BY Women and Hollywood
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...
Catherine Hardwicke and Marti Noxon Get Series Orders
Cable just keeps getting better. Catherine Hardwicke and Marti Noxon have announced separate TV projects, both rather intriguing. Hardwicke, who’s built her career on young-adult fare like...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Anna Kazejak
The difficult transition to adulthood is a topic Polish writer-director Anna Kazejak has addressed repeatedly in her work. Kazejak made her feature debut in Ode to Joy, a triptych film co-directed...
Berlin Women Directors: Meet Sudabeh Mortezai
German-born Sudabeh Mortezai grew up in Tehran and Vienna. Her film debut was the documentary Children of the Prophet, a look at Iranian mourning rituals for Imam Hossein, the Prophet Mohammad’s...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Celina Murga
Argentine director Celina Murga was thrust into the international film scene when she was chosen by Martin Scorsese to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative several years ago....
Oprah Headed for Broadway
Oprah Winfrey always wanted to be an actress. At a THR roundtable last year, Winfrey revealed that she was discouraged from pursuing acting during her teen years by her father, who declared, “No...
TV: Greta Gerwig to Write, Produce, and Star in CBS’s “How I Met Your Dad”
After co-writing and starring in the indie sensation Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig has signed up for the lead role in CBS’s How I Met Your Dad, a spin-off of the long-running sitcom How I Met...
2014 Athena List of Best Unproduced Screenplays with Strong Female Protagonists Announced
We need more female protagonists. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film, only 11% of the top 100 grossing films in 2011 featured girls and women as main...
Berlinale Dispatch 1: Off the Plane and Into the Competition
I didn’t get to attend the beginning of the Berlin International Film Festival because the Athena Film Festival overlapped with the first weekend of the Berlinale. But I hopped on a plane the day...
Of Animal Crackers and Mr. Bojangles: When I Got to Talk to My Idol, Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple, one of the biggest — and littlest — stars that Hollywood ever produced, and who raised the spirits of a nation through the Great Depression and mine throughout childhood,...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Rebecca Chaiklin
The Occupy Wall Street movement receives a loving eulogy in the documentary Another World, directed by Rebecca Chaiklin and Fisher Stevens. Chaiklin is also the co-director of two other politically...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Sophie Fillieres
Paris-born Sophie Fillieres is the director of five films and the screenwriter of several other features. Her latest work, If You Don’t, I Will, follows a long-time couple, played by Emmanuelle...
Athena FF: Lexi Alexander Proposes a Solution to Hollywood’s Woman Director Problem
Lexi Alexander wants to be an optimist. “Let’s assume the men [in Hollywood] are not just selfish pricks,” she declared at the Athena Film Festival this past weekend, where she headlined a...
Athena FF: Callie Khouri on the Difference between Women Characters in Film vs. TV
Thelma and Louise screenwriter and Nashville creator Callie Khouri set out to be an actress, but soon realized that wasn’t for her. Staring out at the crowd from under a blinding spotlight, she...
Athena FF: Tales from the Trenches
No one group of women has cornered the market on terrifying tales fromthe trenches, but women working in TV and film definitely have a few riveting stories totell. Documenting and archiving those...
Athena FF: Amma Asante’s Belle Revisits Jane Austen Through Black POV
“This is the story of a woman who is loved.” Those are the words black British director Amma Asante used to describe her marvelous sophomore feature Belle at the Athena Film Festival this past...
Weekly Update for February 7: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening The Pretty One — Written and Directed by Jenee LaMarque Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) stars as a pair of identical twins in this pleasantly quirky dramedy. As much a...
Claudia Llosa’s Aloft Bought by Sony Classics
Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s first English-language film, Aloft, has been purchased by Sony Pictures Classics. Starring Jennifer Connelly, Aloft is one of the four women-directed films to...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Gina Kim
South Korea-born director Gina Kim is best known for the critically acclaimed drama Never Forever (2007), starring Vera Farmiga as a woman struggling to conceive a child with her infertile husband....