BY Women and Hollywood
26% of SFIFF Films in Competition Directed by Women
Though the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival’s (April 24-May 8) full lineup won’t be announced until April 1, SFIFF organizers have announced the films competing in the narrative...
Female Protagonists Underrepresented Onscreen Five to One
Remember last week when we were all so happy about what Cate Blanchett said at the Oscars? Well, no matter how much money women make, there was almost five male protagonists for every female one...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sandy McLeod
Sandy McLeod is an acclaimed independent filmmaker, having directed numerous music videos and short films in her 25-year career. Her short documentary “Asylum” was nominated for an Academy Award...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Leah Meyerhoff
In making her feature debut, director Leah Meyerhoff went back home — literally. I Believe in Unicorns was partly filmed in the house Meyerhoff grew up and where her mother still lives, since...
Hunger Games Producer Nina Jacobson to Adapt Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
Nina Jacobson, producer of The Hunger Games and Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series, has picked up another hit book — Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Praised for its “Dickensian” scope,...
Special Report: Women Directors at the Box Office in February 2014
Opening onValentine’s Day, the teen romance EndlessLove was the first wide release (2,872 theaters) from a female director in2014. The original, starring teen queen Brooke Shields, was released in...
War Zone/ Comfort Zone: Confronting the Issue of Homeless Women Veterans
Making a movie is like walking across a tightrope. It requires balance, will and muscles you never even knew you had. I’ve spent the last few years making a documentary about homeless women...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Diana Whitten
Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts made waves in 1999 when she announced that she would provide abortions on international waters to women living in countries like Ireland and Poland. When her...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Catherine Gund
Elizabeth Streb is not just a choreographer; she is an extreme action architect. Documentarian Catherine Gund’s Born to Fly traces the evolution of Streb’s movement philosophy — she pushes...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Kitty Green
Kitty Green’s short films have screened at film festivals internationally. After graduating film school, Green worked for ABC in Australia producing content for national broadcast. Green spent the...
In Honor of International Women’s Day: Here Are the Things You Can Do to Support Female Filmmakers and Female Films
This has been a big week for people paying attention to women and the film business. From Ellen DeGeneres pulling in great ratings for the Oscar show to Cate Blanchett using her Oscar win as a bully...
Weekly Update for March 7 Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Honey — Directed by Valeria Golino; Written by Valeria Golina, Francesca Marciano, Valia Santella Irene lives alone on the coastline outside Rome. To her father and...
TV: The “Golden Age of Television” is Really White and Really Male
“’Crazy’ mistresses, nameless strippers, randy hookups, disgruntled daughters, dismayed wives.” That’s how TV critic Maureen Ryan sums up most of the female characters we see on True...
Tribeca FF Announces 10 More Women-Directed Films
The Tribeca Film Festival (April 16–27) announced the second half of its 2014 line-up yesterday, and there are some big names among the ten female-helmed selections. Kelly Reichardt’s fifth film...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Amy C. Elliott
Documentary filmmaker Amy C. Elliott is drawn to America’s weirdness. Her 2010 feature debut, World’s Largest, profiled small towns that built grandiose roadside attractions. Her newest work,...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Margaret Brown
Alabama native Margaret Brown is a Peabody Award-winning director whose last documentary feature, The Order of Myths, received the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards and...
TV: Mary-Louise Parker to Star in NBC Sitcom Feed Me
Before winning over potheads everywhere as drug-dealing suburbanite Nancy Botwin on Jenji Kohan’s Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker first gained notice playing feminist lobbyist Amy Gardner on NBC’s The...
Trailer Watch: Quvenzhane Wallis in Annie
I (Melissa) grew up in the era of Annie. For my generation, it was our Wicked. It was the first Broadway show I saw and it helped spark my love of theatre. I carried around that red album to and...
Producer Gigi Pritzker Lands $50 Mil in Financing
Prolific producer Gigi Pritzker (Drive, The Way Way Back, Ender’s Game) has just secured $50 million to finance future film projects. As the founder of OddLot Entertainment, Pritzker has in the...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Liz Tuccillo
You may not have heard of Liz Tuccillo, but you’ve definitely heard of her work. Tuccillo’s first credited script was “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice” episode of Sex and the City, a...
BBC, Directors UK Launch Workshops to Help Women Directors Find Work
Remember the “cast-iron ceiling” for women directors in the British film industry that Sally Potter mentioned last week? The BBC and Directors UK (Britain’s version of the DGA) are taking a...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Leigh Janiak
Director Leigh Janiak’s first feature, Honeymoon, came out of the NYU grad’s desire to tell “an intimate, grounded genre story.” Shot in North Carolina, the thriller owes its existence to...
First Half of 2014 Tribeca Line-Up Announced; Women-Directed Films Make Up 25%
The Tribeca Film Festival (April 16–27) announced the first half of its 2014 line-up earlier this week, and women’s representation at the festival could both be better and worse. Among the...
TV: How House of Cards’ Claire Underwood Stacks Against Other Anti-Heroines
House of Cards, Netflix’s buzzy political drama, started life as a remake of a British miniseries. Starring Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, an amoral, ambitious member of Congress, it also felt...
Unifrance Exec Spotlights French and American Women Directors
If you see any French films this year, you’ll have Isabelle Giordano to thank for that. Since June 2013, Giordano has been the General Director of Unifrance Films, the government agency that...
NYU’s Fusion FF: Celebrating Women in Film, Television, & New Media
Women behind the camera are rarelyacknowledged in the film industry. As a reader of Women and Hollywood, you already know this. In fact, weall know the sad statistics generated by the recent...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sandrine Orabona
Sandrine Orabona has worked professionally for over two decades as a director, producer, editor and shooter to enhance her storytelling skills in the non-fiction genre. She is the co-director of the...
Gemma Arterton Headed to London Stage in Made in Dagenham Musical
Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace, Byzantium) is headed to London’s West End to star in a musical adaptation of Made in Dagenham, the 2010 British drama about 1960s seamstresses fighting for equal...
Oscar Winner Lupita Nyong’o Poignantly Discusses “Black Beauty” at Essence Event
Since Thanksgiving last year, Lupita Nyong’o has run a stealth but undeniably successful campaign. No, not for her richly deserved Best Supporting Actress trophy for 12 Years a Slave, but it has...
Suck It, Haters: Female-Led Films Make More Money
“Sorry, Cate Blanchett: ‘Films with women at the center’ don’t make money,” proclaims an embarrassing editorial by Marcus James Dixon at the Gold Derby today. Dixon was referring, of...
Frozen is First Woman-Directed Movie to Make $1 Billion
Women want to see movies about women. And since women buy the majority of movie tickets (and boys and men will buy tickets to watch the adventures of female protagonists), movies about women...
The World is Round, People and Other Thoughts from a Potentially Game Changing Oscars
I don’t know about you, but things felt a bit different last night. In fact, let’s be honest, they’ve felt different for some time now. It’s not just one thing. It’s Tina and Amy at the...
The Big O: Between Ellen and Everyone’s Mom, Oscar Night Turned Into Ladies Night
For a year with no female talent represented in the director’s category and only three of the nine best-picture candidates featuring women in lead roles, the Oscar show was a regular femme fest....
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...