedication and efficiency is an inspiration to organizations everywhere to let love be the backbone of nonprofit work the way they do.
Saturday April 25th
7 pm
Kellen Auditorium, The New School at 66 Fifth Ave (at 13th St). Ground floor
$10 suggested donation
More info: Dolphin Anti Rape
CineWomen On Screen: A NYWIFT Series
Presents “Motherland”
Thursday, April 30th, 8:00pm
Magno Review 1 Screening Room
729 Seventh Avenue, between 48th & 49th Streets
CineWomen On Screen celebrates the work of emerging female filmmakers from all over the world. Films that are included in the series must be directed, co-directed, produced, written, edited or shot by women. Whenever possible, the filmmakers are present for discussion and socializing after their works are presented.
This month’s film is MOTHERLAND, directed by Jennifer Steinman. There will be a Q&A following the screening with the filmmaker, and an after-party to follow. Info on film.
Buy tickets here:
The NY Times had a piece this weekend that echoes my piece in the Guardian last Friday — the double standard for female vs. male actors regarding weight.
It’s pretty simple: Guys can be fat, women cannot.
Here’s what I wrote in The Guardian:
Here we find ourselves in a familiar place of berating a female actor for her skinniness, but isn’t that very skinniness what we demand of them? I challenge you to think of the last Hollywood film where the women looked normal. I guess a better question would be – do we even know what normal looks like any more? Judging by Hollywood standards, I don’t. Thinness is what is expected and demanded of our actors – except when they get too thin, because then they get blasted like Johansson and, recently, Keira Knightley and Jennifer Connelly.
Read the full piece here: Scarlett Johansson takes on Hollywood
From the NY Times:
Based on a close look at trailers, still photos and som
e films already released, at least a dozen male stars in some of the year’s most prominent movies have been adding on the pounds of late.
Hollywood’s women may have weight issues of their own. But it is somehow less noticeable, possibly because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth.
It’s less noticeable not only because heavier actresses have less opportunities, it’s less noticeable because all women have less opportunities.
I love this analysis of why we are accepting of heavier male actors:
The change in smoking habits may have something to do with it. Possibly, too, the audience has grown more tolerant of weightier men on screen as the society at large has become heavier.
Why has the audience grown more tolerant of fatter actors but not fatter actresses. Both women and men in the culture have gotten fatter. According to CNN this morning which did a story on the new airline policy on making heavier people purchase a second seat men have gained 25 pounds over the two decades and women have gained 24 pounds.
While the Times talks about the acceptance of the growing male waistline the story pretty much ignores the double standard for women. More from my Guardian piece:
For another example of the double standard, look at Russell Crowe in the excellent State of Play, which opens this week in the US. The man is not thin, in fact he’s quite portly, yet no one talks about his weight as a career hindrance or a monumental issue. I guarantee that if the genders were reversed and Rachel McAdams’s character was the lead, there would be no way that she would have been cast looking the way that Crowe does.
I say it again, guys can be fat and women cannot.
What’s the Skinny on the Heftier Stars? (NY Times)
Scarlett Johansson takes on Hollywood (The Guardian)
Martha Coolidge
A bunch of high profile female directors (Martha Coolidge, Penelope Spheeris, Catherine Hardwicke, Kimberly Peirce) participated in a symposium at Chapman University in CA this past weekend called Women in Focus. They spoke about the difficulties for women directors.
Here’s what Catherine Hardwicke had to say about her post-twilight world:
There are a zillion movies that you feel a woman should direct…But they’re more than happy to let a guy do it.
Some doors opened post-Twilight:
I got sent a zillion scripts…There’s maybe one out of 500 that I’d like to do, but you’re in competition with Oscar-winning directors for those.
Martha Coolidge has been a truth talker on this issue for some time. She’s one of the women with clout to be honest since she was the head of the DGA. (I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for her since she really has tried to push this issue, and even when she had a position of power things didn’t get better.)
The truth is that there is a permeable wall…We don’t have the club and we don’t have the members that the guys do.
The glass ceiling has become a permeable wall. Now women can’t even see the other side.
I find it hysterical that Penelope Spheeris was thought by Lorne Michaels as not able to direct on her own until her 7th movie the SNL spinoff movie Wayne’s World. The idiots must have thought the film was going to flop cause they gave her 7% of the profits making her a millionaire.
Maybe it will be different for the next generation. Kimberly Peirce is now developing a comedy with Judd Apatow. Hopefully with her at the helm it won’t be the typical Apatow fare and might treat women a little better.
Twilight director still looking for daylight in Hollywood (Orange County Register)
For anyone in the NYC area mark down May 7th in your calendar for
the 4th annual Brooklyn Blogfest. The theme is:
Insight. Advice. Inspiration. Resources.
The main program is: WHY WE BLOG is a panel discussion moderated by BCAT’s Megan Donis and featuring Jake Dobkin of Gothamist, Anne Pope of Sustainable Flatbush, Tracy Collins of Freakin’ Blog and Melissa Lopata of Hip Slope Mama.
I will be participating in one of the breakout sessions, “Blogs of a Feather” in the with other pop culture and comedy bloggers. Blogs of a feather is a chance for to meet and mingle with like-minded bloggers. Notable bloggers from a variety of blog-genres will facilitate these small group sessions as a way for you to network and learn more about various categories of blogging and connect with other bloggers.
Whether you live to blog, blog to live or are just curious about this thing called blogging, you won’t want to miss Brooklyn Blogfest 2009: the best Blogfest yet.
Details:
May 7, 2009
Doors open at 7 p.m.
powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Admission: $10 ($5 for students and seniors)
Brooklyn Blogfest After-Party
Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
(right across the street from powerHouse Arena)
Cash bar and refreshments
More details: Brooklyn Blogfest
Co-posted on wowOwow.com
“Grey Gardens” premieres April 18 on HBO, and before you watch it, read what Executive Producer Rachael Horovitz says about stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, the Kennedy family and the enduring women behind the legacy. Horovitz, whose film-producing credits include the movies About Schmidt, State and Main and Next Stop Wonderland opens up to Melissa Silverstein, wowOwow’s correspondent and founder of the website Women & Hollywood.
MELISSA SILVERSTEIN: You use the Maysles’s 1975 cult documentary “Grey Gardens” as the frame for this version. Can you explain why it was so important?
Rachael Horovitz and Michael Sucsy (writer-director, Grey Gardens)
RACHAEL HOROVITZ: I feel like I was completely raised on that film. My mom had gotten me to see it when it came out and she had a great sense of irony. She passed away over 20 years ago and it was one of these things that we shared. It was completely her idiom, as far as the poetry of it, the humor and the zaniness. And my brothers and I really grew up knowing lines from the movie, and quoting them to one another. The documentary was just a beloved favorite film.
The backstory on this film starts with Michael Sucsy (the film’s director) who had written a script that predated my knowing him. It was a chronological, very rich, very ambitious period piece that started with the ’30s and went in order through Big Edie’s death. It included the full debutante ball, and the Inauguration of JFK in Washington. It would have definitely cost a lot of money. Also [Michael] hadn’t gotten the rights to the documentary, and so his script skirted the documentary. Coincidentally, I was trying to get the rights to the documentary. I knew Albert Maysles and we were talking very seriously about making a deal together to do a film based on the documentary, when I learned about the other project.
MS: OK.
RH: So we decided — in the aftermath of the two Capote films and the terror of having that same experience — to “get married.” I brought the documentary rights and they brought their script and we redesigned his script by patching the documentary into it.
MS: Did you have any intentions of having it be a theatrical release?
RH: Many. That was the plan, but we felt that either way we would be very, very lucky. Unfortunately, the theatrical arm (of HBO), Picturehouse, was shut, as was Warner Independent, which was the in-house Time Warner company. I actually started my studio-career working at Fine Line, which was the precursor to Picturehouse. I definitely brought to this production team almost too much knowledge of how easy it is to flame out in the specialized theatrical market. And I was really, really pushing for making the film with HBO, because I thought that if we did have to give up theatrical, that the trade-off would be fantastic.
MS: That’s very smart.
RH: And probably more people — and this has now become a cliché to say this — but more people would see it on HBO than would see it in five or six art-house cinemas around the country.
MS: What is it about these women that is so endearing?
RH: Well, I don’t know that I can answer it for everyone. But if I answer it for myself maybe it’ll be universal. They really feel like family. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a relative whom they dearly love, who also embarrasses them and who’s painfully at odds with the outside world. And if not a relative, then a friend or an in-law. I think a lot of people relate to this story directly. And while I don’t feel that I relate to it directly, it’s not an accident that my mother adored this movie. She had a lot of the Edies in her. She never had a job. She was a true artist in her soul.
She was incredibly intuitive, verbal and clever, and she was actually a very talented painter. I think that what makes the documentary so irresistible and so memorable is that they’re just completely charming and unique characters. And the words that come out of their mouths are as sophisticated and entertaining as anything in theater — and I go all the way to Shakespeare now.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Rachael Horovitz, Executive Producer of Grey Gardens’
Women & Hollywood: How did you get into acting?
Nicole Beharie: I think it comes from the moving (my father was in the foreign service). I was a bully for a while. I forced my brother to dress up when I was in Orangeburg, SC. That was a bad place and I went to Greenville, SC and the school was awesome but the only way to go there was to have an arts focus so I went there on an acting scholarship and I fell in love.
W&H: How did you get cast?
NB: My agents gave me a stack of scripts and I didn’t take it seriously because they didn’t set up meetings for me. I saw this one and said I want to go in for this. I was moved by it and managed to get in with the casting director for a pre-read and it went well.
W&H: How did you get an agent?
NB: I got the film The Express through my showcase at Julliard.
W&H: Why did this script move you?
NB: Every other script with a young black woman she is dancing or having someone’s kid. This was a hopeful story. Somebody standing up for something. It’s about a woman, a black woman. You don’t really see parts like this for women under 30. I didn’t think I was going to get it. This story is presented in a personal way.
W&H: How do we get people to come and see a movie like this?
NB: Right now there is a lot of escapism but I think we need to ask people to look at what is going on around them with the banks and the drugs. Some things just aren’t working for us and the more we turn a blind eye the more trouble we’re in.
W&H: The poster says: when the laws are without order and justice is hardly just one woman must take a stand. That’s a pretty powerful sentence.
NB: I’m totally intimidated by that poster.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Nicole Beharie- Star of American Violet’
Regina Kelly - photo by John Shearer/WireImage.com
Regina Kelly is real the woman behind the film American Violet. She answered some questions about what it’s like to have a film made of your life.
Women & Hollywood: How did the film get the title American Violet?
Regina Kelly: It started off as American Inquisition. But there is a violet in the film that starts out shiny and bright which represented how my life was before the drug raid and then when I am in jail it the violet looks dead, but I am able to bring it back to life and it shows I am getting my spunk back and how life goes on after all the struggles.
W&H: Your story is incredibly impressive. How did it get made into a movie and is the movie close to your experience?
RK: The film is 98% accurate.
W&H: How does it feel to have a movie about your life?
RK: It’s so overwhelming. Never in a million years could I have imagined that I would be going through this. My main thing is to get the message out there that even though it is my story these are issues that people around the world go through on a daily basis.
W&H: And the message is?
RK: The war on drugs is really the war on minorities and it’s killing us, disrupting homes and taking children away from their parents. We need to start holding people accountable for ruining other people’s lives. If it could happen to me it could happen to anybody. We have to do something to change these laws because it is making it easy for DA’s to ruin our lives.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Regina Kelly, the Woman Behind American Violet’
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