I'd Love to See A Movie, but There's Nothing Good Playing

• Share This Post
• submit
• 3
• Sparkle (
  0
  )
   

If one squints a bit at the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s current issue (October 6, 2006), you can make out a headline about a special report reading, “Hollywood Doesn’t Give A Damn About Women” set against the backdrop of the always delightful Kate Winslet’s bare shoulders and cascading blonde locks. As my friend, on holiday from London, exclaimed when she spotted the headline, “No shit! This is breaking news?!?”

While most of us feel the same way as my friend, the article is worth a read. How often do mainstream entertainment magazines write about “Hollywood vs. Women?” Usually these types of articles focus on how hard it is for actresses to find quality roles, but have nary a word to say about how women as an audience continue to be ignored. As the article says:

Women make up half the population, yet the studios continue to make movies and spend billions as if they didn’t exist, focusing virtually all their attention on luring men to the multiplex…To put it in terms even Hollywood executives might understand, there are more than 3 billion potential ticket buyers out there with two X chromosomes. Women aren’t a special-interest group or a “niche” market; they’re half the audience. Making movies that appeal to them (and maybe even to their husbands, fathers, and sons) is what we call good business sense.

This is a nice wake up call for reform, but in a side bar called “A Woman’s Best Friend: Directors who make actresses shine,” all six directors listed are men. Another side related article, “If We Ran Their Careers: Not the they’ve asked, but EW offers some tips for 10 high-profile actresses,” recommends that Rachel McAdams do “a Jane Austen adaptation, directed by Jane Campion” and that Reese Witherspoon star in a Nicole Holofcener comedy. Every other actress is paired with a male director, adding up to a whopping two women out of the 16 directors mentioned. Other than writer/director Holofcener, the only woman writer whose name is mentioned has been dead for nearly 200 years. I guess that women are not to be counted on to help other women; we need male directors and no modern women authors/screenwriters to make us the best we can be as actresses. (Granted, one of the main article’s recommendations for fixing the situation is that more women should be hired as writers, directors, producers, and executives, but they don’t seem to follow their own advice in the examples they site, which are very acting-centric.)

Focusing on the issue of directors for a moment, the previous week’s edition of EW highlights quite nicely one of the problems that may arise from the dearth of women directors. One of my favorite features in Entertainment Weekly is when a famous director or actor goes over his/her track record of past movies, and this is what an article about Brian De Palma entailed on the eve of his new movie, The Black Dahlia. Initially, I was considering seeing this movie. Ever since there was an episode of Hunter (my favorite show after The Golden Girls when I was in junior high; I loved watching Hunter while I babysitting, and often called my Hebrew school crush Jeremy and we’d watch it over the phone together) about the Black Dahlia, I have been intrigued by this gruesome unsolved mystery. After I read the interview, I not only decided not to see The Black Dahlia, but most likely any future movies with which this man is involved. He said:

In any movie, as soon as you see a girl, you’re waiting for her to take her clothes off. You’ll sit there and watch her forever for this to happen. I get attacked for putting women in jeopardy and having them get attacked, but I’m sorry, if I’m going to photograph someone in peril, showing a woman in a negligee holding a candelabra is a lot more interesting to me than some guy walking around with a flashlight.

Nope. Maybe Mr. De Palma and other guys (and possibly some women) go to movies and wait with bated breath for actresses’ titties to appear and, if they are really lucky, a glimpse of the cooch, but that sure as hell doesn’t describe my movie interests or desires.

Anyway, the special report on women and Hollywood notes that, “In 2006, the major studios will release barely a dozen women-driven films” but