This just in from Annenberg:
“The researchers found some evidence that movies with women in creative production roles may give female actors more chances for work. In movies with at least one female director, 44.4% of speaking characters were females as well, compared to 31.7% in all-male-directed films. A similar gender boost was observed in movies written by women.”
There’s a circle here, folks: Marginalize women filmmakers, marginalize women film critics, marginalize women in the audience, & then poof: you get Oscar-Candidates like THE SOCIAL NETWORK (in which all of the women characters are on the edge of the action in a basically all-male world) plus tons & tons of violent crap!
It’s like any other paradigm shift: You don’t see it until you do, & then once you do, you realize it is all around you… But women are not “a niche;” women are ~ 50% of the world’s population.
So remember Martha Lauzen’s principle:
