Archive for the 'Sexism' Category

I know I beat the drum consistently for Kathryn Bigelow but I want everyone to remember that if, and when she wins, the best director award at the Oscars on Sunday it will be only the beginning.   Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking things are equal just because a single woman wins the award.

There is still so much work to do to improve the situation for other female directors.

Martha Lauzen, the guru of stats from San Diego State U.  for one, won’t let that happen:

Just because you can name four or five women directors doesn’t mean no problem exists. If you don’t think there’s any problem then you’re not going to be looking for a solution. And that perpetuates the status quo.

If Kathryn Bigelow wins, media stories could talk about how everything has changed now and that women are equal. And that would be unfortunate.

We must all be vigilant.

Women Directors Face Celluloid Ceiling (AFP via Yahoo)

If you didn’t know any better after reading this AP article on the Academy’s technical awards you’d think that only men worked in Hollywood. This piece is one of the strangest takes on the industry that I have seen in a while.

Here’s the first line:

Forty-five men you’ve probably never heard of were honored with an Academy Awards ceremony of their own that recognized scientific and technical achievements in moviemaking.

The event awarded the “nerds” of Hollywood, the techies, who are clearly smart, but please don’t tell me that only guys work in this area.

Wouldn’t a better story have been, here we are giving out the technical academy awards and you’d think in 2010 there would be a woman on the winner list. Huh? What’s wrong with this picture?

But no, nobody thinks to ask these questions. So I will. What is wrong with this picture?  How can this be a celebration of anything when only men are recognized?

Motion picture academy honors nerds of filmmaking (AP via Yahoo)

Here’s the poster for the movie Middle Men that Paramount Pictures just picked up starring Luke Wilson, James Caan, Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht.

Here’s the description from Slashfilm:

Middle Men tells the true story of Jack Harris “the straight-laced businessman who helped launch one of the first porn websites” and becomes “caught between the Russian mob, a porn star, the FBI and his family, all while becoming very rich.”

This is wrong on so many levels.

Paramount Buys Middle Man, Watch the Red Band Movie Trailer Now! (Slash Film)

Guess David Letterman is feeling the pressure cause he FINALLY hired a woman writer on his staff.

Her name is Jill Goodwin and she has been on the staff since 2001, started first as an assistant to the executive producers and most recently as a writer’s assistant to the staff.

Here’s what a spokesman said to the NY Times about the promotion:

For some time, Ms. Goodwin has been considered to be next in line for a writing job at “Late Show” as soon as there was an opening.

I want to know exactly what some time is and I want to know if there has not been a single male hired in the time she was “next in line.”  I’m gonna bet that some guys were hired.  If I am wrong I will apologize.

I just think the Ms. Goodwin should be giving my friend Nell Scovell a phone call of thanks cause had she not put herself out there and talked about the Letterman work environment I bet this news would still not have happened.

Additionally, Neely Swanson who did development for David E. Kelley and is now an adjunct professor at USC also counted the pilots for next season.  Here’s what she found:

Of the 66 pilots I documented, 13 pilots had at least one female writer as part of the “created by” team; however, of those 66 pilots, only 7 of them were written entirely by women.  You can do the math yourself, but this works out to a high of 20% involvement by women when writing alone and/or with men; and just 11% when written by women without male participation. A closer look at the all the names will reveal one writer of Hispanic origin, three Asian-Americans and an entire absence of African American writers.

As she says this:

This isn’t a glass ceiling, it’s a White Boys’ Club brick wall.

So all of you who think things are hunky dory out in la la land, really need to get a sense of the reality.

Letterman Show Adds a Female Staff Writer (NY Times)

Women Can’t Create and White Men Can’t Jump (Research Wrap Blog)

It’s not the picture that bothers me (except the women do look really glassy eyed) as much as the tired bullshit teaser heading that accompanies the photo:

Annie Leibovitz photographs the nine dolls on V.F.’s cover, as Evgenia Peretz explains why Anna Kendrick, Kristen Stewart, Carey Mulligan, et al. are nobody’s playthings.

DOLLS?  Seriously? WTF?

These are talented women!  If that was a headline on a picture I was in, I would be mortified.  I want to know who wrote that and if they really thought the word DOLL made sense.  All the editors should be ashamed.

I swear every time we make a big leap forward a la Bigelow’s DGA win, there is someone with a pitchfork ready to put us back in our places.

Use this link to send a letter to the editor telling him what you think.

To the anonymous stylist who said this about Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and her dress:

“You don’t put a big girl in a big dress. That’s rule number one.”

FUCK YOU!

This woman is perfectly shaped!  There is nothing big about her!

I hate you and I don’t even know who you are.

After reading Manohla Dargis’ piece in the New York Times and her subsequent interview with Jezebel.com, I felt the need to write the following open letter to the heads of all the feature film studios in the United States.

Dear Sirs (+ the one madam co-chair):

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Ashley, I am one of your customers. One of your 51 percent, to be exact. Ironically, I’m also on the cusp of two age brackets that seem to allude you. Being 28 years old, I’m just edging past your “Twilight” audience and will soon hit your 35+ when-its-a-hit-it-must-be-a-fluke audience. Not only am I one of your customers, but I also happen to be one of you, albeit a very low-level one of you. I feel this puts me in a unique situation, I know your audience because I am your audience; AND, because I’m somewhat of an insider, I’ve struck upon a solution to your problem. A solution that will make you even more money than you’re making now. I’m talking Twilight, The Dark Night, and Mamma Mia kind of money. Believe-it-or-not, it’s not as hard as you think and it’s actually something you know how to do already: make movies. But not just any movies; movies that 51 percent of your audience can relate to and which feature the work of those members of our 51 percent who make their careers in feature film.

Don’t get me wrong, I know you get cross-over audiences. I’m just as likely to see a romantic comedy as I am the next Bourne movie, but I’m even more likely to see a Bourne movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow. I’d probably even go back for seconds if you decided to expand Julia Stiles’ character or give Joan Allen’s more of a back story. Like Bourne, I want to know what taunts them, what makes them tick and what makes them want to find Jason Bourne (because, let’s face it, it’s beyond just their professional duty at this point).

I like stories with style and substance, but I also like action, chase scenes and even my fair share of violence. My favorite movie is “The Silence of the Lambs.” “SOTL” is a great example of how to make a movie that grabs 100 percent of your adult audience: follow the hero’s journey. In this case, the hero just happens to be a 5′ tall heroine and her unlikely leading man is a serial killing cannibal. There’s blood, guts, gore and most importantly, STORY. Both men and women alike invest in these characters because we learn what makes them tick. But women have an extra investment in this particular story (this is the reason why we go back to see it again, recommend it to our friends, buy it, download it, etc.) we see ourselves up on the screen, a lone woman among men in an elevator. Every woman has experienced that moment, just as every woman’s secret desire (like Agent Starling’s) is to save the world.

I also like my romantic comedies to be smart. Don’t get me wrong, I like to see pretty things and pretty people on a screen, but I’m not an idiot either. I’d trade in a beautiful set and a character’s designer wardrobe for a really good story. Make more movies like “When Harry Met Sally.” Those characters had a story and they had great conversations about things we all discuss at dinner parties or over the phone with friends. Many elements of the script came from actual conversations between Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron. And guess what? That movie appealed to men as well. Why? Two reasons: 1) They saw themselves in Billy Crystal: he is the every man and he got the girl; 2) Insight into women. Yes, we sometimes fake orgasms. Now you know.

The “Buddy Movie” (now recoined as the “Bromance” or “A Judd Apatow”) We, the 51 percent of your audience, have only one of these movies to stick a flag in and call our own: “Thelma and Louise.”  This movie was made in 1991. Oh, wait, there was another female buddy movie! In 2002, producer Cathy Konrad put out a hilarious flick (penned by Nancy Pimental) called “The Sweetest Thing.” I was in college. I saw it two times on opening weekend with seven other female friends. It still remains the closest we’ll ever get to “The Hangover” for women. Speaking of which, if  ”The Hangover” was pitched with an entirely female cast, it would never have gotten made. Though I have no doubt there would have been an audience for it — made up of both genders.

The drama (aka “The Oscar movie” or “The Meryl Streep”). In their current state, these movies have a slightly better shot at appealing to me and my fellow 51 percenters because they feature more screen time for women (usually women who can no longer wrinkle their foreheads, but that’s a different letter for another day). The funny thing about these movies is that they’re rarely directed and/or written by women. Though I love men who can write wonderful parts for women (hello, Michael Cunningham), they are not women, and, as such, they will always leave the character with an unexplored territory. It’s one thing for a woman to be mysterious, but another thing to leave 51 percent of us knowing there is so much more to the story that needs to be told. “The Hours” has a great scene which touches upon this, when Clarissa Vaughn talks to her daughter about a moment in her youth:

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.”

Contained within those lines are two potential movies for two generations of women, “the sense of possibility” movie, reaching audiences from their late teens – 30s, and “the moment looking back” movie, for the 40/50/60 female audience. I want to know what that woman sees as both a 20-something and then as a 50-something woman. Romantic comedies offer shades of these moments as well, though they are even fewer and farther between.

I believe women go to rom coms and dramas because they crave any glimmer of seeing their lives reflected back at them, no matter how fleeting of a moment it may be. We women store up a mosaic of these moments and play them back in our minds when we need them. A “greatest hits” if you will. They are our touchstone, our reminder that we are seen, we are remembered; we do serve a purpose. But wouldn’t it be even better if we didn’t need a highlights reel? If the marquee at our local theaters advertised movies where we saw ourselves and our husbands/boyfriends/friends/girlfriends/teens depicted by someone like us who knows the way we think, the way we see, who gives us not “women’s movies” but movies from our perspective? And, maybe even a woman who gives us male viewpoints just as dramatically or funny as the Michael Manns or Judd Apatows of the world, but from a fresh perspective.

I am one of your 51 percent. And, I am also your colleague. I want to see a reflection of myself on a screen just as much as I want to see my name in the credits. I am a part of both sides of this letter. And, I will keep moving forward both from my seat and on a set, until my voice is heard. Because when it finally is, there will be 51 percent of the world’s population behind it. I hope you start listening.

Ashley Van Buren is a Manhattan-based film production freelancer and writer. She has worked in feature film development & production (with some side trips into television writing) for ten years. Her most recent production job was on the Nancy Meyers movie, “It’s Complicated.”  This piece was originally posted on The Brow.

I didn’t think I could love Manohla Dargis anymore after her awesome piece in the NY Times this weekend, but this honest and angry interview with Jezebel made me swoon with excitement.

We never, ever see a person of Dargis’ stature standing up for women in the film business in this public manner.  I really hope that she is the first to speak out, not the last.  But more importantly, we need to figure out how to get things to change so we have more good women’s films and opportunities for women directors.

But this is an awesome start.

Kudos to the women from Jezebel, in particular Irin Camron for getting this interview.  It totally rocks!

Some choice quotes:

On why women in Hollywood aren’t faring any better: This business is really about clubby relationships. If you buy Variety or go online and look at the deals, you see one guy after another smiling in a baseball cap. It’s all guys making deals with other guys. I had a female studio chief a couple of years ago tell me point blank that she wasn’t hiring a woman to do an action movie because women are good at certain things and not others. If you have women buying that bullshit how can we expect men to be better?

Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

You can be a male filmmaker and if you’re perceived as a genius – a boy genius or a fully-formed adult genius – that you are allowed to fail in a way that a woman is not allowed to fail.

On women being taken seriously as moviegoers: It’s a vicious cycle. We’re not going to movies because there aren’t movies for us. Therefore we’re not seen as a loyal moviegoing audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…

That’s why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City’s a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what’s going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We’re 51 percent of the audience.

I don’t want to be the woman critic. I don’t want to be the feminist critic. I don’t want to be the shrew. What I want to do is talk about the art that I love and point out, every so often, inequities….It’s a weird balancing act and I’m not saying there aren’t contradictions.

Re-reading the piece again this morning is actually making me cry with relief.  Finally.  It’s like the rose color glasses are off and the boxing gloves are on.

Game on Hollywood!

You must read the whole piece: “Fuck Them”: Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck (Jezebel)

By now everyone has seen the Manohla Dargis’ piece in the NY Times Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera which is a solid but late to the party piece about how even though women are buying tickets they still have few opportunities to direct.  I guess people care more about the lack of directors this year because a) women are actually making a difference at the box office and must be reckoned with, and b) for the first time a woman could potentially take home the best director statuette at the Oscars.

It’s not news to me or anyone who reads this site that women have been full and equal participants at the box office buying 50% of the tickets (according to MPAA stats).  And according to a piece in The Wrap last week, women won the battle at the box office this year, Look Who’s Winning the B.O. Battle of the Sexes:

“This is the year of the woman,” Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst with Hollywood.com, told TheWrap. “Female stars or female-driven movies have been unexpectedly dominant. I mean, Meryl Streep is just as vital today as ever.”

But here is where the disconnect comes in.  Women buy tickets, yet still don’t get directing gigs.  As Dargis writes:

Women need to develop their own muscles.  I’m not talking about those buff babes who pop up in adolescent fantasies, licking their lips as they lock and load; I’m talking about movies made for and with women. I’m also talking about movies directed by women.

Why is it so hard for women to get the gigs?  Women spend the money to go to film school and want to direct, yet for reasons that no one has really figured out how to assess (because hardly anyone will talk on the record about it) women do not get the big studio directing gigs.  They just don’t.  You can blame it the old boy’s club.  You can say that men don’t want to see the type of movies women direct.  You can call it whatever you want.  But to me it’s plain old bullshit sexism.  For some reason the studio executives — male and female — don’t want to buy what women have to sell.

If we as women (and men) went out and supported films like Whip It the studios would make more of them.  Nobody went to see Whip It which was an awesome film.  We can blame that on marketing issues but if we don’t go see the good films by women the studios won’t make them.  It’s really simple and yes it is a double standard.  We need to support films by women more than we need to support the film by men.  That’s just the way it is.

Here are some more of the depressing stats:

Of the almost 600 new movies that will be reviewed in The New York Times by the end of 2009, about 60 were directed by women, or 10 percent.

Of the major and mini major studios, here’s what women have directed in 2009:
20th Century Fox: Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama) and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (Betty Thomas)
Fox Searchlight: Amelia (Mira Nair), Post Grad (Vicky Jenson) and Whip It (Drew Barrymore)
Disney: The Proposal (Anne Fletcher)
Sony: Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron)
Sony Pictures Classics: An Education (Lone Scherfig), Coco Before Chanel (Anne Fontaine) and Sugar (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck).
Universal Pictures: It’s Complicated (Nancy Meyers)

Miramax Films, Focus Features, Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures released no films directed by a woman.

Look Who’s Winning the B.O. Battle of the Sexes (The Wrap)

Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera (NY Times)

Here’s what she had to say about her great year:

“Sexism is everywhere. Ageism is everywhere. But you know know what? It’s about making money. Look at what Sarah Jessica Parker did with Sex and the City. Look at what Meryl Streep is doing” — she pauses to laugh — “every other week! The proof is in the pudding. I didn’t have the ‘Oh my God, I’m not working because I’m 40.’ I was working when I was 40. I’ve never had this many opportunities in my lifetime.”

Magazine hits the newsstands today.

Sandra Bullock Soars (EW)

I don’t know about you but I wear Victoria’s Secret underwear.  I wear the regular kind not the stuff featured in this stupid, sexist ridiculous ad made by Michael Bay that looks like a sexed up version of Bad Boys.

But I have to say that it is making me think twice about giving my money to them.  See Victoria’s Secret is a store that makes all its money from women (and guys buying gifts for women.)  Yet, they hire a man who is notorious for objectifying women to direct a commercial that highlights the underwear that no woman with any type of real body can ever wear.

Not cool.

Warning- you will be very angry after watching.

h/t Sarah Fain

I saw this when I was walking down the street in NYC last week.

Do I need to say any more? God, I hate David Mamet.

Now that we are about to enter 2010 everyone is looking back on the last decade and compiling lists upon lists.  Here’s a list that caught my attention, The Hollywood Reporter’s Top Ten Movies of the Decade and not surprisingly, there is not a single female directed film on the list.  You can tell from the list that it was not a US based list so that opens is up much wider.  I seriously cannot believe that a single woman directed film in the last decade is not worthy of being on this list.

Here’s the list that was published (FYI- there is no information on how the list was compiled)

1- Letters from Iwo Jima

2-United 93

3- No Country for Old Men

4- The Fog of War

5- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

6- Far From Heaven

7- Divine Intervention

8- Cache

9- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

10- The White Ribbon

So my question is, what women directed films do you think should be included on this list?

The message we always hear is sex sells, especially at the movies.  A new report Sex Doesn’t Sell — Nor Impress by Anemone Cerridwen and Dean Keith Simonton refutes that claim.  The report studied 914 mainstream Hollywood films(and their box office domestically and overseas, critical appraisal and awards)  from 2001-2005, and found that in contrast to most of the Hollywood thinking “sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim, or win major awards.”  The study was recently published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts journal.

Well, that sure throws a wrench into the conventional wisdom which has been that sex, sexuality and nudity are vital for box office success.  Yet, according to Simonton preconceived notions are hard to break even with data:

…I was struck by how hard it is to overcome preconceptions about the box-office consequences of highly graphic sexual content…

It seems that this whole thing was started by the righteous anger of a woman, the co-author Anemone Cerridwen who, when taking acting classes felt that the type of roles women she had to play made her very uncomfortable.  (Guess it’s a good thing she became a researcher and left the acting to others.)  But still, she wanted to know what the story was, why women’s roles are so sexualized, and spent many years crunching numbers.

Here’s her analysis (h/t to Katherine Monk CanWest News Service)

When I first saw the averages, I was really surprised, and mad, too. I felt like I’d been had…I realize that many people think it’s harmless, but I see it as sexual harassment of talent…It also is often just plain sexist, holding up women (and leading men) as objects to be consumed rather than people.”

I think it reflects and reinforces sexism in society, in general. Even if the performer genuinely doesn’t mind having to do this stuff as a condition of employment, it creates a hostile environment for the rest of us: other women on camera, behind the camera, in acting classes, plus women, in general.

It would be smart if the researchers got their material to Hollywood producers.  But then I bet lots of them don’t really care.  It will take a lot more than a report from an American Psychological Society journal to convince them the tits and ass don’t help box office grosses.

Bare Breasts Don’t Beget Boffo Box Office (Miller-McCune)

Sex doesn’t sell in mainstream cinema, study says (CanWest News Service)

I guess I should thank the Hollywood Reporter for making my job easy this week by providing me with such blatantly sexist material.

They posted their conversation with cinematographers and SURPRISE there is not a single woman included.

I know that they do these around awards season and NOT A SINGLE WOMAN has ever been nominated for the best cinematographer award but you cannot tell me that The Box is in contention for any type of award.

Beyond pathetic.

Awards Watch: Cinematographers Roundtable (Hollywood Reporter)

The Writers Guild of America West has released its most recent report on the status of women and people of color in Hollywood and just like the report of two years ago (and the ones before) women seem to be making no traction.  In fact, in movies, it’s getting worse.

Here’s from the introduction:

The 2009 Hollywood Writers Report updates an all-too-familiar story about the challenges faced by diverse writers on the employment and earnings fronts.

The previous report — released in 2007 by the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW)
– found that business-as–usual industry practices resulted in virtually no progress for
women and minority writers.  Indeed, these writers had actually gone backwards in some
areas relative to their male and white counterparts since the Guild’s 2005 report. The
2007 report thus called for “rethinking business as usual” in the industry, which would
include establishing “clear goals, reasonable timetables and effective mechanisms” for
diversifying access to writing opportunities.

Despite this clarion call, the present report finds little if any improvement in the
employment and earnings of diverse writers in the Hollywood industry.  White males
continue to dominate in both the film and television sectors.  Women remain stuck at 28
percent of television employment and 18 percent of film employment.  The minority
share of film employment has been frozen at 6 percent since 1999, while the group’s
share of television employment actually declined to 9 percent since the last report.
Although women and minorities closed the earnings gaps with white men in television a
bit, the earnings gaps in film grew.

The stats:

Women hold just 25% of all the writing jobs.  TV jobs make up 28%, and film jobs make up 19%.

Earnings: There is an over $5,000 earnings gender gap in TV and almost $42,000 in film.  This is the widest margin in years.

So people, men make $42,000 more per year than women.  How fucked up is that!  For every $100 a male screenwriter makes, a woman makes $58.  That’s higher than the overall gender earnings gap.

The previous Hollywood Writers Report noted that while women writers had made considerable strides in television earnings, they appeared to be going backwards in film earnings.  The current report suggests that these trends continue to hold for women writers relative to their white male counterparts.

As the steam was coming out of my ears, I emailed a few questions to Kim Myers, the director of diversity at the WGAW answered some questions about the data.  (Keep in mind that the data is through the end of 2007 and that women of color are in both the women’s number and the minority numbers.)
Women & Hollywood:  Why do you think that women film writers are losing ground?

Kim Myers: Although this is somewhat anecdotal, in conversation with women screenwriters most attribute this fact to the type of films that are being developed at the studios.  The emphasis is on tentpole movies and franchises – many of which are comic book or graphic novel adaptations.  Action is the main focus of these movies.  While there are many women screenwriters who have written and continue to write action movies, this is often seen as the province of male writers.  With that in mind, it could be the reason women screenwriters are getting fewer jobs – and being paid less because they are not being hired to write the “Big Movies”.

Continue reading ‘Still Sucks to Be a Female Writer in Hollywood’

What’s wrong with this picture?

This is getting a little pathetic.  Hollywood Reporter, you are now 2 for 2 for excluding women from your year end roundtables. Please don’t tell me there was no woman to include.  I don’t believe you.

Awards Watch: Writers Roundtable (Hollywood Reporter)

This is just another reason why I have such trouble with the NY Times reviews.   A.O. Scott put his subjective look at the “great” films from 2000 to now, and not surprisingly, only a lone female filmmaker (Claire Denis), and not one female centric film are mentioned in his list.

Sigh.

Women get no respect in Hollywood and from the NY Times, as Scott mentions at the end of his piece:

Movies seem to be, increasingly, for and about men and (mostly male) kids, with adult women in the marginal roles of wives and mothers, there to be avenged, resented or run to when things get too scary.

The piece had a lot of opportunities to include women.  While he talked about comedies he could have mentioned Nicole Holofcener’s films which have true and original womens voices in them.  I also think that Kelly Reichardt has a very original and interesting voice.  And that’s just off the top of my head.

What movies by women over the last decade would you include?

It is incumbent upon the NY Times to see the bigger picture beyond the typical names that we always here or else they are dooming us to fulfilling the prophecy of having fewer and fewer woman on screen, and quite frankly that would be a full-fledged cultural disaster.

Screen Memories (NY Times)

Jeers to the Hollywood Reporter for convening a year end discussion with high-profile producers round-table without a SINGLE WOMAN!  Please don’t tell me a single female producer was not available.

Here are two points, from the conversation of note:

Laurence Mark: on How Julie & Julie got made:

Mark: “Julie & Julia” happened, without question, because of Meryl Streep. We all know it, Meryl knows it, Sony is certainly happy to say it.

And Ivan Reitman talking about casting Vera Farmiga and the discussion he had with his son writer/director Jason.

I’d say the biggest disagreement we had was over Vera Farmiga, who is a wonderful actress but she was eight months pregnant about two months before he started shooting. He said “Look, I wrote it for her, I think she’ll be perfect.” And she was as big as a house! As a producer, I have to say to him, “I know she’s a great actress, she’s going to be great in it, but she’s got to be someone George Clooney is going to fall in love with.” There were all kinds of actresses who wanted to play this part, bigger names than Vera was at that moment, so I kept saying, “Well, how about her?” But he just hung in there. I had to really defend his decision, and I know he agonized about it enormously. There were a couple rough opening scenes — first days — that he reshot at the end of the schedule to give her a little more time to get into shape. Apart from that, there was really no downside.

Thank goodness Jason stuck to his guts.

And our second jeer of the day goes to CNN and this story, When Actresses Turn Ugly which is basically about the fact that Mariah Carey wore no makeup for her part in Precious.  How does wearing no makeup make you ugly?  Unacceptable.

Awards Watch: Producers Roundtable (Hollywood Reporter)

When Actresses Turn Ugly (CNN)

Marsha Norman is one of our best known female playwrights.  Her play ‘night Mother won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, and she has also written the book for the musicals The Secret Garden and The Color Purple.

She recently went out on a limb and talked about the gender inequity in the theatre world.  This piece, Not There Yet, was published in American Theatre and is now online and must be read.

It takes a lot of guts to stand up and call a spade a spade.  While this piece might just be about theatre in particular, it reflects the wider problem.  Norman challenges the literary departments, the artistic directors, the funders, the critics, the newspapers who employ the critics and the writers themselves to do things differently, to think about this as a crisis, to make change before things get even worse.

Here’s her challenge to women writers:

As women writers, we must demand the best of ourselves. We must travel and learn and listen. And then we must claim our place on the American stage. We have to be more aggressive in this regard and help each other more than we have, and not just side with the boys because we expect them to win.

I love her call to claim our place on the American stage.

Here are some choice quotes (I could quote the whole piece it’s that good):

Discussing the status of women in the theatre feels a little like debating global warming. I mean, why are we still having this discussion? According to a report issued seven years ago by the New York State Council on the Arts, 83 percent of produced plays are written by men—a statistic that, by all indications, remains unchanged. Nobody doubts that the North Pole is melting, either—we see it on the news. These are both looming disasters produced by lazy behavior that nobody bothered to stop. End of discussion. What we have to do in both cases is commit to change before it is too late.

We have a fairness problem, and we have to fix it now. If it goes on like this, women will either quit writing plays, all start using pseudonyms, or move to musicals and TV, where the bias against women’s work is not so pervasive.

This past season, theatres around the country did six plays by men for every one by a woman, and a lot of theatres did no work by women at all, and haven’t for years. And as the writing has disappeared, so have roles for actresses and jobs for costume designers and directors. It doesn’t take an economist to draw a conclusion here. Either women can’t write, or there is some serious resistance to producing the work of women on the American stage.

The problem is not that women can’t write. (my bold)

This is my favorite part:

This brings us to the final group that has been blamed for the underrepresentation of women in the theatre—the playwrights themselves. Women’s plays are boring, people say. They have too much talk and there’s no event. They choose “soft” subjects and aren’t aggressive enough about promoting themselves and their work.

The critics have liked my “guy” plays—the ones with guns in them—and pretty much trashed the rest. Seven of the nine plays I have written go virtually unperformed. Thank God I had the sense to write for television and film and write books for big musicals, so I could get health insurance, feed my family and can now afford to teach.

Are those other seven plays of mine worse than Getting Out and ‘night, Mother? Well, how would you know? You haven’t seen them. They are perceived to be “girl plays,” concerned with loss and death, love and betrayal, friendship and family. But no guns.

Are you with me here? There’s no such thing as a girl play. But the girl’s name on the cover of the script leads the reader to expect a certain “soft” kind of play. I don’t get this. Lillian Hellman did not write girl plays. Neither did Jean Kerr or Lorraine Hansberry or Mary Chase.

The expectation of soft work from women writers comes from something way more awful in the society—the commercial romantic idea that all female stuff is soft, an advertising idea. Buy these products and you will have soft hair, soft skin and a soft voice. Unfortunately for writers, soft is perceived as playful and decorative and insignificant, not worthy of our time. We don’t like soft in this country—we like hard here. Hard guy stuff, like in guy plays.

The problem is—and I say this having seen what feels like thousands of them—plays by men are not more violent or more active or smarter or raunchier or more tragic or more anything than plays by women. But plays by men are expected to be better even before they are seen, even before they are read—even, yes, before they are written. This is bias, pure and simple. And we also don’t like bias in this country, so it’s time to stop thinking this way. Women’s plays are written by women, that is all.

To me this is the kicker.  “Plays by men are expected to be better.”

Women’s plays, ones that might not conform to the male norm of what a play is supposed to be, are deemed soft or maybe a better word for that is girly or pink.  It’s like the whole issue with the chick flick.  Women’s work, and women in general, are perceived to be “lighter.”  Lots of women do have smaller bodies but that doesn’t mean we are lighter or like pink any better than gray or green.

To me this is the fundamental issue.  How we perceive women’s and men’s experiences.  Why is a man’s experience or opinion any more important than a woman’s?  That my friends is why we fight the feminist fight day in and day out.

Not There Yet (American Theatre)