Eleven female directors reveal the sexism they've experienced in the film industry, experienced professionals treated with less respect than newbie males:
"On my first assignment when I went by to meet the executive producer, he came out to the lobby, his hand outstretched to greet me. Then he stopped in his tracks, withdrew his hand, and said, “You’re a woman!” Guess the name “Marty” caught him off guard. He never did shake my hand. The next day, I was off the show and a guy was reassigned. Years later, I was having meetings regarding directing, and was often told by producers, “We had a woman director last season, and it didn’t work out too well.” I never asked if any of the men “didn’t work out.”" [The Wrap]

Mila Kunis on Hollywood sexism.

Film Kunis writes on Medium about some of the male behaviour she's encountered during her career, even after becoming a successful producer. However shocking some of this, isn't unsurprising. I can't imagine how you navigate this and still remain true to yourself:

"In the process of pitching this show to a major network, the typical follow-up emails were sent to executives at this network. In this email chain, this producer chose to email the following:

“And Mila is a mega star. One of biggest actors in Hollywood and soon to be Ashton’s wife and baby momma!!!”

"This is the entirety of his email. Factual inaccuracies aside, he reduced my value to nothing more than my relationship to a successful man and my ability to bear children. It ignored my (and my team’s) significant creative and logistical contributions.

"We withdrew our involvement in the project."

You can imagine the producer's reaction. "What did I say? What did I say?" Kunis explains that he said it was just a "light-hearted comment" not really understanding that it's the fact that he would make that comment at all which is the reason why the actor/producer wouldn't work with him. It's about having a particular mindset which would lead to him thinking that was ok. The ultimate expression of it is to describe that tape as "locker room talk".

Tessa Thompson on Veronica Mars.

TV The intersection has finally happened for Tessa Thompson with key roles in huge films this past couple of years, Creed, Selma and Dear White People which has led to a further three big roles in amongst other things Thor: Ragnarok.

Buzzfeed celebrates the occasion with an extensive interview in the old Rolling Stone style, following the actress as she goes about her business.

The writer, herself black, expresses embarrassment that a large percentage of the piece is about the implications of their position within society in a way which would not be a topic if the subject was white or a man, but agree that it's important that these stories are told so that everything can change.

Here's the paragraph when it brief alights on the moment when Thompson played Wallace's girlfriend in Veronica Mars, one of a series of a bit problematic elements of an otherwise great series. Her character was set to be some sort of femme fatale figure but the execution was at times somewhat one dimensional:

"Two years later, Thompson landed her first TV gig as a 1930s lesbian bootlegger in an episode of Cold Case. For the next near-decade, she picked up roles in dozens of television shows and movies, learning early on she had an affinity for characters whose race was central to the performance — whether she wanted it to be or not. On Season 2 of Veronica Mars, she played Jackie Cook, the title character’s best friend’s girlfriend, a role that was ultimately written off the show due to poor reception from fans. “Even on that show, a show that was so smart, I felt like my character was still boxed into a space of being the black girl,” she says."

Dear White People is on Netflix UK and one of the best films I've seen this year. It should be a fixture for a while - Netflix have announced a television series and although some of the film cast will return, Thompson is onwards to other things.

Romola on preserving film.

Film The (future) Doctor gazes into a hand-held time space visualiser at footage of the original suffragettes and comments on the implications of being able to see something as it happened rather than having rely on contemporary written reports.

Claudia Wells on Back To The Future II.

Film Claudia Wells played Jennifer in Back To The Future but hadn't given up acting to care for a sick relative so decided not to participate in the sequels and was replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Under The Radar has an interview with her today which asks her how she felt when she saw the two sequels. It's a cornucopia of trivia and not just about BTTF:

"I saw Part II in the theaters, and I saw Part III in the theaters. Both times I went by myself and slumped down in the seat and watched the movie with everyone else. It’s funny that Elizabeth Shue got the part, because I’d screen tested for Adventures in Babysitting. That role had come down between her, me, and Phoebe Cates. So, the fact that she wound up getting my role in Back to the Future is a funny synchronicity.

"Almost every movie in the 1980s came down between the three of us and Sarah Jessica Parker. It was the same group, no matter how many people auditioned, it was almost always the same people it came down to, just switching up who got it. Phoebe Cates got Gremlins, and then I got Phoebe Cates’ role, Linda Barret, in Fast Times [the TV series]. So, literally, it was a very small group of people that got most of the parts.

"There was one audition one morning where Sarah Jessica Parker and I were trying for the lead in a movie, and then that afternoon it was between the two of us for the starring role in Martin Sheen’s directorial debut, Babies Having Babies. When I saw Sarah again that afternoon, I went to her and said, “Sarah, let’s make a deal. You get one part, and I’ll get the other. Let’s shake on it.” [Laughs] As if we had any power. So we shook on it, and she got the morning part, and I got the afternoon part."

This has happened ever since, a small pool of actresses working around projects. My guess is it's something like Emma Stone, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Williams and for a time Carey Mulligan with Shailene Woodley in there too.

As a bonus, here's Wells giving an interview in French:

Sarah Silverman on her Career.

Film Note I haven't actually watched this yet, but putting it here so I can remind myself to. In a rare move, TIFF have included clips that they're talking about, which are usually edited out for copyright reasons.  But yes, can't wait.

Linda Gray on Directing.

TV The most recent Random Roles on the AV Club is Linda Grey. Back in the 80s when he contract renegotiation happened for season eight of Dallas, she didn't want more money, she wanted to direct an episode. This was the response:

"... at the end of season eight I went to my producers—it was the time to negotiate for the next two years—and I said, “I would like to direct.” I had been studying with a French woman director, whom I adored. And I said, look, I don’t want to go in there and say, “I want to direct and and you’re going to let me direct, blah blah blah.” I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to go in with a solid bag of my solid work, my homework, and I did it. I said to my director I was studying with, “Tell me when you feel that I’m ready.” So after a long time, she said, “Okay. You’re ready.”

"So I went in at the end of season eight and I said, “I’m really tired of Sue Ellen drinking and having affairs. And the world is changing and women are changing and I really would like to direct.” And I said, “I don’t want money, I’m not asking for money, I’m just asking to direct one in 52 episodes. The next 52.” And they said no."

To spoil the ensuing text, Larry Hagman threatened to resign and so they let Gray direct and as a surprise to the them, because men, was pretty good and ended up directing at least five according to the IMDb.  As a side note, I'd love to know which French woman director was mentoring her.  Let's pretend it was Agnès Varda.

Olivia Wilde on Producing.

Film Olivia Wilde has decided that the only way to get the kinds of films she wants to appear in to be made is to take a more active producing role. After gaining some experience on Joe Swanberg's superb Drinking Buddies, she's now going to champion female filmmakers, beginning with Reed Marano, an otherwise cinematographer who's new film Meadowland, in which she's starring and producing (trailer above). Buzzfeed interviews:

Wilde was also motivated by her desire to support a female filmmaker in an industry where directors who are women are still consistently overlooked. In her quest to get funding for the film, Wilde was confronted directly by the gender bias she was rallying against.

“It was incredibly difficult to get financing,” she said. “Reed Morano has DP-ed Oscar-[nominated] films. She is no newbie. Of course she’d make a great director based on [her] experience. So for me, it seems like a pretty safe investment. I wonder if it would have been easier if she were a man. I suspect it would have been.”

The piece is diplomatically short on detail. We don't discover who refused to fund the film and the reasons they gave (presumably because to break those confidence could affect future projects).  Let's hope the funding process on Marano's next film, Lioness, coming in 2017 film and starring Ellen Page is much simpler.

Jennifer Lawrence's Wage.

Film From Lenny, Lena Dunham's new newsletter:

"It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me)."

Unarguably, J-Law's the most famous actor in American Hustle thanks to the two franchises she's talking about and yet they thought it fair to pay the three blokes more money.  Shame on them.  I daren't think how much Scar-Jo is getting at Disney for The Avengers films in comparison to her co-stars.

“Girly-girl”

Film I think I'm just going to keep posting these quotes because something has to change. Whilst it's true that Raimi's Spider-Man was filmed and released over fifteen years ago, the second paragraph explains why this is still relevant.

  Kristen Dunst being interview by Elizabeth Day in The Observer:

"We start talking about whether the pressure to look a certain way is stronger for women than it is for men. Does she think the film industry is sexist? “God. These conversations are always so, like…” She pauses and I see her actively decide to say what she really feels. “I mean, yeah,” she concludes. She recalls that, when she was filming Spider-Man at the age of 18, the older men on set – including director Raimi – would call her “Girly-girl”.

“I didn’t like that at all. I mean, I think they meant it as endearing, but at my age I took it as dismissive.” At the time she was too intimidated to speak up for herself. But recently she found herself working with the same first assistant director on another film. “I told him how much that upset me,” she says. “And he treated me completely differently on this movie and we got along really well. He’s a great guy.”

More on Women in Film.

Film The Observer this weekend ran a couple of pieces about women in film which underscore, just as this tiff Q&A does, the huge gap between men and women in the industry. Firstly an interview with Geena Davis, who is a key example of how Hollywood treats its actresses so poorly:

At 59, Davis is familiar with the crushing silence of a phone that never rings. Women in film are, she says “definitely” discriminated against because of their age.

“I was averaging about one movie a year my whole career and that was because I’m fussy. I probably could have done more. And then in my 40s I made one movie… And I was positive it wasn’t going to happen to me because I got a lot of great parts for women. I was very fortunate to have all that stuff happen and never get typecast, so I was just cruising along thinking: ‘Well yeah, it won’t happen to me.’ It did.”

Then nine women in film talk about the sexism they've either seen or experienced themselves. Agnes Godard, cinematographer:

"I have experienced sexism at work. Most of the time it’s a refusal to do what you’ve asked, or to doubt the legitimacy of the instruction. The most illustrative thing I went through was a long time ago, in 1983, when I was a focus puller on the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas. The director of photography (DoP) was Robby Müller and I split my role with his usual focus puller. One week Robby wasn’t there and I set the camera and did a frame. When Robby arrived, he said, “Who did this beautiful frame? It’s really good”, and the grip, who was next to me, said it was the male assistant who made it. I was just speechless – I felt invisible. I think I said something, but it was like a whisper, because I was astonished. And I was shy and quite young at the start of my career, and I didn’t feel I could complain."

Trigger warning: the comments on both articles fulfil Lewis's Law.

Financing Female-Led Films.

Film Find embedded above a TIFF Industry discussion about the financing of female-led films, encompassing what's gone wrong in the past and with an idea for the kinds of action which could and should be taken in the future. The too long to watch version is that because women have always been in the minority on boards and in decision making roles even if a discrimination in creative circles isn't actively brought by men it can be unconsciously. The action plan is essentially to create goals. The best contributor is Anna Serner, the CEO of the Swedish Film Institute were 50% of the productions they finance are by women directors and as she notes it's all very well women filmmakers getting together in support networks and talking but its then up to them to take their talents up the hierarchy.

Frankly, and let's call them what they are, man films made by men about men for men. To unfairly selecting something at random, I watched the exceedingly average Out of the Furnace recently which stars Christian Bale as a mill worker who's trying to protect his younger wayward war veteran brother Casey Affleck. There's more to it than that, but suffice to say there's some punching and shooting and shouting and amongst a cast which includes the likes of Woody Harrelson and Willem Defoe there's room for just one female character, played as she so often is by Zoe Saldana. Now the potential argument is that the film's portraying a world in which there are few women and in which these men don't much interact with women, but my counter-argument would be ask why we have to see that again?

Despite only appearing in about three scenes, it's soon pretty clear that Saldana's character's story arc is a lot more original and interesting than the generically grim nonsense happening elsewhere but the filmmakers, all men, just simply aren't interested in expanding her role beyond girlfriend who leaves and hooks up with someone else in order to cause the protagonist pain. To have done so would have led to a completely different film, but I suppose my point is we've otherwise seen this film. We haven't seen the version of this film which is about her character. Not that there's any reason why this story couldn't be told with women in the lead roles either beyond the usual lazy gender stereotypes and that in and of itself would have created the necessary variance.

But as the discussion touches upon, it's also about recognising that women make up 50% of the world's population and that not having more than one woman in a lead role both behind and in front of the camera is morally wrong. Flicking through the winter preview section of this month's Empire, all I see are pages and pages of films with male protagonists, often with the character's name in the title. Apart from The Hunger Games (and possibly Star Wars), when women are visible it's as part of an ensemble and even then often as a romantic interest or daughter and the vast majority of this work is created by men. But when these things are made and are successful, as the panel agrees it's treated as a fluke rather than something to be turned into a movement and I'd add if they're a failure it stops that kind of film being made again as if that's what's important.