Geena Davis will produce a a documentary on Hollywood’s gender inequality, Variety has learned.
Davis, a prominent activist about this issue, is teaming up with Creative Chaos vmg and their partnership will be launched by the making of the doc, which will be “told through the eyes of experts and researchers using data provided by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, as well as first-person accounts of high-profile actors, executives, and artists in the field. Its goal is to take a systemic look at unconscious bias and provide a roadmap for solutions to act as a catalyst for change.”
“I’ve been encouraged by my peers speaking out on gender disparity in recent years, but we still are not seeing the actual number change,” Davis said. “There’s been no real improvement in the number of female roles since 1946 and there’s still a dearth of female directors.”
She cited two of her ’90s films, “Thelma and Louise,” and “A League of Their Own” as harbingers of gender equality in cinema, but noted that little has changed since then.
“The same thing happened when ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Sex and the City’ opened during the same summer and again when ‘The Hunger Games’ opened,” she added. “There’s a need for Hollywood to recognize that it’s operating with an unconscious bias.”
While Davis has been one of the most visible leaders on this issue worldwide— she also founded the Bentonville Film Festival, which champions women and diverse voices in film — we are extremely disappointed that a man will be directing the film. Tom Donahue, director of HBO’s excellent “Casting By,” will helm the feature. This is nothing against Donahue, but the optics here are problematic.
How can these folks not get that this message is counter to all the positive impact that a documentary of this sort could engender? If you are going to talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk, and in this instance it means hiring a woman director. And honestly, what’s more representative of Hollywood’s gender bias than having a man direct a documentary about gender inequality in film?
