ALL POSTS
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Gillian Greene (Murder of a Cat)
The daughter of veteran actor Lorne Greene,Gillian Greene grew up in Los Angeles on the sets of her father’s televisionshows. She attended USC and NYU before moving back to Los Angeles to...
Live-Action Barbie Movie in the Works
Blame it on The Lego Movie: the toys are taking over the multiplex. Sony has announced plans to make a live-action comedy starring Barbie. There have previously been over two dozen animated...
Aaron Sorkin Mansplains Hollywood
This week writer Aaron Sorkin showed up at the Tribeca Film Festival and, in his typical way, gave us some nuggets to digest about how the privileged few in Hollywood regard the rest of us. This is...
Crosspost: What’s It Going to Take for Gender Equality to Come to Hollywood?
Crossposted with permission from Awards Daily. The WGA diversity report, released on April 15, delivered this rather devastating news about women screenwriters in Hollywood: While women and other...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Courteney Cox (Just Before I Go)
Actress Courteney Cox, best known for her Emmy Award-winning comedy Friends and for her Golden Globe-nominated role in Cougar Town, segues behind the camera to make her feature-film directorial...
Trailer Watch: Breastmilk Doc Explores the Many Different Ways to Be a Parent and Nourish
After delving into the dangers of contemporary American motherhood in the documentary The Business of Being Born, producer Ricki Lake is back with another parenting-related feature. Directed by Dana...
Distribution Pioneer Nikki Rocco to Retire
Nikki Rocco, the first and only female distribution chief at a major studio, has announced her retirement. Rocco joined Universal as a 17-year-old high-school senior and stayed on at the studio for...
Rachel Weisz and Toni Collette to Star as BFFs in Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already
Rachel Weisz and Toni Collette will play best friends in Catherine Hardwicke’s upcoming comedy-drama Miss You Already. Morwenna Banks’ script finds two lifelong friends being pulled in...
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s The Nest Gets 2015 Release Date
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s next collaboration, the sister comedy The Nest, will open December 18, 2015. The former SNL co-stars will star as two thirtysomething siblings who return home for one...
Crosspost: The Time of Her Life
Crossposted with permission from DGA Quarterly. Lee Shallat Chemel was recently directing an episode of the critically acclaimed single-camera comedy The Middle when it suddenly dawned on her how...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Eva von Schweinitz (A Film Is a Film Is a Film)
Eva von Schweinitz is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, working in theater, film, and interactive media. Holding a B.A. in screenwriting, she has expanded her interest in storytelling into...
Cannes Roundup: Few Women Directors at Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week
As we’ve come to expect from Cannes, far too few women will be represented at the French festival — again. Among the 19 features selected by delegate general Edouard Waintrop for...
Meryl Streep Receives Monte Cristo Award from Eugene O’Neill Center
Last night, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center honored Meryl Streep with the Monte Cristo Award, one of the most prestigious acting awards in the country. The ceremony was a homecoming for Streep,...
TV: Keke Palmer to Become Youngest-Ever Talk Show Host
Keke Palmer will make talk-show history by becoming television’s youngest-ever host. The 20-year-old star of Akeelah and The Bee and Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP will headline a daytime show...
Trailer Watch: Diane Kurys’ For a Woman + Exclusive Artwork
In Oscar-nominated director Diane Kurys’ (Entre Nous) latest film, a love triangle forms between a man, his wife, and his brother. Michel (Benoit Magimel) and Jean (Nicolas Duvauchelle) believed...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them)
Megan Griffiths has been a director, writer, and producer in the independent film community for over a decade. Her film, The Off Hours, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and went on to...
Trailer Watch: A Young Woman Searches for Her Real Identity in Ida
A teenage nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of pleging herself to the Catholic Church discovers the truth about her family origins in Ida. Set in 1960s Poland, the Rebecca Lenkiewicz-penned...
Rape Culture Sidetracks Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones is a show full of violence, including sexual violence, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss generally tend to make that violence meaningful. The beheading of Ned Stark, the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Karen Leigh Hopkins (Miss Meadows)
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, and raised by an Italian factory-workermother whose dream of being an artist were squelched by a teacher who told hershe had not imagination, Karen Leigh Hopkins was not...
Angelina Jolie and Linda Woolverton Talk Maleficent in New Featurette
A new two-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette about Maleficent reveals that the May 30 release will be part-prequel, part-alternate POV. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, The...
Take the Quiz: How Many Movies By Female Directors Have You Seen?
Buzzfeed’s Alison Willmore has published a great new quiz on women directors that extends all the way back to 19th-century film pioneer Alice Guy-Blache’s The Cabbage Fairy, includes midcentury...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jessica Yu (Misconception)
Jessica Yu’s award-winning body of work includes her film “Breathing Lessons,” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short; her documentary for Participant Media on the water crisis,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Amy Berg (Every Secret Thing)
Amy Berg is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary Deliver Us From Evil (2006). The film tells the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Kate Davis (Newburgh Sting)
Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort, a 2001 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winner, has won over 25 awards and continues to be screened as a seminal work aimed towards overcoming...
Weekly Update for April 18: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Gabrielle — Written and Directed by Louise Archambault Quebecois director Louise Archambault follows her smart and refreshing debut feature Familia with this tender...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sabine Lubbe Bakker (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
Filmmaker Sabine Lubbe Bakker was born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium, and has studied in The Netherlands and Brazil. Her credits include the award-winning documentary Shout (2010), Power to the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Melissa Johnson (Love in the Time of March Madness)
Melissa Johnson is a writer and filmmaker living in Venice, California. She is best known for her award-winning feature documentary, No Look Pass, about a Burmese lesbian basketball star, currently...
Trailer Watch: Chloe Grace Moretz in If I Stay
Life-or-death situations are rarely as literal as the one teenage Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz) faces: Should she live or die? In this big-screen adaptation of Gayle Forman’s YA novel If I Stay, Mia,...
Megan Ellison to Develop TV Show about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo
In news that’s almost too good to be true, Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures announced that it would develop a TV series about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Both stars were widely rumored...
Cynthia Lopez to Run NYC Film Office
Cynthia Lopez has been named the new chief of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. The Hollywood Reporter notes that around 200 films are made each year in New York....
Guest Post: Getting to the Finish Line
I’ve worked on Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe A La Hache for years — three and a half years, to be exact. During that entire time, I so desired to have a woman on my team. There...
Guest Post: Younger: From Novel to TV Show in 527 Easy Steps
Exactly two years ago today, I got an emailfrom my agent Melissa Flashman at Trident Media saying that Darren Star wantedto turn my novel Younger into the next Sex & TheCity. I, of course, said,...
Guest Post: Write What You Don’t See
I started screenwriting five years ago because I was angry. Every time I watched a movie or TV show geared towards women, it had female friends fighting over a man or being catty to each other,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Louise Ni Fhiannachta (Rubai)
Irishdirector Louise Ni Fhiannachta’s love affair with storytelling started whenshe discovered she could entertain her family at the age offour and a half. It wasn’t long beforeshe was...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Susanna Fogel (Life Partners)
Susanna Fogel began writing and directing short films as a teenager, premiering her first two, “For Real” and “Words of Wisdom,” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1995 and 1997....
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Johanna Hamilton (1971)
Johanna Hamilton has most recently co-produced Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008 and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She has produced...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Garrett Bradley (Below Dreams)
Garrett Bradley was born in New York City and now lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. The recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award, the Lynn Weston Fellowship, the Motion...
TV: Trailer Watch: Orange is the New Black Season 2
At last, at last. Netflix has released a trailer for the second season of Orange is the New Black, and it seems the red-envelope suits have gotten the memo: this isn’t just Piper’s show. We...
Dreamworks to Make Adventure Movie With Black Girl Protagonist
If you caught Mr. Peabody and Sherman or Rio 2 in theaters, you probably also saw an adorable short called “Almost Home” about a group of aliens in a spaceship searching for a planet to...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Liveris (Nocturnity)
Alexandra Liveris is currently an MFA Candidate in Stanford University’s Documentary Film Program. In 2013 she directed three shorts and is currently directing a documentary under the working...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Olivia Klaus (Life After Manson)
Olivia Klaus is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been seen on networks like CNN, HLN, Discovery, MTV and The History Channel. Sin by Silence, her 2009 directorial debut, went on...
Cannes 2014 Lineup Revealed; Only Two Women Directors in the Main Competition
For whatever reason, the Cannes Film Festival — perhaps because of its grandeur, glamorous red carpet, and press attention — has become the crux around which global conversations about...
Trailer Watch: Jenny Slate in Obvious Child
Here’s the 21st-century romantic comedy you’ve been waiting for. Writer-director Gilian Robespierre’s Obvious Child features former SNL castmember Jenny Slate as a stand-up comedienne named...
Spotlight on Sexism: Hollywood’s Lighting Departments
We’ve already brought you the dismal numbers on female directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, editors, composers, production designers, sound designers, special...
TV: The Maya Rudolph Show to Debut in May
After a long-delayed debut, The Maya Rudolph Show finally has a premiere date: Monday, May 19 at 10 PM. Except here’s the catch: it’s yet unclear whether Rudolph’s variety show will be a...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Grausman (Art and Craft)
Jennifer Grausman directed and produced the Emmy-nominated documentary Pressure Cooker (2008). Previously, she was the Director of the Screenwriters Colony and Manager of Exhibition and Film Funding...
Trailer Watch: Gone Girl Asks, Where’s Amy?
The very first trailer for Gone Girl has been released, and it essentially introduces novelist Gillian Flynn’s story to newbies. While Nick (Ben Affleck) searches for his missing wife Amy...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Linda G. Mills (Of Many)
Linda G. Mills is the inaugural Lisa Ellen Goldberg professor at New York University and co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Of Many Institute with Chelsea Clinton (who produced “Of Many”)....
Rebecca Zlowtowski to Head Two Cannes Juries During Critics’ Week
After the much-welcome announcements earlier this year that Jane Campion would head this year’s Cannes jury and that Andrea Arnold would preside over Critics Week, more good news has come out...
Donna Tartt, Annie Baker Win Pulitzers
Novelist Donna Tartt and playwright Annie Baker have won the Pulitzer Prize’s most prestigious categories. Filmmaker Laura Poitras also won for her NSA articles in collaboration with Glenn...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sofia Norlin (Broken Hill Blues)
Born in Njurunda in Sweden in 1974, Sofia Norlin studied film in Stockholm and Paris, where she now lives and works as a theater and film director. Her 2005 film Les Courants screened at numerous...