Meryl Streep Calls for More Women Film Critics

Posted on October 9, 2015 at 8:00 am

The Hollywood Reporter quotes Meryl Streep on the disproportionate number of male film critics on Rotten Tomatoes: “The word isn’t ‘disheartening,’ it’s ‘infuriating,’” she said. “I submit to you that men and women are not the same. They like different things. Sometimes they like the same things, but their tastes diverge. If the Tomatometer is slided so completely to one set of tastes, that drives box office in the U.S., absolutely.”

Streep made these comments in London, where she is appearing at the premiere of her new film, “Suffragette,” about the women who fought for the vote in the UK.

In a related story, The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has launched an investigation of gender disparities in the film and television industry, following a request made by the American Civil Liberties Union in May.

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Coming on PBS: The Women’s List, With Margaret Cho, Madeleine Albright, Betsey Johnson, Shonda Rhimes, and More

Posted on August 25, 2015 at 8:00 am

The Women’s List is coming to PBS as a part of the American Masters series on September 25, 2015, featuring:

Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1997-2001
Gloria Allred, lawyer
Laurie Anderson, artist
Sara Blakely, entrepreneur
Margaret Cho, comedian
Edie Falco, actor
Elizabeth Holmes, scientist and entrepreneur
Betsey Johnson, fashion designer
Alicia Keys, singer-songwriter
Aimee Mullins, athlete and fashion model
Nancy Pelosi, politician
Rosie Perez, actor
Shonda Rhimes, writer-producer
Wendy Williams, talk show host
Nia Wordlaw, pilot

New Report: Same Disappointing Results on Diversity on Film and in the Film Industry

Posted on August 14, 2015 at 10:24 am

A new study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism documents the vastly over-proportionate portrayals of white males on film and in filmmaking. Their review of 700 top-grossing films from 2007-2014 found:

Gender. Only 30.2% of the 30,835 speaking characters evaluated were female across the 700 top‐grossing films
from 2007 to 2014. This calculates to a gender ratio of 2.3 to 1. Only 11% of 700 films had gender‐balanced casts
or featured girls/women in roughly half (45‐54.9%) of the speaking roles.

Race/Ethnicity. Of those characters coded for race/ethnicity across 100 top films of 2014, 73.1% were White, 4.9% were Hispanic/Latino, 12.5% were Black, 5.3% were Asian, 2.9% were Middle Eastern, <1% were American Indian/Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 1.2% were from “other” racial and/or ethnic groupings. This represents no change in the portrayal of apparent race/ethnicity from 2007‐2014.

LGBT. Across 4,610 speaking characters in the 100 top films of 2014, only 19 were Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual. Not one Transgender character was portrayed. Ten characters were coded as Gay, 4 were Lesbian, and 5 were Bisexual. Only 14 movies sample wide featured an LGB depiction and none of those films were animated. Of the LGB characters coded, nearly two‐thirds were male (63.2%) and only 36.8% were female. LGB characters were also predominantly White (84.2%). Only 15.8% were from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds.

Behind the scenes is even worse.

The landscape of popular cinema in 2014 remains skewed and stereotypical. Across 700 films and over 30,000 speaking characters from 2007 to present, movies continue to distort the demographic reality of their audience. Film characters are overwhelmingly White and male, despite both population statistics and viewing patterns.

Employment trends behind the camera evidence a similar dearth of diversity. Only five Black directors helmed top movies in 2014, and women were underrepresented by a factor of 5.3 to 1 as directors, writers, and producers in 2014. Further, the 100 top films of 2014 featured no Asian directors. Despite activism, attention, and statements about addressing the issue, Hollywood’s default setting for characters and content creators remains fixed on “status quo.”

Vox on Makeover Movies

Posted on July 11, 2015 at 3:55 pm

In my book, The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies, there is a discussion of “makeover movies.”

Little girls and bigger ones see a lot of what I call “makeover movies:” in a crucial scene Our Heroine gets a new dress and hairstyle (or just takes off her glasses) and her life changes. Sometimes she transforms herself, as Ella does in “The Bells are Ringing” , causing her to have enormous conflicts and self-doubt. More often, she is transformed by someone else. Cinderella gets a dress to go to the ball, where the prince falls in love with her. Sleeping Beauty’s ballgown is so crucial that the fairies’ fight over its color literally leads the bad fairy to her hideaway. The modern counterparts are Eliza Doolittle, who, like Cinderella, goes to a ball in borrowed finery (and accent) and dazzles everyone there (“My Fair Lady” ) and “Gigi” who is actually groomed by her grandmother and great-aunt to be a very elegant prostitute, trained almost like a geisha in manners and skills for pleasing a man. Over and over, we see the heroines rewarded for being passive pleasers.

Transformation themes have been a central part of stories long before there were movies. The examples above were fairy tales before they were on screen. And girls and women are not the only ones who are transformed; superheroes all have origin stories that are a form of makeover, though they are changing to fantasy versions for themselves, and not to get positive attention from the opposite sex.

VOX has a nice commentary on makeover movies.

Amazon Will No Longer Sell “Boys Toys” and “Girls Toys” — Just “Toys”

Posted on May 11, 2015 at 3:32 pm

There is only one person who should decide which toy is fun — the person who plays with it. Not the manufacturers or the retailers. President Obama wisely pointed this out by refusing to accept the labels on toys at a holiday giveaway.

Now mega-seller Amazon has decided to no longer categorize toys as “girl’s toys” or “boy’s toys.” Everything is just Toys.

I can only say: Well played.