Women in Film LA’s annual Crystal + Lucy Awards held earlier this week honored some amazing women and men who have championed women in their professional work as well as their personal lives. The brilliant women of Mad Men were honored as well as George Lucas, Sofia Coppola (whose film The Bling Ring is out today), Rachel Morrison and Laura Linney.
Our Indiewire colleague, Anne Thompson attended the awards, spoke with writer/director Nancy Meyers. Meyers presented Coppola with her award. Thompson asked Meyers what she was currently working on her next film:
During an intermission, when I asked Meyers what she’s working on, she reminded me that “things have changed.” She’s pushing two projects up the hill,
trying to get a studio green light. “I’m trying,” says Hollywood’s most consistently commercial woman filmmaker (“What Women Want,” “Something’s Got to
Give”). If she’s struggling to push her films forward, what about other women directors with a less stellar track record?
We echo Anne’s distress over the situation and it just makes what Laura Linney said in her acceptance speech about gender equity even more important. Check out the full transcript here.
Unlike in the theatre, I soon realized that for the most part I was surrounded by men. A lot of really wonderful men as well as some not so wonderful ones.
As an actress in film, it is very easy to become isolated just due to the ratio of gender inequality that exists. Rarely do you have a scene with other
women, very few women are on the crew, and what few female executives arrive tend to keep to themselves. You have fewer and fewer women to turn to for help
or advice, and information is not easily shared.
This is a problem. And it is unhealthy. And I believe has something to do with the slow pace of progress women are making, not only in their artistic
lives, but especially in their business lives. The news about inequality in pay between men and women, whether in film or television, seems to be worse
than it was twenty years ago. And while we are all aware of the upheavals and drama in the world of finance, the numbers and the disparity is simply too
extreme to justify any excuse. Obviously, this is a problem that has been extant for DECADES, but the stagnation of progress, and the seeming acceptance of
such a practice, troubles me.
Crystal+Lucy Awards Toast ‘Mad Men’s’ Women … and George
Lucas (The Hollywood Reporter)
