Michael Corvin

That makes more sense.

AGuyNamedMike

Alas, being a somewhat stereotypical male I'm more interested in finding a solution than talking about the problem and how it makes me feel. What can we do to fix this issue? Affirmative action of some sort? Social engineering in the schools? Open combat on the streets?

Jay G.

What can you personally do? For one, support films like Wonder Woman by seeing them in theaters, recommending them to others, etc.

You could also support the site Women and Hollyood. They have a donate button:
http://womenandhollywood.com/about/

Otherwise, I'm not sure there's a lot you can do if you're not part of the entertainment industry. But just talking about it isn't bad. If you're talking to people who don't believe it's a problem you could potentially change their minds, or change the minds of people listening in.

Ash Ketchum

Come to NYC August 18-20 for the Old School Kung Fu Festival at the Metrograph Theater. Eight Hong Kong martial arts classics with female leads.

http://metrograph.com/series/series/...l-kung-fu-fest

AGuyNamedMike

Wait, are market forces relevant or not?

ntnon

History of Comics in the US is wide and varied, too. To begin with, war, romance, horror and other genres thrived; readership was (believed to be) fairly equal between boys and girls. It was Wertham and the Comics Code (and surrounding factors) that helped splinter comics into "suerheroes" and "little else". Even then, the 'little else' includes Archie (and spin-offs - Josie and Sabrina, etc.) and others.

Comics in Europe (and Asia) are also much more likely to include variety - tone, genre, women - and don't typically suffer for it. Diversity is everywhere(ish).

There's been a stigma attached to comics (and other things - animated films, for a start) as being "for children" that is essentially an illogical mangling of a reasonable truism. Comics were/are aimed PRIMARILY at children has stuck in the mindset as "comics are childish".

Thank Harry Potter and the MCU for finally (if still partially) shattering that notion.

ntnon

There are walking-on-eggshells factors involved, too...

Batman and Superman are hands-down the top two superheroes. No-one else is close. Twenty years ago (i.e. becore the MCU and normalised "geek culture") you'd be hard-pressed to find a non-fan who a) hadn't heard of them and b) could name (m)any others. Spider-man and WW were probably 3rd and 4th.

So having made several Bat and Super films - and not a WW one - is a complex argument that doesn't (just) come down to Male vs. Female. After the comics code heyday of the 50s and 60s, Batmam and Superman didn't go back on TV for decades; WW did.

WW is also inextricably-linked to Greek Mythology (irreligious; ancient) and World War II (...). Neither of which were popular for studio minds, generally, or particularly for superheroes. The Captain America films they made were embarrassing and muddled; even the WW TV show skipped around timewise. Batman and Superman can be set "now-ish" without difficulty. [And then more recently, the shifting-'foreign war' backdrop for Iron Man can be updated and made "relevant", while it allegedly took Matk Millar to force WWII into the draft for Captain America.]

It is slightly surprising that Xena fever didn't give the world a WW film, but the Batman failures may have had a hand in that, too.

So many complexities... and SuitSpeak allegations-used-as-maxims "girls don't watch superheroes" and "men don't want female leads". Add the them the confusing lines between Xena&Buffy-as-feminist-hero, Buffy&Xena-as-male-characters-played-by-women and Xena/Buffy-as-male-gaze-sexist-wish-fulfillment and it's possibly easy to see why some people wouldn't even try making certain kinds of female-led films... damned if you do, damned if you don't.

ntnon

I was just thinking that most/many of the films I watch from the 30s and 40s (maybe into the 50s) feature headlining female actresses, lead/joint roles for women, etc. Glad to see it mentioned here, albeit in passing.

Now, while the overall statistic may hold and speak volumes, I wonder how it shifts when you do one simple thing: elminate war and western films, and recalculate the numbers.

Surely it can't be argued hard that vaguelly-historically-accurate war & westerns would not typically have many big parts for women? And from that - sidestepping, not excusing - that it skews statistics to include them in such calculations (as I assume was done)...?

Most of the films I watch on TCM - even "sexist" 'damsel-in-distress' types - tend to star, highlight and showcase two leads: one male, one female.* Even if the man is the "main" star some/much/most of the time, it seems a lot closer to 60/40 than 80/20 by screentime and lines...

Maybe it's selection bias?



*I suppose the corollary is that it's 'one man, one woman... and a supporting cast of twenty other men'. Still, though. Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Olivia de Havilland and Betty Grable and Deanna Durbin and Joan Fontaine and Greer Garson and the rest starred and should count for something more than a footnote.

Jay G.

Except DC made Green Lantern first, and Constantine, and Jonah Hex, and the Watchmen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...d_on_DC_Comics

Hell, even Suicide Squad came out first. Are you saying Deathstroke is a bigger name than Wonder Woman?

Plus, as this thread's starting post can attest to, DC has been kicking around the idea of a Wonder Woman film since at least 2004. They managed to reboot both Superman and Batman twice since then. Hell, they even squeezed in a Lego Batman movie in there.


Yeah, it's possibly selection bias on your part. Plus idle speculation. You don't have any hard numbers, and your personal accounts may be recollecting more female representation than what's really there.

Mabuse

Don't throw out the Westerns! Destry Rides Again, Johnny Guitar, 40 Guns. All star women. What's the Selznick big western with his wife as the star?

If women are underrepresented, it's a modern thing. The filmmakers of the past crafted great roles for women and the female actors are more iconic than their male counterparts. Modern filmmakers can't do a lot of things the old guys could do, like make a musical or a women's picture.

wishbone

^ Duel in the Sun?

ntnon

Problems with a WW script(/casting/bias/etc.) meant they looked beyond Superman and Batman. Eventually. True. But there are other factors, too...

Excepting maybe GL - and even then, it's space opera as much as superheroes - those are NOT Superhero films. And adapted-from-a-comic is a different story... still skewed against women, but different. Ghost World's on that list, and Sin City. Which is differently-troubling, but has a diverse cast. Then again, 300's there, too.....

Watchmen had been mooted since at least 1988, and finally made it to screens because Time Warner decided adapting their best-selling and most-lauded work outweighed creator concerns after the Moore-protectors were weeded from DC.
Constantine (like From Hell, LXG and V for V) follows Swamp Thing as another attempt to mine Moore's ideas and try and misguidedly lock in an audience.
Jonah Hex was relatively cheap, and vaguelly linked to the mild attempts to revive westerns.

It's not a straightforward line from "why did it take so long to make a WW film" to "sexism". That's clearly a part of it - though presuming sexism (worrying that men won't watch it and it will lose money) is subtely different from actively quashing plans to make it.

WW's popularity and timeframe echo Captain (Shazam) Marvel's. Both had TV shows. Both had extreme popularity 70-odd years ago. Both have had terrible difficulties being adapted for (modern) audiences.

ntnon

What percentage of All Westerns is that, though...?!

That's my impression also. But apparantly the numbers do not suppprt that... so is it personal feelings being wrong, or are there biases and factors skewing things - war/western? Is it suppprting cast?

The Adventures of Robin Hood stars Flynn and de Havilland. She's not just there to be rescued, she has agency and worth. But... despite the Big Letters, she has relatively little screentime, and is basically one of two women there, while there are several Merry Men and the Prince and Sir Guy.. so what does that prove? The Wizard of Oz is all about Dorothy and the Witch, but there are still three male companions keeping the numbers hazy...

You can't really apply statistics in the way they're often applied. It's bad science... but arguably the only science available.

Mabuse

Thank you.

Mabuse

You just can't use statistics to prove anything about art. Judy Garland was the biggest Hollywood draw for a stretch. Back to westerns I can't think of one off the top of my head that doesn't have a great female role. Stagecoach has two. My Darling Clementine is the title character. Fort Apache has Shirley Temple (another female star who outearned all the men at one time). In many ways Fort Apache is more about the women, and the family unit, that makes it possible for the Army to operate. The Searchers. Now there's a film with a shit pile of complex representations of women.

Jay G.

What do you mean by "bias"?

According to Wikipedia and BoxOfficeMojo, Green Lantern, Watchmen, and Suicide Squad are superhero films:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...uperhero_films
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/...=superhero.htm

Jonah Hex is on Wikipedia's list but not BOM, and Constatine isn't either either. However, they're still comic adaptations, and show that DC was willing and able to dig deeper into their catalogs for material than they were able to get a Wonder Woman film off the ground.

Patty Jenkins wanted to make Wonder Woman since 2003:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hea...t-lesser-any-w
But instead of hiring her back then (hot of an Oscar winner, with the same number of movie credits as she had when they eventually hired her), WB did some jerking around, going with that David E. Kelley TV pilot, etc.

There's never just one factor that goes into making a film, but one has to wonder why WW was so "tricky" to get greenlit, when they greenlit crap like the Green Lantern film and Jonah Hex pretty readily.

It's subtly different, sure, but it's still sexism, especially if they didn't have any numbers to back that concern up (and producing any numbers that clearly filter out all other factors for a film and judge based solely on gender would be extremely difficult, if not impossible).

ntnon

More bad science to muse on films past...

Dorling Kindersley's Cinema Year by Year has a two-page spread of posters from films released between 1922 and 1929.

The Call of the Wild
Pandora's Box
Her Husband's Trademark
Merton of the Movies
The Winning of Barbara Worth
The Top of New York
Stolen Love
A Woman of Affairs
Outside the Law
General Crack
The Wolf Man
Salome
Madame X
Napoleon
Her Wild Oat
So This is Paris
Old Clothes

Four posters only feature a woman; two only a man (one with a horse).
Most highlight the stars - excepting CotW (Hal Roach & London) and StiP (Lubitsch) - often in larger print than the titles.
Swanson, McAvoy, Dean, Nazimova, Chatterton and Moore are women; Hunter, Barrymore, Gilbert & Coogan are men. Four others have equal-print billing for male and female leads (including Pandora's Box).

Selection - and survival - bias is a major factor here. There's also no modern gallery to compare with. Still interesting, though.

I tried to get numbers/grosses from TheNumbers or BoxOfficeMojo, but they're naturally missing most films from the 20s and 30s.

Jay G.

Art is very subjective, and statistics aren't infallible, but while you can't use them to "prove" a point, you can certainly use them as a tool to point to where something may be a problem.

Women have felt underrepresented in Hollywood for decades. The statistics done tend to show that their feelings are most likely correct.

Judy Garland wasn't treated well by the studios, forcing her to have abortions and the like.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/...ywood-abortion
That's separate from representation, of course. But nobody ever said that women weren't given lead, starring roles, just that the proportion is out of whack.

Ah, back to anecdotal evidence, I see.

Mabuse

Garland's treatment by her mother and studio handlers is utterly tangential, as even you admit.

You seem more interested in social science than cinema. I'm talking about film history and you're talking about statistics and surveys. I'm giving nuggets of historical fact and you're bouncing it back at me as anecdotal evidence. We are not getting anywhere.

I will concede that women are currently underrepresented. I would suggest that anyone who has a problem with this should get familiar with the cinema of the past when this was far less the case. I really see that as the only solution, because, as has also already been pointed out, the market gets what the market wants. There's no way to "fix" the underreprentation that you point out.

ntnon

Comics - readership (modern), creators, editors, publishers - is inarguably dominated by men. And the particular 'boy's club' mentality that feeds into things is going to be biased in myriad ways.

Over-and-above (beyond, behind) the MOVIE business and its quirks, assumptions, biases, etc.

There are arguments for and against whether boys want to read WW. Whether men should/can write for her. Whether a man writing her is writing a "male character" that is merely drawn as a woman. Whether (and to what extent) costumes and art and plots are inherently sexist and 'fan-service-y' and so on and so on. Men wrote Buffy and Xena. Men created WW. Does that - and how much does it - diminish them as role models, strong characters, etc.

Does Marston's odd life and predilections impact his character? Do the bondage themes fatally flaw Diana? Is the all-female Island a male fantasy, female fantasy, plot point, ahistorical necessity, and so on and on.

Does making a WW film - casting, costume choices &c. - require lengthy debates on how things will be perceived (and by whom) as any particular -ism? Is Charlie's Angels empowering or not?

Naturally. So, I assume, are Kick-Ass, GotG, Captain America and Catwoman. Yet, there are extraneous extra factors: Watchmen (moreso on the page) is deconstructing and commenting on the genre. GotG and GL are sci-fi. KA is "reality". Cap and SS are war films - SS is the Dirty Dozen in an urban setting, and CA is literally a war film. Mainly.

I do like the use of the word "able" more than "willing" - Hex was a soundly panned film. But on paper - particularly budget-wise - it was arguagly a surer bet... with an ironic adaptation's logic that the fanbase was smaller and less likely to be unhappy. Hex tried to be Blade.

It took the MCU to show that reasonably-faithful adaptations could make good films. A lesson ignored by Man of Steel and bafflingly sideswiped by BvS.

TimeWarner have always been happier putting DC on TV. But seeing the money Disney-Marvel is making with their universe meant the time (profit) was right for a movie.

Also, why is there still an in-built "Movies > TV" factor..? Aren't we societally past that..?

Agreed. But the wondering should be much wider than presuming it's somethingsomething women. Hal Jordan js a pilot who gets a ring and does fancy CGI space stuff. Diana is a warrior from an Island of women who somehow winds up being all-American because she falls in love with the first man she meets. There are a LOT more ways to cock up that second scenario and upset EVERYONE..! Plus it's set in the past, which "audiences don't like"..

Couldn't agree much more, so long as the hilarious (in the saddest sense) irony of that parenthetical comment is deliberate. That is what Stuios DO. Catwoman failed because it was a female character (and black). Elektra failed because it was a female character. F4 failed because they changed Johnny's race. Suicide Squad's profit overrules critical reation.

Catwoman changed everything about the character that made her popular, ignored the origins and purpose of the character and made up a terrible plot about makeup.
Elektra is fairly good, as far as it goes. But it was a not-really-sequel to a mixed-reviews film that didn't feature the "main" character. It was a flashback spun into a feature.
F4 was just weird. And Fox-ed.
Suicide Squad is not a good film. The DC comics-to-screen process is awful. They don't understand their audience, their characters or how to plot coherent and well-crafted films. They do not trust their source material. They seem hellbent on confusing their fans, old and new, by running parallel iterations in multiple mediums, etc., etc., etc.

Jay G.

There's really no evidence that it was "less the case" in the past, but there are certainly many great films from all eras featuring women that one can watch, even if those films where outliers at the time.

Well, recognizing and acknowledging that there is a problem is a start. You can certainly vote with your wallet and support good women-lead films, and spread the word on them and encourage others to see them. If more films like Wonder Woman succeed at the box office, the tide will gradually start to change, as it appears to be doing already.

ntnon

And Claudia Cardinale is the most important part of Once Upon a Time in the West. But.

While statistics can prove (or disprove) whatever you like; while statistics apply poorly to art (imagine a study that rates paintings by colour proportions...), the point being argued is not that there are NO roles, but thatbthere are few. And minor. With little screentime. With little diversity of character. With standard traits and roles.

Hence my thought about Westerns. IF the statistical analysis saying women were "underrepresented" even 70 years ago, my musing is whether those numbers are skewed by including 'historical' films that typically sideline or pigeonhole women for (allegedly) logical reasons. OUaTitW basically has one female role. And on the one hand she's the uniting, central character; on the other she's a plot device. In one view, she's strong and independant and fearless; contrarily, she's a prostitute who spends a large part of her onscreen time seducing/flirting...

There are female parts in war films. But not many. Clementine is in the title, but less so in the film.

Jay G.

At least you're admitting there's bias.

The thing is, you can take any single one example, and break out all the possible factors that went into it getting into production, and its relative success. However, I wasn't saying that any single one of those films was a result solely of a reluctance to have a female-lead superhero film, but in aggregate they indicate a trend.

There's still some prestige with a film property, which is going to have a bigger budget and more international exposure, than a TV show. I recall Neil Gaiman stating recently that the reason there hasn't been a Sandman TV series is because WB still believes it's a "big" enough property to be a film/film franchise.

That's not the only way to do a Wonder Woman adaptation, and it's not like this adaptation was a strictly literal one. They tried modern-day approaches to.

I'd say it's pretty hard to pin a film's success/failure on any single factor, but on the flip side, one can look at a group of movies and see overall trends in terms of female representation. It'd be hard to say definitively why that is just based on statistics, but when paired with what female actors, writers, and directors say about the mentality of studio heads, they tend to match up that there is bias against them, or at least a bias for men, to the detriment of women, within the industry.

ntnon

And that still seems odd. Are the methodologies and scope of such studies available, do you know..?

Which is where the proportions play in. More possibilities give a greater range of quality.

People were encouraged to support Ghostbusters because of the cast. But it was not good, so that looped back into problematic arguments. WW is a good start, certainly - women in front and behind the camera in a film its actually possible to support and recommend!

But the medium is (surely?) shrinking, making less diversity plausible within limited confines. And the suit/media dumbing-down reduces things to STARS and SEX and GENRE. I do not care if Tom Cruise is the star. I do not care if it's a female lead or a male one. I don't care who the director is. I don't care about genre. I want to see a "good" film.

I may well be an outlier - many people DO prefer particular people, directors and genres. (Ironically, from a sexism perspective, women are "as bad" as men about wanting to watch certain stars for their looks as much as their abilities...)

stingermck

I dont know wtf y'all are talking about now, but:

Warner Bros. has set Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman 2” for release on Dec. 13, 2019.