Women and Hollywood is off this week. Please enjoy one of our top posts of the year. This piece is from June 21, 2016.
In today’s dose of “Are you fucking kidding me?” another male director with very little directing experience has been given the job of directing what’s most likely a big-budget film.
As first reported by Variety, “Iron Man 3” screenwriter Drew Pearce will make his feature directorial debut with “Hotel Artemis,” a “near-future thriller, set in its own distinctive crime universe, [which] is drawing comparisons to ‘Ex Machina,’ ‘Drive,’ and ‘Looper.’”
Pearce’s directing experience is limited to the 14-minute “Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King,” and a couple of videos for Funny or Die.
This reminds us of the time Paramount hired screenwriter Roberto Orci, a man with no directing experience, to direct “Star Trek Beyond.” (Justin Lin eventually took over the gig.) And that time that Seth Grahame-Smith, writer of the books “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” was given the gig of directing the big-screen adaptation of “The Flash.” (He too eventually gave up the gig; “Dope” director Rick Famuyiwa has taken over. Maybe if they hired someone with directing experience these things wouldn’t fall through?)
Or how about those second-time directors who go from small-budget indies to huge tent-poles with one shot? There’s Colin Trevorrow, who got the $150 million “Jurassic World” gig after making “Safety Not Guaranteed” for $750,000. Gareth Edwards was offered the $160 million “Godzilla” after he made “Monsters” with a budget of $500,000. Or Marc Webb of “The Amazing Spiderman” who made that $230 million film after the $7.5 million “500 Days of (Summer).” Sure, “Chronicle” director Josh Trank may have tanked “The Fantastic Four,” his first tent-pole. But we bet he won’t stay in “movie jail” as long as, say, Karyn Kusama.
The fact is, more often than not, male directors are given these huge projects over more experienced female directors for no other reason than their gender. While first-time male directors like Robert Stromberg (“Maleficent”), Wally Pfister (“Transcendence”), and Andy Serkis (“The Jungle Book”) no doubt had extensive on-set experience, the fact remains that there are women directors out there who aren’t getting those kinds of breaks, and there are definitely no women DPs, Mo-Cap actors, visual effects directors, or screenwriters getting those big breaks either.
As we’ve written before, studios “have no problem hiring men with no experience or promoting men from low budget films to the big leagues. It’s not about risk, it’s about gender. This is about male privilege and the belief that untested men can handle films better than women with experience.” We have a hard time believing that a woman would get such an opportunity. And we aren’t the only ones who have noticed:
Writer Man Gets Bigger Budget For a Movie Than Most Expert Women Directors Will Ever Gethttps://twitter.com/slashfilm/status/745224978568716288 …
While we don’t know the proposed budget of “Hotel Artemis,” as a science fiction film, it will almost certainly involve special effects, and action-heavy sequences that require a lot of money — money that isn’t given to female directors. The Hollywood big shots simply don’t want to risk a tent-pole or big-budget film on a woman, and that’s a frustrating, and depressing truth. It presumes that women don’t have the experience or the clout to direct such movies.
Yes, right now we have a woman plucked from the indie world directing a big-budget superhero film: Patty Jenkins is now directing “Wonder Woman”after coming off of her debut “Monster.” And indie filmmaker Emily Carmichael will write and direct “Powerhouse,” for Amblin Entertainment. But the fact remains that handing inexperienced male directors these huge, money-loaded films when there are plenty of experienced women out there who long for those gigs is a trend we’d like to see die.
