2010 Black List Movies

The Black List, movie-modern era, is screenplays that are ready to film, but for reasons undiscovered, have not been produced, completed or handed to distributors. LA Times claims a midlevel executive named Franklin Leonard polls his colleagues for the list. There are murky rules, multiple "like"(s), but many of the voters probably were the very folks who turned down the deal. Another site claims a guy in Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way came up the idea. Fine. We do not know who the 300 people surveyed for the 2010 list are. That colleagues, Hollywood, executives are keywords tells me these are men. I counted 75 movies on this list at slashfilms. Writers credited for the screenplays: 82 men (including one movie written by three) and ready?... 5 women. F-I-V-E. Katie Lovejoy, Jenni Ross, Carrie Evans, Megan Martin, Katie Wech. The guys wrote movies like "Your Bridesmaid is a Bitch," and "F*cking Jane Austen." Although Carrie Evans cowrote "Boy Scouts vs. Zombies," and Katie Welch wrote "Prom" so I'm making no judgment on the literary quality of these scenarios. But 75 movies and five women is a pitiful ratio. The most votes went to current event, fact-based, CIA-tinged yawns. Are we all in for reality film just like reality TV? Nobody has to make stuff up, revise a second act, or break a brain sweat at all. Coming to a theater near you. We can do better than this. I wish I knew how.

Women's Work in Movies

Movies today: tonight is the 83rd annual feast of praise and damnation, a celebration of the best & awfullest. I'm dusting off my tails. Francine LeFrak's article titled "The Mysterious Disappearance of Hollywood's Trailblazing Women" bemoans the lack of success for the movies about women this year. She points to Amelia, Conviction, Made in Dagenham, Secretariat and Fair Game. She writes in dollars: is box office the only criteria for 2010 being a "painful" year for women in movies? There are a thousand villains in a movie's supposed failure. The screenplay is the usual first suspect rounded up. Only two women writers: Pamela Gray (Conviction) and Anna Hamilton Phelan, second billed (Amelia). Maybe the director? Only one woman - Mira Nair directed Amelia. Nigel Cole has good woman movie creds (Calendar Girls, Saving Grace). Could be subject matter: Amelia Earhart again? Secretariat is a horse opera, I don't care who owns him. Conviction is a marginal story: sure there's a woman's struggle against possible injustice, but geez, did the brother do it or not? Is there anyone in this country who doesn't know the Valerie Plame story? How did these less than stellar story concepts get produced? This is no mysterious disappearance of women, trailblazing or other, in movies. It's a classic storyline. Moving pictures began in 1895. In 1896, Alice Guy-Blache directed her first narrative film. Frances Marion was scripting movies for Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies (as actors, directors, producers, studio executives) in the 1920s. Dorothy Arzner was admitted to the Directors Guild in 1937, after the money men had laid seige to Hollywood. Women have been, and continue to be, deliberately disappeared. Kathryn Bigelow won the first woman director's Oscar and DGA Award in 2010, a double first - 115 years after moving pictures began. In 2010 only 16% of directors, editors, producers, writers working on the 250 top films were women. I will wager a bunch that this year that percentage will be less by 2%. And we'll get still fewer movies about powerful women, brought to the screen by powerful women. 116 years of the movie business, with pioneering, trailblazing women working the majority of enterprising executive positions in the industry in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And here we are at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. Now that's a screenplay to be written, a movie to be directed, edited, produced, distributed. Women's work.