We all know that things suck for a woman wanting to direct films in Hollywood, especially a studio film. So what’s a talented woman director to do while waiting for the gender apartheid to end to make a living? The answer is anything and everything something that actors learned a long time ago.
I just want to give some serious props to Angela Robinson for her honesty in this Variety piece Female Directors on the Hunt for Work. I’ve met Robinson and she’s quite impressive. She’s one of the women who has directed a studio movie — Herbie Fully Loaded before Lindsey Lohan went off the deep end, but it’s been a struggle to get the next film. But she’s an artist full of tons of ideas. So she’s being smart and diversifying. She’s written and directed episodes of the L Word, wrote an comic book, wrote a graphic novel, did a web series, anything and everything to get her work out there.
I don’t feel like you can, as an artist, only make studio movies. What I’m trying to do is so diverse, and I think we all need to work across all the platforms out there now.”
This woman has some serious vision, but she’s not directing films. Here’s could be one reason why:
“I am a woman, I am black, and I am a lesbian, too, so statistically, I am nonexistent!”
“It is pretty brutal out there right now for women. I was incredibly depressed about the Catherine Hardwicke thing with the second ‘Twilight’ movie. I mean, that would have never happened to a guy,” she says of Chris Weitz, and not Hardwicke, helming “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”
“That was really kind of like Prop. 8 for me, where you were just like, ‘What??’ ” Robinson adds, referring to the recent California ban on same-sex marriage. “And while I feel like it is brutal for women out there, I feel like it is bad all around. The industry has really battened down the hatches and is trying to figure out what’s going forward, with so many different media. It’s a really weird, fearful time, in publishing, in Hollywood, in newspapers, everywhere.”
So Hollywood, here’s a woman who knows about comics and graphic novels and stuff you don’t think women get. She’s smart and has directed before. Get it together and frickin give her a job.
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Nice article. Thanks for sharing! I’m currently producing a web series. You have have to work hard to get stories told, but so be it!