Women writers, directors and stars were consigned largely to the background, beginning with the very expensive advent of sound, when Eastern and Western bankers - all male - provided the money to convert the studios and got both a piece of the action and a big role in providing the direction the movie business went in. Most people will be shocked to discover that it wasn’t always this way. Reese and Marisa, Tiffany and Cate, Sandra Oh and many, many others echo the sentiment, “We have been ‘otherized’ by men.”Īnd on and on “This Changes Everything Goes,” a mountain of evidence presented that Hollywood has both had a huge hand in objectifying and marginalizing women in America, and that it practices that marginalization off-camera as well. Natalie Portman acknowledges being turned into an object onscreen while footage of her first film, “The Professional,” plays over her complaint. She figured out, “This movie is not MADE for you…You see yourself through the eyes of the male camera operator…When I think I’m acting, it’s really the camera just panning across my ass.” Kramer,” trying to make more of a believable character out of someone who didn’t have the same gender as the writer, director or anybody else with authority on the set.Īctress turned #MeToo activist Rose McGowan notes how she can’t watch much of the work she was offered, and wouldn’t advise little girls to, either. Meryl Streep breaks down and critiques her somewhat self-scripted turn in “Kramer vs. Henson notes how she kept her mouth shut at the sort of subservient “in the hood” roles she was offered at the beginning of her career, how she’s never met a female cinematographer on the set. That landed her in “Tootsie.” “”The very first thing I shot was in my underwear, with Dustin (Hoffman).” She was up for a part where “She had to look good in her underwear” and Davis had been in Victoria’s Secret catalog. Geena Davis, a president on TV, an Oscar winner and a driving force in gathering much of the data we have on the vast scope of this problem, opens Tom Donahue’s movie by remembering her first big screen break. “This Changes Everything” features a sea of female faces and voices, Oscar winners in front of the camera, shakers and movers behind it, and many, many women who say their careers were curtailed because of the sexism that relegated them to second class citizens in a business that, in turn, passes that status on in the on-screen role models it serves up for America and the world to emulate. Here’s a documentary that lays the whole problem out, from identifying the injustice to suggesting “action” steps that could rectify it. “This Changes Everything.” Only it almost never does. A burst, here and there, of “Let’s get more female screenwriting voices on the screen,” more women directors, etc., may last a year or three.Ī movie like “Thelma & Louise” comes along, or a “Wonder Woman,” TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” blow up, and the media covering Hollywood use the magic phrase. A few years of pro-active hiring practices raised the number of female members of the Directors Guild of America from one or two percent, to 15 percent. On film and on TV, “the women are in orbit around the men.” The vast majority of female characters are peripheral. Put down the data and watch those movies and TV shows. Go on down the filmdom food chain - four of five narrators of TV and film are male, one in four lead characters in your typical movie are female. In 2018, 85% of the top 100 movies were scripted by men, 92% of the directors of the top 250 films were male. You can sit back - if you’re say, Hollywood - and claim that gender discrimination on the screen, behind the screen, writing the stories that fill the screen and signing off on the checks that feed the entertainment beast, “went away” with the culture-shifting movements and legislation of the past 50 years.Īnd then the hard, naked numbers stare you in the face and show you that’s just not true.
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