ALL POSTS
Jenji Kohan Talks Equal Pay and Being Told Men Are Funnier
There is an awesome profile in the current issue of The Hollywood Reporter on Jenji Kohan, the creator and showrunner of Orange is the New Black. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say...
Study: Latina Women Most Likely to Be Naked On Screen
A new study spearheaded by Dr. Stacy L. Smith at USC’s Annenberg School confirms what we already know: Hollywood sucks at portraying racial diversity. But here’s a surprise: It doesn’t suck...
Sundance Award-Winning Rich Hill Director Tracy Droz Tragos on the Injustice of Rural Poverty and How Motherhood Can Open Doors to Documentarians
“People expect me to have a better future than Ido. I don’t know what to do anymore.” So declares a twelve-year-old boy lessthan five minutes into this film, and at once we are ruthlessly...
Director Leigh Silverman on Mounting the Broadway Musical Violet and Working with Sutton Foster
Violet is one of those rare Broadway shows where less is more. The sparsely set stage is a perfect showcase for veteran Broadway actress Sutton Foster to soar in her Tony-nominated role. Foster...
Quotes of the Day: Zoe Saldana on Hollywood Sexism and Ageism
On the PR trail for Guardians of the Galaxy, Zoe Saldana, who plays the alien orphan Gamora in the Marvel movie, has been surprisingly open about the sexism and ageism she’s encountered in...
Guest Post: How I Quit the LA Actor Race and Became the Filmmaker I Always Wanted to Be
Ever since I saw Jaws, I knew I wanted to be a director. I wanted to take people on the same thrill ride I’d experienced watching that movie. I came to Los Angeles and got on set as quickly as I...
Weekly Update for July 25: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Very Good Girls — Written and Directed by Naomi Foner Very Good Girls, the first directing effort from veteran screenwriter Naomi Foner, is a nostalgic look at girls...
You’re the Worst: Misanthropes In Love
FX premiered two new sitcoms last week, Married and You’re the Worst. As I sort of expected, the latter is the interesting one. Perhaps Married will get better (as I have heard it does), but the...
Sandra Bullock to Play Tupperware Marketing Exec in Biopic
Sandra Bullock has been choosy with her post-Gravity projects, but the actress has finally selected a new starring vehicle: an untitled biopic of Tupperware marketing exec Brownie Wise. Wise was the...
Jessica Chastain to Be Honored at Deauville Film Fest
Two months before the arrival of her next film, the marriage drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, news arrives that Jessica Chastain will be honored at the Deauville American Film Festival...
An Open Letter to TV Showrunners: There Are Over 1200 Experienced, Accomplished Women Directors Waiting to Be Hired
Dear TV Showrunners, I haveknown many of you over the years as colleagues, bosses and friends. I know youto be a group of professionals with the highest work ethic and a mindfulapproach to your...
The Resurrection of Don’t Trust the B — — : Score One (More) For Difficult Women
I never really got how beloved Don’t Trust the B — — in Apartment 23 was until Logo announced it will broadcast its eight final, unseen episodes, starting this Saturday at 10 PM. They were...
The Big O: 2015 Oscar Preview: Expect Reese to Rise Again and a Woman to Crash the Directing Category
Wow, that was fast. The movie year is already half over, and if you are a fan of Legos, sequels to bombastic blockbusters, and just-OK comedies, you probably think everything has been awesome in...
Jane Clark Talks ‘Crazy Bitches,’ Horror Films and Slasher Satire
Seven crazy bitches and one fabulous gay guy take a weekend getaway to a remote ranch for some R&R, gossip, and grub, to celebrate their friend Alice’s birthday. What the group finds out is...
Universal Chief Donna Langley: There is No “Magic Bullet” to Improve Number of Women Directors Working on Studio Films
The Summer DGA Quarterly has hit and director Nicole Holofcener is on the cover. I have been told that Nicole is only the second-ever female director to be featured on the cover, the first being...
Patricia Arquette on Why Boyhood is Winning Over Audiences and Why She Loves Network TV
Perhaps best known for playing the title character in NBC’s Medium (2005–2011), Patricia Arquette co-stars in Boyhood (out today), the passion project that director Richard Linklater filmed in...
Land Ho! Director Martha Stephens on Her Raunchy Comedy About Two Old Men and Her Unlikely Muse
Land Ho! tells the story of two very different ex-brothers-in-law whotravel to Iceland for a holiday. It’s about life and regrets and coming toterms with the fact that you are getting older....
Halle Berry and Alien Babies: Will Extant Revive the Mystical Pregnancy?
In pop culture, one of the best ways for a female character to get some distance from gender clichés is to literally leave Earth. To wit: Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien movies; the...
Jessica Williams is Leaving “The Daily Show” After Raising Its Game
Jessica Williams: “The Daily Show” Your favorite “Daily Show” correspondent is leaving the late-night program. Entertainment Weekly has revealed that Jessica Williams’ last episode will be...
Snow White Sequel Ditches Snow White
Where a poisoned apple failed, Hollywood sexism will succeed. News arrived last week that a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, the 2012 action-oriented feminist revision of the fairy tale, will...
Bound by Flesh Director Leslie Zemeckis on the Love Story Between Two Conjoined-Twin Sisters
Atthe height of their fame, conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton were thetoast of vaudeville. They were among the highest-paid entertainers on thecircuit, and a young Bob Hope was part of their...
Out in the Night Traces an Attempt to Seek Justice for Queer Women of Color
In Newark, New Jersey, in May 2003, 19-year-old butch lesbian Sakia Gunn was stabbed to death after she politely turned down a sexual advance by an unknown man by telling him that she was a...
Chicken & Egg Awards 23 Follow-Up Grants; Places Open Call for New Projects
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the only nonprofit film fund devoted solely to supporting women documentary directors, has announced that it will endow follow-up grants to 23 ongoing feature-length...
Why Maleficent is the Rape Revenge Film That We Need
Warning: Lots of Maleficent spoilers ahead.Not since I Spit on Your Grave have I seen such an intrepid and compelling rape-revenge film. I am talking, of course, about Disney’s Maleficent, the...
Feminist Western The Homesman Gets Release Date
One of the films most anticipated by Women and Hollywood is the 2014 Palme d’Or competitor The Homesman. As a dusty, female-centric Western about doing the right thing despite enormous and...
Human Rights Watch Women Directors: Meet Anne de Mare & Kirsten Kelly (The Homestretch)
Filmmakers and theater artists Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly have been making documentaries together for over a decade. Their work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Sundance...
Iranian Director Mahnaz Mohammadi Jailed, Inspires Petition Demanding Her Release
The imprisonment of Iranian filmmaker, actress, and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi since June 7 has sparked international concern and outrage. Mohammadi has been sentenced to a...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Iva Radivojevic (Evaporating Borders)
Iva Radivojevic is an award-winning filmmaker who spent her early years in Yugoslavia and Cyprus before settling in NYC over a decade ago. Her work explores the themes of identity, migration and...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Rachel Beth Anderson (First to Fall)
Rachel Beth Anderson, a Sundance Award-winning cinematographer, has filmed around the world in several conflict zones, including Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, and South Sudan, for...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Cynthia Hill
Cynthia Hill crafts documentaries that take a complex approach to critical contemporary issues, creating story-driven and visually rich films. Private Violence is Hill’s fourth feature...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Jennifer M. Kroot (To Be Takei)
Jennifer M. Kroot directed the documentary feature It Came From Kuchar, about the legendary underground filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar, which premiered at the 2009 South by Southwest Film...
It’s the Little Things That Make OITNB One of the Best Shows on TV
Orange is the New Black is back, and its arrival seems to have elevated the term “binge-watching” to a new level. But when did binge-watching become de rigeur for showing appreciation for a...
LAFF Women Directors: Meet Rania Attieh (Recommended by Enrique)
Rania Attieh, among Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 Faces of Independent Film” in 2011, is a Guggenheim and U.S. Rockefeller Fellow in film/ video. Attieh is from Tripoli, Lebanon. Together with...
Shonda Rhimes’ Dartmouth Commencement Speech: “Dreamers Often End Up Living in the Basements of Relatives”
This past Sunday, Shonda Rhimes doled out some tough love — and shared a few great anecdotes — at the commencement ceremony at Dartmouth University, her alma mater. Her overall message...
Crosspost: The Fault in Our Stars: Our Love Affair with Romance and Feminism
Pain demands to be felt. So goes one of the wise lines from John Green’s bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars. The line is prominently featured in the movie of the same title — and...
Obvious Child Director Gillian Robespierre: “We Don’t Make Abortion Funny. We Make a Character Funny.”
Obvious Child is the kind of movie that helped me remember why I love movies. I was laughing my ass off even before the credits, and that’s when I knew I was in for a treat. In this tightly...
Guest Post: Creating My Film Footprint: The Importance of Women on Both Sides of the Camera
As far back as I can remember, I have always hada deep passion for movies, which probably derives from my fascination with thehuman character. The ability that film offers to travelwith a character...
In Praise of “Go Fuck Y’Self” Women: Lori Petty in Orange is the New Black
Orange is the New Black is back Friday, all 13 episodes of the second season will be miraculously available at 12:01 AM on Netflix. And what a return it is. I’ve only seen the first episode, and...
June 2014 Film Preview
With only one movie with a female protagonist opening wide, June will be a lean month for women at the multiplex, even by Hollywood standards. Despite not being a feminist, Shailene Woodley will...
Maleficent Writer Linda Woolverton on Adapting Fairy Tales for a New Generation
Morethan a decade before Frozen’s Jennifer Lee became thefirst woman to direct a Walt Disney Animation Studios feature and Brave’s Brenda Chapman became thefirst female director of a Pixar film,...
Night Moves Director Kelly Reichardt On How Her “Action Film” Is About People, Not Politics
After gaining notice for Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff, her small but critically acclaimed collaborations with actress Michelle Williams, director Kelly Reichardt has made the...
The Other Women of Mad Men
In a recent Facebook discussion about the awful events of last weekend, and whether or not our sexist cultural landscape was to blame, I was reminded by a brilliant, feminist playwright friend of...
Mansplaining Away Hollywood Misogyny
This weekend, Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday took a much needed look at the correlation between Hollywood and violence. This is not the first time a critic has taken on the correlation between...
Crosspost: GendRE & IMDb: An Open-Data Analysis of the Film Industry Gender Gap
This post was originally published on No Country for Young Women. Last week, during the annual OECD Forum, I had the pleasure of discovering a new, groundbreaking initiative by entrepreneur Elian...
Why Shonda Rhimes’ Upcoming Fall Drama Is Already a Hit
No network was scrutinized more in this month’s Upfronts than ABC, which, for the past three seasons, has ranked dead last among the big four networks for viewers under 50. The female-skewing ABC...
Veep’s Selina Meyer and the Art of the Tantrum
“Temperament” is a word that’s been kicking around a lot over the last week in relation to women and the workplace. But let’s talk about the thing that’s really verboten for female bosses:...
Hollywood Feminist of the Day: Cate Blanchett Defends Mothers
Cate Blanchett has been on a roll calling out double standards in Hollywood. After blasting the film industry for giving movies about women the short shrift and lambasting E! for having its camera...
Guest Post: Directing a Feature Film With Sword in Hand
Myfirst experience in “keiko,” or fight practice in kendo, the Japanese art ofsword play, was over 20 years ago. Confronted with an experienced player’s bamboo sword, I was taken aback by the...
Guest Post: Bridging the Generational Gap Through Technology
In 2009, a documentary idea simply fell into my lap. My two younger sisters were in highschool when they decided to create a volunteer program called “Cyber-Seniors.” Inspiredby seeing our...
Fed Up Director Stephanie Soechtig on Voting with Our Forks, Working with Katie Couric, and the Power of Knowledge
“For the past 30 years, everything we thought we knew about food and exercise is dead wrong. Fed Up is the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see. From Katie Couric, Laurie David and...
Quote of the Day: Jane Campion Acknowledges the “Inherent Sexism” of the Film Industry At Cannes
Jane Campion is Cannes Jury President this year, and she’s using her platform to speak out against sexism in the film industry. While Campion is known for being outspoken about gender inequity in...