I came across this post from Elizabeth M. Daley the Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts talking about whether Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win will help improve things for women in Hollywood. She’s honest that the numbers are bad, but being in the position of training the future directors, she’s also optimistic that things could change.
Here’s what she writes:
I’m in a unique position to feel very positive about the future of women in the entertainment industry. In fact, were a parent of a prospective female student to ask me, “Should my daughter go to school to study the cinematic arts?”, I would unequivocally, and atop the Hollywood sign if necessary, say “Yes!”
Do you think that parents of young women contemplating going to film school are now! after a woman wins the Oscar saying to their daughters, honey, this might be a bad idea. You might not be able to make a living. I would think that most people who study directing and who want to make films, HAVE to make films. It’s who they are. It’s not like studying to be an account of a lawyer (before the recession.) There are no guarantees even from the best schools.
I’m happy to say that SCA has a 50/50 ratio of women to men for our fall admissions. Despite the disappointing numbers in the Lauzen study, progress has been made, and is continuing to be made. Each year, SCA trains more and more women who will join those already entrenched in the industry, and work to tell stories that resonate with audiences everywhere.
My understanding is that it has been 50/50 for some time. (Does anyone have real numbers?) The issue is not that women are not being trained to be directors cause we know they are, the point is that men get the jobs, get the meetings, get the big movies.
So no matter if they train 50% women or 20% women, if men still get 93% of all the jobs, there is something wrong.
Women In Hollywood – Are The Numbers Changing? (Huffington Post)
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
people who think it’s a bad idea to go to film school, also needs to realize that it’s a bad idea to go to college in general. I have various friends with college degrees (who did NOT study filmmaking or any arts) who are unemployed and have been struggling to find steady jobs.
Going to college, no matter what you plan to study, is always risky.
Hmm. I wonder if Elizabeth Daley has access to the Writers Guild of America West biennial reports that continue to document the difficulties women and various minorities have as script writers, the storytellers alongside the directors: http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/HWR09.pdf http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/hwr09execsum.pdf
There have been women at art schools in a majority for over a generation but my understanding is that their work still gets shown less, reviewed less, and sold and resold for less. My guess is that our numbers at film school have very little relationship with the numbers of films made with the possible exception of documentaries. I’d send my daughter to film school and expect her real—and disillusioning—education to start when she leaves.
USC is priveleged but I think you have to take the rest of the film schools in account through the rest of the country before she published this post that you shared with us. I would like to see those numbers and in what roles those students are. I went back to film school and graduated when I was 40 at CSU Long Beach. The numbers were definitely smaller for women than USC. We had two tracks – Film Production and Film Theory. In my production classes, there were a few women but in Film Theory there were much more. Advanced Cinematography had one.
I think the original post is showing a false hope. Many women intellectuals will read it but be tricked. USC is one school out of thousands and by visiting other film schools, I dont believe this is the case. We think we have achieved equal footing when in reality we have not. I think it is great our leading film school has equal numbers but I would have liked to hear from the rest of the country. In USC, I would like to know after school how many of the women are working vs the men.
In Hollywood, it is tougher getting jobs as a woman and almost impossible a woman in her 40s with diverse experience.
I do recommend going to film school. It is a hard life where you work a lot out of the industry but the jobs I got were very fulfilling. I am slowly working on my own documentary because I realized how tough it is for an older woman in Hollywood.
It would be great if people like Dean Daley would take a leadership role in educating their students’ future employers about issues of diversity and inclusion, and pushing for real change. For aspiring directors, studios/networks often have programs that allow shadowing or mentoring, but few jobs rarely materialize from them. If studios and networks really want to help level the playing field, they need to look at the discriminatory culture that’s baked into their industry and make an effort to remove roadblocks to the employment of qualified women directors.
Unfortunately, but understandably, there are a lot of women or women’s groups in Hollywood who are afraid to push the issue because of fear of retaliation or looking like “whiners.” This is why I think someone, like Daley, from a more neutral position could be successful with encouraging networks, studios and others to look within and make some changes.
I went to an international film school in the Czech Republic two years ago for a semester of intensive production courses. While there, I had fellow students take equipment out of my hands and was told to fold laundry instead. I had to give up crew positions as gaffer and DP because the school scheduled me to be an actress instead. I was asked by a faculty member to post naked for him in order to get a dolly and tracks for a shoot. And I had a male professor tell me not to write comedy because women aren’t funny.
I don’t care how many women they accept to the school. The system is set up to reward men for being men, and assumes women will simply create substandard product. There needs to be an all-female film school, where women can learn the craft from other women in the know – if this exists, tell me! My experience in film school galvanized me; I don’t care who needs to get prodded or yelled at in order for me to get my shoots done. And I can deal with the word “feminazi” being lodged at me, so long as when those idiots are done they can move out of the way so I can get my shot.
My experience at film school was appalling, and I wouldn’t recommend it for women who can’t work while they’re being ridiculed. I’m still trying to find my inroads slowly, and on my own terms, with the help of the women who have come before me. It’s a grim road for female filmmakers. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it all we’ve got.
The women’s film groups get their sponsorship from the corporations who are discriminating, so they really can’t say anything unless they want to risk their financing.
I didn’t go to film school. I honestly think the only reason I made film after film (shorts) was because nobody told me I couldn’t be a director. I was a complete outsider. In my ignorance, I just assumed if I was good I would eventually get hired. Of course I was living in a fantasyland, but I’ve achieved a certain level of competence (and self confidence) in the process. I’ve heard that the young women who go to film school get pushed around by the guys. By the time they graduate, the insidious discrimination pushes them into being producers rather than directors.
I’m not in an actual film school, but a film program at a four-year state college. The program is very new and still gaining students, but just about all of them are in the production specialization, not the critical studies specialization. I’m in the latter and last I heard there were about eight of us– to the best of my knowledge, all of us are female. There are other female students in the production side, but I don’t think any of them are doing much in terms of really directing. They’re mostly in scriptwriting or editing (I think), and they, along with just about everyone else in production, roll their eyes and turn up their noses at the critical studies. Of course everyone’s required to take a theory class and you can just about hear the eyes rolling back in people’s heads when feminist theory comes up. Nobody wants to think about it because they think it’s irrelevant, and this includes a lot of the females in production, too. It’s really frustrating that the people who need to think about this stuff the most are the ones most inclined to ignore or dismiss it. even when statistics about the race and gender of film students and professional filmmakers are brought up, I don’t get the sense that anyone really takes it seriously, like it’s all ancient history, or it won’t apply to them or something. It’s frustrating.
Some truly nice and useful info on this site, too I believe the design has got good features.
You had some nice points here. I done a research on the topic and got most peoples will agree with you
{ 2 trackbacks }