Features
Newcomer Samantha Barks on Her Les Mis Experience
When Samantha Barks sings “On My Own” in the new film Les Misérables, it will be hard for anyone to ask why this virtual unknown was chosen to play the key role. Barks originally...
She Who Will Not Be Ignored
My fellow blogger Sasha Stone has another great piece (how do you write so much great stuff Sasha?) over on her blog Awards Daily called Female Trouble: Why Powerful Women Threaten Hollywood. ...
Guest Post: From Film to Comics
The best career advice I got before graduating from film school (besides the cliché but true “It’s not a sprint it’s a marathon”) went something like this: You need to...
Anne Hathaway on Her Transformation in Les Mis
There’s a lot of Oscar buzz centered around the soon to be released Les Misérables, particularly for Anne Hathaway whose character, Fantine, is actually in the film the least amount of...
Why Having Only Strong Girl Heroines is Not Enough
A.O. Scott in the lead story of the NY Times Magazine this past weekend wrote a very interesting piece on how Hollywood has finally embraced women, well not exactly women, heroines. The piece...
Interview with Nancy Buirski – Director of The Loving Story
The Loving Story is a powerful and beautifully wrought film about two people – Richard and Mildred Loving – who just wanted to be married and live in their home state of Virginia. ...
Cross Post: Okay, Jen. Here Goes: “Stop Being Mean To Women On The Internet”
My fellow comedian Jen Kirkman is boycotting Twitter until men stop using it as a medium to be awful to her because she’s a woman yet still has the audacity to express her views on occasion. Or...
Guest Post: On Editing and Cooking
The first time I told some friends that I was working on a film about a man in an iron lung trying to lose his virginity, I got looks that were somewhere between incredulity and pity. I could tell...
AFI Review: The Central Park Five – Co-Directed by Sarah Burns and West of Memphis – Directed by Amy Berg
Los Angeles’ AFI Film Festival gave me the chance to see two documentary films directed by women: The Central Park Five co-directed by Sarah Burns, Ken Burns and David McMahon and West of...
Fran Walsh Steps Out
You can't watch Hitchcock without thinking what life would be like had Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife lived today. From the film you see how much a partner she is in life (expected) and...
Is the Marketing for Starlet a Turn Off for Women?
It has become hard for me to go and see movies with my friends because I see so many of them ahead of time for work. During Thanksgiving week my friends and I were trying to find a movie we...
The Hollywood Reporter 2012 Actress Roundtable: Addressing Sexism, the Fight for Parts and Creating Media
Last week, The Hollywood Reporter released their annual Actress Roundtable issue. This year the list was all white and included Sally Field, Anne Hathaway, Naomi Watts, Marion Cotillard, Helen Hunt,...
Cross Post: Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is Not “Required” and Not Praiseworthy
Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day. If you recognize any of these phrases, then you've probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway...
Guest Post: 2012’s Best Actress Race: A History of Inequality
Capote. Ray. Malcolm X. Nixon. Milk. Ali. Chaplin. Do these ring a bell? They are the names of famous politicians, filmmakers, activists, authors and athletes who inspired biopics that were...
Cross Post: How To Audition Internationally
Wake up and smell the latte. Opportunity knocks all over the world, and the common passport is talent. We live in an era where casting directors can cast internationally from their own laptops and...
Guest Post: Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks: The Parallels between Children’s Brains and the Global Brain of the Internet
We’re constantly striving to push ourselves further. When we couldn’t see far enough, we invented the telescope. When we needed to speak with people who weren’t within shouting...
Cross Post: What Is Feminism?
Women are not yet on equal footing with men politically, financially, or culturally. If you have a pulse and a sense of right and wrong, there is a moral imperative to do something about this,...
Guest Post: Bella Swan and Me
This weekend, the fifth and final installment of the Twilight franchise opened, and to no one’s surprise, killed at the box office. Conversations about the film will undoubtedly focus on the...
Guest Post: Loaded Questions
I started working on my first feature film Fully Loaded in 2007. It was like climbing a mountain four times as high as it says in the damn guidebook. It was like changing churches. It was...
Guest Post: Backwards: Can Women Have It All? A Filmmaker’s Perspective
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s controversial article, “Why Women Can’t Have it All,” discusses the challenges facing working women and moms. While I do not yet have children, having...
Guest Post: Wanted: Female Astronauts: Geena Davis Celebrates “Add Female Characters” Month at Third Symposium on Gender in the Media
Did you know that November is Add Female Characters Month? It is according to Geena Davis, who took over the back page of Variety to declare it such. The ad ran on Tuesday, November 13, the...
AFI Review: Ginger and Rosa – Directed by Sally Potter
In my favorite Anne Sexton poem “Rowing,” one line in particular always sticks out to me: “I wore rubies and bought tomatoes/and now, in my middle age/about nineteen in the head...
Dueling Skyfall Reviews: Feminist Mom Approved — Skyfall
Skyfall, the newest 007 blockbuster, is a fabulous, almost win-win-win for women! The film has three significant female characters and Bond himself is portrayed as a humbled, post-modern anti-hero...
Dueling Skyfall Reviews: Skyfall: A Post-Election Conservative Wet Dream
FAIR WARNING: Do not read this if you don’t want to know how the new James Bond movie Skyfall ends. Although, if you were disappointed by last week’s election results, it might give...
Cross Post: Hollywood’s New Feminists, Why the Old One Went Away and What’s Coming Next?
Women’s rights made a major impact on Hollywood in the 1970s. Feminism, now a dirty word, was such a force to be reckoned with that you didn’t dare depict a woman in a film who didn’t have, at...
Cross Post: Sexism in Hollywood: Where Are the Women in Argo?
Ben Affleck’s Argo is shaping up to be this year’s biggest success story. With a near-win for the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, stellar reviews across the board and an A+...
Guest Post: Coming Up Roses Or Bust…
“You’ll never get this made,” was the blunt and firm response from a well-regarded producer after reading my screenplay synopsis. The central theme of my film — a woman desperately...
Guest Post: Time For A Major Women’s Film Award Initiative?
As the awards season gets under way each year I look for the women who are nominated and most years I’m disappointed — the only award category where it is certain that a woman will be...
Guest Post: Why Make Babies When You Can Just Make Documentaries?
Being a woman, I was told since I was a teenager, “just wait, it’ll hit you — you’ll suddenly be overcome by the rash, ridiculous desire to have kids.” This was presented as a...
Cross Post: Cloud Atlas Charts New Territory Between Women and Men With Halle Berry and Hugh Grant
I was belatedly watching “Cloud Atlas” at my local Cineplex, catching up on movies that I hadn’t seen because, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, I no longer had my Manhattan to upstate NY umbilical...
Guest Post: Into the Amazonian Jungle: Shooting in a Third World Country
Festival of Lights marked my departure from the documentary tradition for the first time in my professional career. I had always been attracted to the works of Margaret Mead and Mary Leaky, and...
Book Excerpt: Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It
From the Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone As I sit attentively in the lecture “So Many Species, So Little Time: The Men of Twilight,” a teenage girl wearily plunks herself down beside...
Guest Post: An Epoch of Parity for Women Directors?
It seems like everyone’s talking about women right now. With the 2012 presidential election just a day away with a demographic breakdown of male to female voters at 48% to 52%, women’s voices...
Interview with Vamps Director Amy Heckerling
This was originally posted on April 9, 2012. Vamps is in theaters now. Amy Heckerling has made some serious classic films in her career namely Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. She was in...
Guest Post: American Mary Sets Out to Modify the Way You Think About Women in Horror
In short, our film American Mary proclaims that she is the story of medical student Mary Mason who is growing increasingly broke and disenchanted by medical school and the surgeons she once admired....
Book Excerpt We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History
The first time I ever heard the statement “women aren’t funny” was while reading it in a Christopher Hitchens’s column in the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. At the time, I was more...
Guest Post: Looking at Real Women With Real Life and Body Issues in Yogawoman
With the presidential debate including talk once again of women getting equal pay, it seems surreal to me that we are still having this discussion. In the 70’s, when I was a teenager reading books...
Cross Post: Why The Twilight Saga Film Franchise Mattered, What it Accomplished, and Why its Legacy is Ultimately a Positive One
In just one month The Twilight Saga film franchise will come to an end. Oh sure we may see spin-offs, reboots (probably in a different medium) and/or quasi-sequels in some form in another, but the...
Cross Post: I Was Hired Because I Was A Woman
Yep. You read correctly. I was hired because I was a woman. I’m not making assumptions. I was simply told that by the executive at Disney Animation with the cold blue eyes who sat behind his...
The Academy Celebrates the Career of Ann Roth
A couple of weeks ago I spent the weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival. I was able to catch up on a bunch of films and attend some really cool events including a tribute to the...
Cross Post: How To Build Gender Parity Initiatives and Influence Theatre
The Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative is a grassroots advocacy group of women and men whose mission is to promote female theater artists in LA and beyond. We’ve been around for two and a...
Guest Post: Labor of Love: How Women are Changing Documentaries
In 2010, I finished my first feature documentary, Living Downstream. Based on the book by ecologist and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, the film follows Steingraber as she tries to ring the...
Woman to Watch: Issa Rae — Creator and Star of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
Issa Rae, 27, is beginning to make her mark in Hollywood. She recently sold with Shonda Rhimes a half hour comedy to ABC, I Hate L.A. Dudes, which is about a journalist who moves to Los Angeles to...
Cross Post: Heroines of Cinema: 10 Reasons to Love Emma Thompson
Having previously examined the downside of being of a star actress, it seemed time for a corrective tonic. Not that I feel any A-list actress particularly needs to be acclaimed a heroine. Actors...
Cross Post: She has a name. Her name is Sharon Carter!
One of the big would-be stories this week was the announcement of five actresses apparently on the ‘short list’ to play Sharon Carter in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Such stories are...
The Ugly Intricacies of Desire in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights
Tackling a beloved and classic piece of literature to interpret into film is not an easy task and one that director Andrea Arnold typically doesn’t like to do. But after the idea to direct an...
Guest Post: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret
According to the latest “Boxed In” report compiled by Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, Executive Director at The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, released...
Guest Post: We Came! We Saw! We Threw Bananas! WE WERE THEATRE!
Since 2001 Guerrilla Girls On Tour! have staged an annual protest around the time of the Tony Awards to highlight sexism in theatre. We chose the Tony Awards because we wanted people to think about...
Rebel Wilson, Pitch Perfect and Body Acceptance
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rebel Wilson discusses the difficulty she had in getting cast for roles when she was starting out in Hollywood. Despite her talent, Wilson wasn’t...
Women Do Rule the Documentary World
Last week was Independent Film Week here in NYC. There are a wide variety of events, panels and of course parties. I was able to attend the Chicken and Egg Pictures event (which was beyond packed)...
Today’s Lesson — You Can’t Please the Twihards
Today I learned an important lesson which I probably already should have known. The people who care about all things Twilight — the fans of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are intense....