ALL POSTS
Weekly Update for February 28: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Bottled Up — Written and Directed by Enid Zentelis In this modern day drama, Oscar-winner Melissa Leo beautifully conveys the heart-wrenching struggle that comes...
VIDA Count: Literary Sexism Persists in Book World, but Less at NY Times
Anyone familiar with bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner’s multi-pronged campaign against sexism in the book world knows that literary chauvinism is alive and well. The fifth annual VIDA Count,...
The Oscars’ Giant Gender Gap Isn’t Closing
Progress is all around us: there are more women than men in college, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire all over America and Europe, and black and Latino and Asian firsts (and seconds and...
TV: Trailer Watch: Emily Mortimer’s New HBO Sitcom About Female Friendship
Emily Mortimer has been badly disserved by The Newsroom, a show full of female characters who are little more than incompetent dingbats, and whose character MacKenzie’s entire existence revolves...
How the Demise of the Romantic Comedy Will Affect Women
Writer Amy Nicholson takes a hard look at the death of a genre — the romantic comedy — in her fantastic LA Weekly piece “Who Killed the Romantic Comedy?” Let’s keep in mind that...
Paramount to Distribute Ava DuVernay’s Selma
Director Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic Selma just got a big boost through a distribution deal with Paramount. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, Selma will be the third narrative feature...
The Big O: Who Will Win the Oscars This Sunday — And Who Should
As Oscar watchers count down the minutes to the 86th edition of the Academy Awards this Sunday, those of us who care about promoting women in the film industry have several reasons to count our...
Study Finds Lead Actresses Get Less Screen Time Than Lead Actors
Pop Quiz: When is a lead actress not the center of her film? If you guessed “when she’s in Hollywood,” you’d be right. The New York TImes published a study of the “screen time gap”...
Sally Potter on the Cast Iron Ceiling for Women Directors
In preparation for a career retrospective next month at the Bradford International Film Festival and the publication of her book Naked Cinema, Sally Potter answered some questions for the Guardian...
Women and Girls Lead Launches Online Film Fest #SheDocs for Women’s History Month
In celebration of March and Women’s History month, Women and Girls Lead has partnered up with Eileen Fisher to roll out the second annual #SheDocs, an online film festival featuring twelve...
Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Wins Blackburn Prize for Chimerica
British playwright Lucy Kirkwood has been announced as the winner of this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which “recognizes women who have written works of outstanding quality for the...
Viola Davis to Star in Shonda Rhimes’ Next Show
The return of Scandal tomorrow night after a three-month hiatus isn’t the only good news to come out of Shondaland. Oscar-nominated actress Viola Davis (The Help, Prisoners) has signed on to star...
March 2014 Film Preview
This year’s March Madness comes courtesy of the Veronica Mars movie, which will receive a day-and-date release on March 14. Kristen Bell’s noir detective, now a decade out of high school,...
TV: Jamie Lee Curtis Heads to CBS
Jamie Lee Curtis’ most recent roles have been on Fox’s New Girl (playing Zooey Deschanel’s mom) and CBS’ NCIS (playing Mark Harmon’s love interest), so it makes sense that the Freaky...
Infographic: The Diversity Gap in the Academy Awards
It’s never been easy to take the Oscars seriously, but it gets harder each year, especially as the Academy stays white and male while the rest of America (and indeed, the international moviegoing...
Trailer Watch: Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love
Girls and women begin their sexual lives in as many ways as there are girls and women, so any filmic depiction of burgeoning female sexuality that doesn’t take place in a softly lit...
TV: 5 Reasons to Watch HBO’s Just Renewed Getting On
HBO finally showed the terrifically unsentimental hospital sitcom Getting On some tender, loving care last week by renewing it for a second season. The network had previously disserved its most...
Women and the Oscars 2014
It’s Oscar week and on the surface this year feels different. Ellen DeGeneres will host the ceremony, and while I’m sure she will be biting, I doubt that I’m going to feel the need to take a...
TV: Jennifer Lopez to Headline NBC Cop Drama Shades of Blue
Jennifer Lopez doesn’t get enough credit for her reinventions. Since the early 1990s, the former Fly Girl has tried on as many showbiz hats as Madonna: fashion icon, Latin ingenue, pop star,...
Kristen Bell Scores First Victory in Fight Against “Pedorazzi”
Back in the spotlight for the March 14 release of Veronica Mars, Kristen Bell has used the extra media attention to campaign against “pedorazzi,” the term she’s given photographers who attain...
NAACP Awards: Black Women Creators Thrive in TV
When the NAACP Image Award nominations unwittingly exposed the film industry’s continued hostility to black women earlier this year, no one could claim surprise. At this weekend’s NAACP awards...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Feo Aladag
Writer-director Feo Aladag’s In Between Worlds was one of four German films to compete for the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. The Vienna-born filmmaker has been a European director to...
Statistics
Statistics on the State of Women and Hollywood FILM2015 Women Behind the Scenes Women comprised 19% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working...
Weekly Update for February 21: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (doc) — Directed by Chiemi Karasawa Elaine Stritch is one of the most entertaining women in show business, both on stage and off. Chiemi...
SXSW’s New Gamechanger Award to Help Fund Women-Directed Films
Men and women may enter film school at the same rate these days, but 90–95% of the directing jobs in Hollywood still go to male filmmakers. Gamechanger Films is one of the many players trying to...
Helen Mirren to Play Nazi-Stolen Art Recoverer in The Woman in Gold
Just last month, we called attention to the erasure of women that George Clooney commits in his historical romp The Monuments Men, which follows (pretty much only) the men who endeavored to recoup...
A Third of New Directors/New Films FF Lineup Directed by Women
Nine emerging female helmers will have their works featured at the 43rd New Directors/New Films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Women-directed films...
Tina Fey to Produce and Star in Black Comedy About War
Tina Fey isn’t one to play it safe, so it isn’t a total surprise that she’ll next focus her lovably acerbic wit on mining humor from war. Fey will produce and star in the black comedy Taliban...
Helen Mirren Speaks Out Against Rise of Dead Women on TV
I’ve been catching up on Twin Peaks for the past few months, and it’s been fascinating to see how heavily David Lynch’s 1990–1991 series still influences today’s TV landscape. The show’s...
Meryl Streep to Join Carey Mulligan in Suffragette
Meryl Streep, who recently outed herself and her friend Emma Thompson as “rabid, man-hating feminist[s],” has signed on to play British feminist icon Emmeline Pankhurst in the Sarah...
TV: Lisa Edelstein, Janeane Garofalo to Star in Marti Noxon’s New Bravo Series
Is the Real Housewives’ reign of terror finally over? Bravo has greenlit its first scripted program, an hour-long dramedy from Glee and Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Marti Noxon called...
The Big O: In Praise of the 10 Actress Nominees
It is all too easy at this late point in the Oscar season to only focus on the shifting standings in the 24 categories and to ignore the big picture of what this collection of contenders actually...
TV: Prime Suspect Prequel Headed to Bookstores and ITV
Writer Lynda LaPlante has announced she’s bringing back her biggest hit, Prime Suspect, as a prequel. The seven-season crime series made Helen Mirren a household name and a Hollywood movie star...
Trailer Watch: Halle Berry in Frankie and Alice
The story of Frankie and Alice’s long road to theaters is nearly as hardscrabble as the life of its protagonist. Or is that protagonists, since Halle Berry plays an eager-to-please lap-dancer and...
Feminist of the Day: Olivia Wilde
Need a reminder of the awesome and awful power of Hollywood? In a panel called the “State of Female Justice,” actress Olivia Wilde shares a story about being recognized while “on a camel in...
Six Women-Directed Projects to be Funded by Tribeca Film Institute
Concussion director Stacie Passon, TV writer Colette Burson, and documentarians Heather Courtney and Anayansi Prado were among the filmmakers chosen to participate in the Tribeca Film Institute’s...
The Web is a Great Place for Women
Leena Pendharkar: I moved to LA in 2005, armed with severalfeature-film screenplays like any other aspiring writer. But I learnedsomething really strange once I got here: Hollywood isn’t always...
Special Report: Women Directors in January 2014
While Frozen continues its box-officedominance (with over $360 million in domestic grosses and a new sing-along version intheaters), the Mickey Mouse short that accompanies it, “Get a Horse!,”...
TV: Octavia Spencer, JoAnna Garcia Swisher to Headline New Shows
Angela Lansbury may have put the kibosh on the Murder, She Wrote reboot, but Octavia Spencer won’t be kept from TV. The Oscar-winning Fruitvale Station co-star has signed up for Fox’s hospital...
Five Women Directors Win at Berlinale
Representing five countries on three continents, a quintet of female filmmakers won honors at the 2014 Berlinale but none in the main competition section. Australian Sophie Hyde took home the...
Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken Gets Olympic Preview
Angelina Jolie’s Christmas 2014 release Unbroken looks like it will be the highest-profile woman-directed picture since Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The Louis Zamperini biopic got a...
Ellen Page Comes Out, Will Play Julianne Moore’s Lesbian Partner in Freeheld
I don’t know what your weekend was like, but in my corner of the universe, there was only two things anyone wanted to talk about: the godawful weather and Ellen Page’s touching coming out at a...
Frozen, Gravity, and Philomena Win at BAFTAs
With so few women-directed films and women-penned screenplays in the running, this awards season doesn’t have much to offer those looking to increase female presence behind...
Weekly Update for February 14: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Adult World Adult World is a satirical comedy about an eccentric young woman, Amy Anderson (Emma Roberts), who has just come out of university convinced she’s going to...
TV: Black Female Creators Discuss Responsibilities, Opportunities
Among the most interesting discussions this week about the difficulties and possibilities of culture creation today was a 30-minute roundtable discussion posted on YouTube called “The State of...
How The Mary Tyler Moore Show Got Women’s Stories Just Right
If you grew up in the 1970s, chances are you remember watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Saturday nights, most likely with other female members of your family. You probably also remember the...
Real Talk on the Women of True Detective
It’s impossible to deny the pleasures of watching long-time friends and sometime acting partners Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson onscreen together. Currently, the two men are starring in...
UCLA Releases Scathing Report on Diversity in Film and TV
Just when you thought it was safe to be hopeful again, here comes another reality check. The Bunche Center at UCLA has released its annual “Hollywood Diversity Report” to remind us that we’re...
Ricki Lake to Explore Dangers of Hormonal Birth Control in New Doc
I don’t know of any woman who hasn’t seen Ricki Lake’s The Business of Being Born. The Abby Epstein-directed documentary from 2008 exposes how our dysfunctional health care system has resulted...
Trailer Watch: Melissa McCarthy in Tammy Teaser
As the first film to boast Melissa McCarthy’s writing credits, Tammy already made our Most Anticipated Films of 2014 list back in January. We’re not entirely cool with the premise that Susan...
Gary Sanchez Producer Jessica Elbaum Launches New Label for Women’s Comedies
Studio comedies have long exemplified some of Hollywood’s worst bro-ish excesses. The last decade has seen the fall of the romantic comedy and the rise of the bromance, which wouldn’t...