November 22, 2015
"Why isn't the big Hollywood player who said 'call some chicks' named? What did he do to earn anonymity in this story?"
The 3rd highest-rated comment on a NYT article by Maureen Dowd titled "The Women of Hollywood Speak Out/Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"
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47 comments:
"What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"
They will need to get rid of the leftist Democrats who run Hollywood.
Because he's well known supporter of democrats. Can't cast aspersions on a dem.
[Leslye Headland] wants to look cool in magazine pictures so that ‘‘little girls will put female filmmakers on their Pinterest boards.’’
(1) Little Girls don't have Pinterest Boards.
(2) Why can't Little Boys hold her in high regard?
Only third? You're going to make me go read Dowd's BS so I can see the comments rated higher.
You fiend.
Hollywood's pretty much a Leftist cesspool now, isn't it? Why are Leftist women surprised that Leftist men take all the goodies? I thought R Crumb explained how the Hippies of he 60s operated.
As for cinematic art, Bay Area Gal took me to the see the James Bond movie last night, and it was so atrocious, so pointless, so humorless, so uninteresting, that, Yes, I would agree to replace Director Sam Mendes with Lena Dunham for the next one.
A viable market.
Have the top drawing actresses commit to appear only in films with a female director. Circulate a Letter of Commitment, gather signatures, publish it.
Problem solved.
Clearly there is tremendous opportunith here. I look forward to these powerful women applying their own risk capital and talents to build their own studio system free of sexism and the suppressing compensation structure of the old guard. No doubt they will put the old studio system out of business.
No doubt.
The comment is now down to #5. The number #1 comment starts out by saying "I've noticed for over 15 years now that there's hardly anything I want to see at movies because they almost all star men, while the female is relegated to being the wife, or hot girlfriend who smiles adoringly at her man." This suggests to me that she hasn't seen "Hunger Games," for one. Maybe she doesn't like Sci-Fi and missed "Alien" and its sequels.
OTOH I really do like the #4 comment: "Already you are displaying the usual chauvinist attitude by describing women only by what they wear. That's half the problem right there, that all women in the entertainment industry are only as important as what they wear.
It's time to end this trope in reporting."
Hear! Hear!
I think Mae West came before Ida Lupino.
Does Dowd think the men in Hollywood should help the women get gigs?
Some sort of quota system?
White men, sheesh
(And as the article points out " White, male JEWISH men", really bad.)
Aborting and planning your future audience for profit is bad publicity. What other film ideas do feminists hope to mass market to a cynical public?
Most of the women pictured are white.
Not to mention, I didn't see any trans women. Seems to me they should be first in line for opportunities as they're ostensibly the most marginalized. Give trans women a chance. That'll show those fucking men.
I'm ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to dismantle the pervasive anti-me-ism that keeps me from doing it?
Dowd mentions the talent-free Lena Dunham several times but not Leni Riefenstahl -- perhaps the best known female film maker ever.
About half the article is blaming the audience for liking movies the women interviewed don't want to make.
This is more than a bit like women demanding to join the Elk's Club and then complaining that all the men want to do is drink beer, play poker and smoke cigars. (So they force change and then wonder why nobody attends meetings anymore.)
My own anecdote from film school; most the students were men, ALL of whom were complete accepting of the female students. Film school is not the only, or perhaps even best way, to get into the film industry, but it is indicative of who will make up the bulk of the "above the line" film and television crews.
The cold reality is that at least 99% of the people who try to break into movies don't make it. When the vast majority--as in well over 90%--of those people are men, of course the number of women making the grade is going to be very small. Gee it's almost like STEM majors and careers.
(And bringing up Nora Ephron is a poor example. In between her good movies, she made some real stinkers. The article suggests that her stinker movies were due to sexism, not because they sucked. [Though the abomination Bewitched actually made money!])
...says the director Adam McKay, who is Will Ferrell’s writing and producing partner. ‘‘You can trace that to the old-school guys in the boardrooms.’’
Old-school guys? How old are the "old school guys"? 90+? I'm sorry, almost all of those "old school guys" came of age in the late 60's to 70's at the latest, and were brought up steeped in a feminist culture.
What does it say that the wealthiest & most lefty cultural enclave in the US still seems to be a hotbed of racism & sexism? The left isn't happy about Hollywood, in blue cities, in the universities. I mean, are we ever going to get this non-sexist & non-racist Brave New World even marginally functional?
You know, if the bar for PC success keeps on getting raised higher & higher, pretty soon everybody's going to say why even bother. And where will that leave all the pretty little PC bitchers & moaners, hhhhhmmmmmm?
Kathyrn Bigelow directed a box office success in 1991 called Point Break. She has since won an academy award for The Hurt Locker in 2009, and her 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty was nominated for Best Picture. Has anyone asker her why Hollywood's "pervasive sexism" has been ineffective at suppressing her career?
This kind of reminds me of Spike Lee's consternation that black America would much rather watch Tyler Perry in drag than go see his movies. I think he called it "coonery buffoonery."
No one remembers Georgiana Lucas' "Star Wars" movies.
Or Stephanie Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
But everyone remembers Jane Cameron's "The Titanic."
Not everyone can make Michael Bay's "Boys Don't Cry."
I am Laslo.
"That's half the problem right there, that all women in the entertainment industry are only as important as what they wear."
Or, more importantly, don't wear.
Don't like how Hollywood is run? Start your own damn studio.
My favorite comment:
"It's so true. The discrimination against women in the workplace, including the movie workplace, is veritably palpable. I have spent 42 years in corporate life so far and the discrimination against women is almost unconscious. It is built in; ingrained. And all of the Diversity & Inclusion lip service is window dressing an ugly truth. I have two adult daughters; I know. Moreover, I have written a six novel series, with four screenplay adaptations, that include strong, highly educated, multi-racial, independent, entrepreneurial women, among other characters. I have pitched that work until my eyeballs bled. No publisher for the books, no streamer for the serial rights, no production company for the feature films. I worry for my daughters."
I still haven't figured out if it's a joke or not.
Is the New York times ever going to ask if Jews and Gays are over-represented in running Hollywood?
I don't think so.
Summary of Article: Women who make millions upset they aren't making more money.
The New York times cares.
The central complaint that undergirds all of this faux feminism is that men aren't doing what the women want them to do.
Hey, ladies, how about you make the films yourselves? Pretend your in the kitchen, making sammiches.
"What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"
Talent. Ability to make money. Money-making talent.
The sexes are equal but after half a century of feminism, in the most lefty precincts of the country, women aren't getting and doing equally good jobs because -- well, because men, bad bad men. Come to think of it, that means the sexes really are equal: the problems of both sexes are equally the fault of men.
Christopher: Despite the fact that Blighter and the associated rating system is a McArdle phenomenon, I'm going to give that one 1200 milliBlighters. It's better than many genuine Blighter posts.
No one can convince me that's not satire.
I've worked in Hollywood for decades. The entire premise of the story is completely bogus. There may be many reasons why more women and minorities are not running studios and directing big budget pictures, but discrimination is not one of them...unless we're talking about issues of taste, drive, authority and talent.
- Krumhorn
Talent can't simply be conjured up for the self-proclaimed deserving. I'm sure the woman who wrote the 6-novel series wrote the same short story 6 times. How many people want to see a variation of A Black Lesbian Grows in Brooklyn, which dissects the universal theme of growing up a black lesbian in Brooklyn?
Christopher Lasch's Freudian take has it that true art can only be created by the person who confronts his or her secondary narcissism objectively thereby transcending childish object relations.
Or, in other words, to create Art one needs to get the fuck out of their own way.
Maureen Dowd is still alive???
Relevant???
Jeez, it's almost as if Sherry Lansing and Amy Pascal never existed.
[Leslye Headland] wants to look cool in magazine pictures so that ‘‘little girls will put female filmmakers on their Pinterest boards.’’
Why would Hollywood want somebody seemingly anxious to write off half of the market to make "blockbusters"?
Old-school guys? How old are the "old school guys"? 90+? I'm sorry, almost all of those "old school guys" came of age in the late 60's to 70's at the latest, and were brought up steeped in a feminist culture.
Will Ferrell is a big old Prog. Why isn't a guy he's partnered with repeatedly required to work with women?
It's almost as if they will ignore their "beliefs" to make money.
We need more Moonstruck "Why do men cheat? Because they are afraid of getting old!" and less Die Hard "Yippie aye oh caiyay, motherfucker."
@tim in vermont
You've misremembered the "Moonstruck" quote. It's not "Because they are afraid of getting old." It's "Because they are afraid of death."
The script was, of course, written by a man. The line is put in the mouth of a woman, but it is a man's screenplay, and it's full of expressions of male fear. I can see why you remembered and misremembered it.
There may be many reasons why more women and minorities are not running studios and directing big budget pictures, but discrimination is not one of them
I'm sure that the women in Hollywood quoted in the article would reply that you've defined discrimination wrongly.
They're not making blockbuster movies, ergo they are discriminated against.
There's a huge, untapped market for PC, preachy movies. Isn't there?
There is a reason why women aren't "bigger parts" of Hollywood.
Actresses play dull as all hell characters. They can only play characters in a tiny, tiny, tiny spectrum of the human experience.
White men can be losers. Bumblers. Idiots. Sociopaths. Nobody bats an eye when the white guy is the evil dude or the complete imbecile.
When ANY other group is cast like that, it becomes "sexist" or "racist".
People complained that all of the main actors on "Seinfeld" were white, which they were. But if you had a black guy or a woman playing, say, George Costanza, there'd be protests about how utterly terrible the character is and how demeaning it is to have to play him.
Female directors don't seem able, by and large, to do that any better. Do you think the female Ghostbusters will have anybody as happily sleazy as Murray's Venkman? I certainly don't. They might have one of the women play a terrible "misogynistic" role, but it won't be nearly as morally repugnant as Venkman was.
Until other groups are willing to be the super villain or absolute loser without whining and crying about it, there's no point to the discussion.
Yeah, I should have used "There's no crying in baseball."
What I always remembered about that quote was it's pure inauthenticity. Which may be why I thought it was written by a woman. Fear of death is not why men cheat. But maybe the inauthenticity came from a man projecting what he thought a woman would say into a woman's mouth.
You have a point about Moonstruck though.
"Some female executives lay some of the fault on women. ‘‘Many women come in unprepared and with a chip on their shoulder,’’ said one. ‘‘They’ll say presumptuous stuff like, ‘If this is the movie you choose to make, let me tell you how to make it good.’ ’’ Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm, told me: ‘‘Until I waved the flag at the Fortune women’s conference recently, I had not had one single phone call from a woman telling me that she really, really wants to direct a ‘Star Wars’ movie. They need to be the ones picking up the phone and saying, ‘Hey, let me tell you what ‘Star Wars’ means to me and how much I could do with it.’ ’’
"Money talks and bullshit walks".
- Bobbi Flekman - This is Spinal Tap
So, if we women are more power to make their kind of movies and then fail, will they then accept responsibility? Or will they complain the white males didn't market it right? Or the white male bigots refused to see the movie out of sexism?
I'm guessing the later.
What you have to believe is that male Hollywood studio execs are willing to leave money on the table by overlooking female talent who could make the studios money. The sophisticated form of that argument is that the male execs are too blinded by their sexism (and lives lived within the patriarchy, etc) to see that this is the case--they don't know that they're perpetuating a system of sexism that ultimately costs them (the execs) money.
You have to believe this while simultaneously arguing that the execs and men like them are wholly motivated by greed, lust for power and money, and all the other things Progressives denounce successful capitalists for. It's rarely addressed that these can't both be true--capitalists can't both put nothing above their own profit and gain AND be willing to cost themselves tons of money in order to sexistly exclude women from making them money (by being successful themselves).
Farmer said...Not to mention, I didn't see any trans women. Seems to me they should be first in line for opportunities as they're ostensibly the most marginalized. Give trans women a chance. That'll show those fucking men.
Uh, excuse me Farmer, but I think you need to slow down--what about oppressed minorities from foreign lands? Like, trans women from overseas, religious minorities fleeing persecution, then foreign homosexuals, then oppressed first peoples, then developmentally and physically disabled persons from abroad, and THEN trans people from America, and on down the line.
Geez, when you consider it for a moment these (mostly white) women are using powerful people like Maureen Dowd to try and cut in line, marginalizing more-needy people around the world. Monsters!
When "victimization" is your currency you'd better make sure you're the worst off, after all.
In the first place, America would be a better place if someone (I'm looking at you, North Korea) dropped an ICBM on Hollywood. Women should be proud their complicity in Hollywood's crimes is largely confined to getting naked in front of a camera.
In the second place, why should anyone give a fuck whether movies are written, directed, cast, etc by women or men? Do you care whether your beer is brewed by women or men? Who made the seat in your car, that you sit your ass on every day? Was the foundation of your house poured by a woman? How about that can of dog food your mutt is chowing down on? Any bitches involved in its manufacture?
Look, I can assure you, men are vastly over-represented in the garbage collection industry. But no one is talking about giving little girls a trashwoman they can look up to. Why is it a problem that we are also over-represented in the garbage production industry?
Jupiter,
That's true. The waste industry lacks [political] glamour. They will send women into combat, to prove a point; but, they will not demand women serve as garbage collectors, sewer cleaners, janitors, etc.
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