BY Women and Hollywood
Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Receive BAFTA’s Charlie Chaplin Award
National treasure and perennial award-winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus (five Emmy and counting!) will receive another recognition of her genius later this month at the 2014 BAFTA LA Britannia Awards. The...
Makers Presents ‘Women in Hollywood’; ‘Maleficent’ Screenwriter Linda Woolverton on What’s Changed and What Hasn’t
Tonight, the Makers documentary series continues with a look at women in Hollywood. There are some great interviews, including one with Jane Fonda, where she talks about how she was able to get her...
17% of Oscar Submissions for Foreign Language Film Are Directed by Women
In the past few decades, the Oscar race for Foreign Language Film has been kinder — or maybe just fairer — to female filmmakers. Three women — Marleen Gorris, Caroline Link, and...
Watch: Frances McDormand is a Maine Toughie in Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’
Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) is many things: beloved teacher, resented mother, seen-it-all middle-ager, wry chronicler of her small Maine town. Based on author Elizabeth Strout’s...
Ruba Nadda’s ‘October Gale’ and Liv Ullmann’s ‘Miss Julie’ Find Distribution
Three weeks after their debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival, two women-centric, women-directed films have found distribution. Writer-director Ruba Nadda’s October Gale has been...
Weekly Update for October 3: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Gone Girl There hasn’t been a soignée blonde so flat-out hate-able since Gwyneth bitched about the burdens of motherhood. Welcome to the A-list, Gone Girl star Rosamund...
Sarah Jessica Parker and Catherine Zeta-Jones Board Women-Directed Films
Sarah Jessica Parker and Catherine Zeta-Jones have signed on to starring roles in projects by European female filmmakers. Parker will return to the rom-com genre in Ella Lemhagen’s All Roads Lead...
A Woman You Should Know: Margaret Nagle — Developer of the Red Band Society and the Writer of The Good Lie
Margaret Nagle was one of the first women in met in Hollywood who told me really what it was like to be a working woman in Hollywood. She told me about unbelievable (which I totally believed)...
Guest Post: Only 26% of UK Film Crews Are Female — Which is Better than in the US
Earlier this year, I published a report into what percentage of crews on the top-grossing US films of the past 20 years are women. I found that, on average, women made up only 23% of a typical film...
Anna D. Shapiro Takes Over as Steppenwolf Artistic Director from Martha Lavey
Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company will pass the torch from one female artistic director to another next year when Anna D. Shapiro takes over the position that Martha Lavey has occupied for two...
Winners of Women Composers Competition Announced
The League of American Orchestras and EarShot have named Julia Adolphe and Melody Eotvos the winners of a new program designed to promote women composers. Adolphe and Eotvos will each be awarded...
Watch: First Look at ‘Inside Out,’ Pixar’s First Girl-Centric Movie After ‘Brave’
It took Pixar nearly two decades to make a movie with a female protagonist, but fortunately the studio seems to have gotten the memo that girls and women watch adorable animated adventures too....
Mill Valley Film Fest to Showcase 35 Women-Directed Films, Celebrate Elle Fanning and Laura Dern
Lynn Shelton’s Laggies, Doris Dorrie’s Que Caramba Es La Vida, and Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem are among the nearly three dozen women-directed films...
Sherry Lansing Biography Scheduled for 2016 Release
Sherry Lansing, the first female head of a major film studio, will be the subject of a new biography to be penned by Hollywood Reporter editor Stephen Galloway. The as-yet-untitled book will be...
Sunday Night Sex Talks: Turning Weekend Brunch with the Girls into a Monthly Storytelling Experience
Six months into my life in Los Angeles, I realized that I did nothave enough female friends. I was living with two wonderful gay men in West Hollywood, dating a smart and sweet television...
‘Bad Judge’ Review: I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This
I’m going to use the word bad a lot in this post, and I already feel bad about it. As must actress Kate Walsh, who took on a seemingly interesting lead role in Bad Judge, the new NBC comedy about...
Quvenzhané Wallis Books New Gig in Adaptation of Bestseller ‘Counting by 7s’
Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis has signed on for The Mazur/Kaplan Company and Olympus Pictures’ adaptation of Counting by 7s, based on Holly Goldberg Sloan’s bestselling novel. Wallis will...
Helen Mirren to Reprise Her Role as Elizabeth II on Broadway
Helen Mirren will soon reprise the role that made her an Oscar winner, that of Queen Elizabeth II, on Broadway. Here’s the twist: Mirren won’t be starring in a stage adaptation of The Queen,...
New ‘Twilight’ Shorts Directed by Women to Appear on Facebook
Great news for Twilight fans — and even better news for aspiring women filmmakers: Lionsgate, the studio behind the film series, and Stephenie Meyer, who, of course, wrote the Twilight novels,...
The Big O: If the Girl in ‘Gone Girl’ Provokes Debate, Oscar Noms Might Follow
Much of the suspense over Gone Girl, at least among the film journalists who were the first to witness David Fincher’s latest thriller at the New York Film Festival, has not revolved around any...
‘Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason’ Is the Highest-Grossing Women-Directed European Film in the Last Decade
From my latest Forbes post on why there are still major issues with women-centric content in Europe, where there are more women directors than in the US. Sometimes I think that Europe is leading the...
October 2014 Film Preview
October may be the time of ghosts and ghouls, not that you’d know it from the many diverse film offerings made by and starring women this month. But we definitely start with one ghoul: the one in...
Women in Film, Indiegogo, and the Black List Launch New Award for Young Female Filmmakers
When it comes to fostering female directing talent, support and mentorship can’t come soon enough. To that end, a group of producers, media companies, and film organizations have come together to...
Mary-Louise Parker to Pen Memoir
After a quarter-century in Hollywood, Mary-Louise Parker will reflect on her life in a memoir — though not necessarily about her career. In Dear Mr. You, “an autobiographical literary work...
‘Makers’ Starts Tonight With History of Women in Comedy
It was less than a decade ago that the late Christopher Hitchens, a respected writer and thinker, wondered aloud in a mainstream publication “why women aren’t funny.” Many rational people...
Kate Winslet’s ‘A Little Chaos’ Finds Release Date
Those of us who have missed Kate Winslet playing headstrong women in period garb have much to look forward to in A Little Chaos. Winslet reunited with her Sense and Sensibility co-star Alan...
Three New Sci-Fi Epics With Female Protagonists in Development
Or maybe it’s just the “Hollywood’s finally getting its head out of its ass” effect. News arrived yesterday that three separate sci-fi tales with female protagonists are currently in...
All-Female Sports Talk Show to Debut Sept. 30
Just a few weeks after the Ray Rice video plainly illustrated that women’s issues (and a humane sense of right and wrong) are sorely lacking in both professional sports and its commentariat, the...
Hollywood Feminist of the Day: John Cusack
Hollywood has been kind to John Cusack, who steered his teen stardom into over six dozen acting credits. But the Say Anything icon, who appears in the industry-savaging Maps to the Stars (out early...
Review: Rosamund Pike Gives An Oscar Worthy and Career Making Performance in ‘Gone Girl’
There hasn’t been a soignée blonde so flat-out hate-able since Gwyneth bitched about the burdens of motherhood. Welcome to the A-list, Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike! The tall, slender,...
Watch: A Mother is Terrorized by Her Child’s Favorite Book in ‘The Babadook’
When it debuted at Sundance this year, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut, The Babadook, became one of the festival’s breakout hits, with critics praising the film as a “flat-out...
Weekly Update for September 26: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Bjork: Biophilia Live (doc) In 2011, Icelandic artist Björk released her eighth full-length studio album Biophilia, yet the Biophilia project has continued beyond an album...
Julianne Moore’s ‘Still Alice’ to Receive Oscar-Qualifying Run (Plus Bonus Clip)
With four nominations and no wins yet, Julianne Moore might finally deserve her due at the next Academy Awards ceremony. The vehicle that’ll get here? Not the Hollywood-skewering showbiz satire...
CineCause Launches New Mentorship and Networking Initiative for Female Filmmakers
Producer Gina Belafonte, Killer Films chief Christine Vachon, and writer-director-actress Jocelyn Towne will be among the headliners at the inaugural Fueling Female Filmmakers (F3) event, a new...
Women Playwrights Make Up Only 33% of the Most-Produced Plays of the Past Decade
American Theatre has released its annual list of the top ten most-produced plays, and while the 2013–2014 season boasted a commendable 50–50 split between male and female writers, a look at the...
Guest Post: What is Queer Film Culture’s Past and Present?
Queer film culture has a longhistory, which directly links queer cinema, with its specific aesthetics andpolitics, with the film festival as a community experience. The oldest LGBT/Q film festival...
Women Directors Comprise Majority of San Francisco Film Society Grant Finalists
The San Francisco Film Society has announced the 14 finalists who will be competing for a $300,000 grant from the SFFS and the Kenneth Rainn Foundation. One or more narrative films from the Bay...
Digital Bolex Grant for Women Cinematographers Now Receiving Applications
Cinematography is one of the film industry’s least equal fields. In the last five years, women accounted for just 3% of all cinematographers among the 250 top-grossing films. In what might be the...
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Eden’ to Be Released Next Spring
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, Eden, has been a staple this year at major festivals like TIFF and NYFF. And now the 20-year electronica epic has found a distributor in Broad...
Has the London Theatre Community Found a Solution to Gender Inequality?
Earlier this week, the theatre community in across the UK came together to discuss the problem of gender inequity on its stages. The numbers are just as bad over on that side of the Atlantic as they...
‘Key & Peele’s’ Lady Problem (And the Perils of Loving Comedy While Female)
Julie Delpy to Start Shooting Her Sixth Film Next Month
Fresh off her Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nod for Before Midnight (along with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke), Julie Delpy is set to start shooting her sixth feature next month. Delpy will...
Trailer Watch: A Rebellious Sprite Faces Marriage or Death in Studio Ghibli’s ‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya’
When the divine Princess Kaguya took earthly form after being born inside a lotus flower, she probably wanted something more out of mortal existence than a marriage conundrum. She doesn’t...
Women Directors Dominate the Competition at Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Seventy percent of the works in competition at the 2014 Abu Dhabi Film Festival (October 23 — November 1) will be directed by women. The ADFF will only showcase shorts (along with a Truffaut...
DGA Celebrates Women Directors, But What’s the Next Move?
The DGA hosted an event last Saturday night to celebrate the six women who created the Women’s Steering Committee 35 years ago. The 600-seat theatre was packed, with impassioned cheering and...
Powerhouse Female Producers Join Forces to Launch New Company
Big-league UK producers Alison Owen (Saving Mr. Banks, The Giver, HBO’s Temple Grandin) and Debra Hayward (Les Miserables, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Atonement) have teamed up to form a new...
The Big O: Lead or Supporting Actress? Depends on Which Category is Likeliest to Hit Gold
As of today, Patricia Arquette stands as the favorite to win a supporting-actress Oscar for her 12-years-in-the-making portrait of devoted motherhood in Boyhood. That is, if you believe the expert...
Guest Post: Pioneering Women DIrectors, Then and Now
This past Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America celebratedthe accomplishments of the Pioneering Women Directors of the DGA. Susan Bay, NellCox, Joelle Dobrow, Dolores Ferraro, Victoria...
Things I Learned from the ‘Selma’ Sneak
On Saturday night, Ava DuVernay brought a short clip of her upcoming film Selma (opening Christmas Day) to the Urbanworld Film Festival in NYC. (As Ava put it: “Jason Reitman takes his films to...
Julie Taymor’s ‘The Lion King’ Becomes Highest-Grossing Work of Any Media in Entertainment History
The stage version of The Lion King has a lot of things going for it: a universal story, sing-a-long songs, childhood nostalgia for the animated movie, and relatively affordable tickets. But it’s...
Seeking Our Story: Living Comedy with Elaine May’s ‘The Heartbreak Kid’
Elaine May traveled and told stories on the Yiddish theater circuit evenbefore she was born. In 1932, Jack and Ida Berlin welcomed baby Elaine inPhiladelphia, PA. After Jack’s untimely passing in...