No room in Hollywood for the XX chromosome???
Of course there are women in movies today!
However...where is the balance? where are the stories of struggling women from 11 to 99 years old? The adventures of superheroines? The biopics of iron Ladies and Freedom fighters and Scientists?
As the old phrase says, "there are a thousand stories out there in the big city" and most likely, 5200 of them belong to women of such a wide spectrum as to be played by let's pick up 100 stories of those 10,000--- 52 very different women, of a wide variety of backgrounds and emphasis on action to mystery to drama, costumed, modern, future...to comedy, light as a feather or sharp as a knife?
They could be loners or partners or part of a community , highflyers or practical, dreamers or down to earth women and girls.
Here's a few articles about the "no country for women" old, young, child, girl, grrrl, 10, 40, 70 years old, famous or plain folks...No Norma Rae. No Queen Victoria. No little girl in a wildly magical reality somewhere in the South.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/06/17/2168531/how-hollywoods-disinterest-in-women-could-waste-a-generation-of-outrageously-talented-actresses/#more-2168531
Holmes’ piece scared me not just because of what it says about how Hollywood studios and Hollywood filmmakers think about women, or because of what these numbers suggest about how the rise of the international film market is making female characters less valuable, though those things are depressing too. Actually, I think the idea of women literally fading from our movie screens like Hermione Granger from the photos in her parents house after she casts a spell on them to erase herself from their lives scares me most because it means we could waste an outrageously talented generation of young female actors on the rise.
More below the folding curtain...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/14/191568762/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone?sc=tw&cc=share
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman - any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon - you can't. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
...
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by "we," I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says "win some, lose some" and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every "surprise success" about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
...
From the wonderful blog Women and Hollywood...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/women-aging-and-hollywood
In the Daily Mail, Cattrall comments on the lack of older women naked onscreeen.
We get covered up, we disappear, not to be seen, because we are no longer young and beautiful and sexually desirable. That's such a shame because everywhere else in the world they prop older women up on statues and platforms and podiums, saying, 'Not only is this a woman who is beautiful, but she has life experience too.
...
Susan Sarandon was as equally frank about aging as Cattrall in an interview for Oprah's Master Class. She told Oprah that many actresses couldn't make the transition once they aged--mostly because of the shift in the work they could get, as Sarandon explains.
You're so punished in this business. When people say, 'Do you think you've lost work because of your politics?' I say, 'No, You lose work because you get old and fat!' That's when they write you off in Hollywood.
I will continue this in an omnibus post next post...it was getting a little long and so stay tuned for Part Two.
Ironic Post-script: I am listening to the soundtrack of "I'm Not There", a movie which costarred Cate Blanchett as a "Dylanesque" beat singer-songwriter, and she was playing a "man's role" in "drag"...very rare, and I think somehow an interesting framing comment on the above articles about women and movies and Hollywood.
However...where is the balance? where are the stories of struggling women from 11 to 99 years old? The adventures of superheroines? The biopics of iron Ladies and Freedom fighters and Scientists?
As the old phrase says, "there are a thousand stories out there in the big city" and most likely, 5200 of them belong to women of such a wide spectrum as to be played by let's pick up 100 stories of those 10,000--- 52 very different women, of a wide variety of backgrounds and emphasis on action to mystery to drama, costumed, modern, future...to comedy, light as a feather or sharp as a knife?
They could be loners or partners or part of a community , highflyers or practical, dreamers or down to earth women and girls.
Here's a few articles about the "no country for women" old, young, child, girl, grrrl, 10, 40, 70 years old, famous or plain folks...No Norma Rae. No Queen Victoria. No little girl in a wildly magical reality somewhere in the South.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/06/17/2168531/how-hollywoods-disinterest-in-women-could-waste-a-generation-of-outrageously-talented-actresses/#more-2168531
Holmes’ piece scared me not just because of what it says about how Hollywood studios and Hollywood filmmakers think about women, or because of what these numbers suggest about how the rise of the international film market is making female characters less valuable, though those things are depressing too. Actually, I think the idea of women literally fading from our movie screens like Hermione Granger from the photos in her parents house after she casts a spell on them to erase herself from their lives scares me most because it means we could waste an outrageously talented generation of young female actors on the rise.
More below the folding curtain...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/14/191568762/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone?sc=tw&cc=share
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman - any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon - you can't. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
...
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by "we," I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says "win some, lose some" and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every "surprise success" about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
...
From the wonderful blog Women and Hollywood...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/women-aging-and-hollywood
In the Daily Mail, Cattrall comments on the lack of older women naked onscreeen.
We get covered up, we disappear, not to be seen, because we are no longer young and beautiful and sexually desirable. That's such a shame because everywhere else in the world they prop older women up on statues and platforms and podiums, saying, 'Not only is this a woman who is beautiful, but she has life experience too.
...
Susan Sarandon was as equally frank about aging as Cattrall in an interview for Oprah's Master Class. She told Oprah that many actresses couldn't make the transition once they aged--mostly because of the shift in the work they could get, as Sarandon explains.
You're so punished in this business. When people say, 'Do you think you've lost work because of your politics?' I say, 'No, You lose work because you get old and fat!' That's when they write you off in Hollywood.
I will continue this in an omnibus post next post...it was getting a little long and so stay tuned for Part Two.
Ironic Post-script: I am listening to the soundtrack of "I'm Not There", a movie which costarred Cate Blanchett as a "Dylanesque" beat singer-songwriter, and she was playing a "man's role" in "drag"...very rare, and I think somehow an interesting framing comment on the above articles about women and movies and Hollywood.