“Supergirl” Co-Creator and “Empire” Showrunner Call For Change at Alliance of Women Directors Awards
The dismal status of female directors in television was a hot topic at the Alliance of Women Directors Awards and Benefit on Friday, with honorees Irene Chaikin and Greg Berlanti calling on everyone to take up the cause of getting women behind the camera.
“It is probably accurate to say that almost every single woman that works in our business has encountered institutional sexism in one form or another,” said Chaiken, showrunner for Fox’s hit series, “Empire,” according to Deadline’s report. Her award was presented by one of the the show’s stars, Academy Award nominee Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”).
“We’ve found a host of ways to endure and navigate, but we’ve all got stories, right?” she continued. “We’ve made gains over the years, but we’ve also backslid. It’s a much reported fact that the most recent statistics are grim. Maybe it’s progress that some of the behavior that was once rampant is no longer tolerated, and some of the most overt rhetoric now has to be toned down or delivered with subterfuge. But it would be an understatement to say that women still face obstacles to achieving equality.”
“Tonight,” Chaikin added, “I feel in good company saying I have an agenda. Personally, I have a bunch of them; a gay agenda; an inclusive agenda. The Alliance of Women Directors is one of the best things that’s happened for my most cherished agenda, the one I believe is the most important — full and total equality for women. It’s an agenda that I inherited from my mother, that I share with my wife, and that I’ll pass on to my daughters.”
“Supergirl” co-creator Berlanti has become a promising male advocate over the years, and called on men to ignore the idea that the issue may not apply to them and instead take up the cause, Buzzfeed reported. “As I started running show, it was just a natural thing for me to want to hire as many women as I could. Through the years, in writers’ rooms and edit bays, most of the staffs I put together were made of equal parts women and men. And then you would look at the directors list and they always seemed like they were from a different era — like something out of ‘Mad Men.’ It was all white dudes…This seemed very odd to me. But you would hear the same Catch 22 refrain — a network and a studio had to have worked with a person to hire them. Well, if women were getting less opportunities, how were they ever supposed to get the opportunities that would get them approved?”
After years of trying to circumvent that Catch 22, Berlanti promised that 50 percent of the directors on the upcoming season of his show “Arrow” would be directed by women or people of color. He explained, “I have no doubt that many of these directors will then have the material they need to convince film studios they’re the right women to be directing the tentpole films the studios are making these days. Obviously, we haven’t done enough yet; I haven’t done enough yet; this needs to keep happening until it’s no longer a conversation — it’s just a way of life.”
The other AWD honorees of the evening included film director Jen McGowan, Chiara Tilesi, and Albert Berger of the film production company We Do It Together.
“We are not a minority,” McGowan said. “We don’t need token women; we need a multitude of women’s voices. The lack of vision in the industry is always someone else’s fault. If you are not personally contributing to the solution, you are part of the problem. But all problems are solvable. Each one of us can contribute to solving this. We must, and we will.”
