The Skeleton Twins – Bitch Flicks

‘Below the Line’: Women Cinematographers’ Panel at Athena (Part 1)

Caryn James: There are some really appalling numbers about women cinematographers in the industry. In a study done last year by Celluloid Ceiling for the year 2013, of the 250 top-grossing films, only 3 percent had women cinematographers which was 1 percent more than the previous year and for some reason a decrease from 1998. And just to get a sense of the range here, 6 percent of those films were directed by women, 17 percent were edited by women, 25 percent had women producers. But only 3 percent of women cinematographers in that group. Why do you think that is? Are there historical reasons for that ? What is going on?

(L-R) Kirsten Johnson, Nadia Hallgren, Reed Morano

Written by Ren Jender.

The following is a transcription (edited for concision and clarity) of the first part of the panel “Below the Line” held Saturday, Feb. 7, 2015 at the Athena Film Festival. The panel featured women cinematographers Kirsten Johnson (Derrida, Pray The Devil Back To Hell, Citizenfour), Reed Morano (The Skeleton Twins, Frozen River) and Nadia Hallgren (Citizen Koch, Searching for Sugar Man) speaking with Indiewire critic Caryn James

Caryn James: There are some really appalling numbers about women cinematographers in the industry. In a study done last year by Celluloid Ceiling for the year 2013, of the 250 top-grossing films, only 3 percent had women cinematographers which was 1 percent more than the previous year and for some reason a decrease from 1998. And just to get a sense of the range here, 6 percent of those films were directed by women, 17 percent were edited by women, 25 percent had women producers. But only 3 percent of women cinematographers in that group. Why do you think that is? Are there historical reasons for that ? What is going on?

Kirsten Johnson: I was really excited to see that study. But I thought, “That doesn’t really apply to me.” Because the 250 top-grossing movies obviously we know what those movies are and there aren’t that many women. But I just came back from Sundance where I was on the US Documentary jury and you know, there are two women programmers at the Sundance Festival and I was on this wonderful jury. I did statistics on the US Documentary this year at Sundance and there were listed 19 cinematographers who were men, one cinematographer who was a woman. I went back through the numbers and out of 16 films several of them were codirected. So there were 15 men and there were eight women directors. In two of those cases the women did not list themselves as cinematographers even though they shot their own films: which is this interesting thing of a devaluation of the role and also an expectation of women in the documentary field: “I don’t have any money. I have to shoot this film myself. But I’m not really good at this. Sometime when I get some money I’ll hire someone else.” I think that’s often the case with women documentary directors who shoot their own work and certainly don’t consider it a profession.

'Pray The Devil Back To Hell' (Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer) — *Pray The Devil Back To Hell* (Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer)

The number that really made me sad was the subject matter of the films. So of the 16 films there were only three that had major women characters. One of those was the mother, Lucia McBath, of Jordan Davis who was shot, so she was one of an ensemble of people featured in the film. The other was How to Dance in Ohio, an ensemble piece about teenagers with autism. A couple of those teenagers were girls. And the third one was Hot Girls Wanted which was a study of amateur porn so the women who had the presence on the screen were 18-year-olds being exploited by the amateur porn industry. The rest of those 16 films, including the ones made by women, were all about men.

Caryn James; How do you account for that? Even at Sundance where you’d expect things to be more equitable. Are there historical reasons why it’s tougher for women to break into that area?

Reed Morano: I don’t know. I feel like expectations have been set up by the industry. Also it could be subconscious thinking. I mean just speaking from having made my own feature with a woman lead: it took a long time to get financing but even a longer time to get a male lead that would play second to her. I think maybe there’s a fear: you want to get the movie made, and it’s harder to get it made with a female central character.

Kirsten Johnson: I think we could break this down into several different categories. The world Reed is from is a primarily fictional world and Nadia and I are in documentary.

Caryn James: Well how did you all become cinematographers in the first place? Nadia, what was your impulse for becoming a cinematographer? Was it something you always wanted to do? Or just floundered into, the way most of us do in our careers?

Nadia Hallgren: Well I started out in still photography, black and white photography, as a kid. Someone gave me a video camera and then I started to make my own films. People seemed to respond to them. I ended up making a short film that screened at a local film festival in the Bronx, where I grew up, and I met Michael Moore’s longtime producing partner. And she liked my film. We talked and I told her I wanted to shoot films and she ended up hiring me and promised me if there was ever a chance to shoot on the film she would give it to me. And she did. That’s also how I met Kirsten who was one of DPs (director of photography) on Fahrenheit 9/11. Before we wrapped shooting I told her I wanted to be a cinematographer. I wanted her to teach me stuff and she did. It was through encounters with women that gave me an opportunity. You realize you are going to be part of this boys’ club. There were plenty of times when I was in vans with ten guys who were talking about football and I couldn’t really relate. Finding your way to other women who are supportive is key: other cinematographers, directors, producers willing to bring you in.

Oscar Winner 'Searching For Sugar Man' (cinematographer: Nadia Hallgren) — Oscar Winner *Searching For Sugar Man* (cinematographer: Nadia Hallgren)

Caryn James: So how does that work if there aren’t all that many women in the field? Who are the people who helped you along? Who are the cinematographers who mentored you?

Kirsten Johnson: I went to film school in France. I was encouraged to go into the camera department since there was no way they were going to let an American into the directing department. I discovered cinematography. I discovered I love the camera. I moved to New York and I didn’t know anybody. I was working for the Shoah foundation interviewing Holocaust survivors. Those were all male cinematographers. One of the things in this field is: you have to fun to be with because you’re going on long trips and going to be spending long hours with people. It’s like the most important part of the job. If people want to hang out with you, they’ll hire you. And one of the other things that I learned, maybe before becoming a cinematographer, when I made this choice after college to move to Senegal because I was interested in African cinema. And I didn’t know anything, but I wanted to do it so badly. I bluffed things. I have tried to mentor folks because there was nobody to mentor me except for women directors.

When I moved to New York, there were five women who were cinematographers, like I could name all of them. They were all busy working . None of them had time to talk to me. I met with women directors like Barbara Kopple, who wanted to work with women and wanted to work with me. But I didn’t yet have that much experience. Going to Senegal and not knowing anything taught me to try. You can’t study cinematography. You learn it by doing it. And for some reason many more young men are so cocky about this, like, “I can do this. I can hold this camera.” So I started saying that too. You just say “yes” and then you learn it on the job.

Caryn James: That really is the kind of thing that speaks to the kind of confidence women should have in general. Is there something specific about working with the camera? One of the things that might have been historically factored in here was the idea that these poor, little women can’t lug around big, heavy equipment, so they shouldn’t be doing this, which is not so much the case anymore. The other thing is a lot of it is technical. You need to know science and things like lenses: not the “girly” thing to do. Is that a factor in keeping women out of that area more than other areas?

Kirsten Johnson: Well also, when you’re on a feature film you have to run a crew and most of that crew are men. So you’re the boss of men. Whereas working in documentary you’re doing it all yourself. You have to have some kind of mastery over the actual camera. But you can sort of practice that and get that under your belt. But I think in the case of features…

'The Skeleton Twins' (cinematographer: Reed Morano, ASC) — *The Skeleton Twins* (cinematographer: Reed Morano, ASC)

Reed Morano: You run a crew of men and also they’ll find out really fast if you don’t know what you’re doing. The only way to run a crew successfully is if you have their respect and they have confidence in you and you know what you’re talking about. You don’t have to overprove yourself, but the things you ask for have to make sense. You’re not running people around in circles. You know what you want. You’re not waffling. You make immediate decisions. I’m about to do a show right now for HBO, a pilot, with my key grip and gaffer who are probably a good 20 to 30 years older than me and they’ve been in the union forever and probably were making movies long before I was. And they’re awesome. They totally respect me and are psyched to do it.

Caryn James: How did you get there?

Reed Morano: Well personally all the films I had to do before I got into the union were with friends and peers, male or female. And you learn how to work with guys. I came up as a key grip as well which is typically, that’s a very male-dominated job. Because it’s basically heavy lifting. I remember the first time I was gripping and I had to receive a 4 x 8 feet sheet of plywood from a guy on top of a truck. I was like, “I don’t really know if I can do this. Okay, I’m doing it. And I’m not wearing (work) gloves because I’m a girl.” It was like a learning curve. And like you were saying, people have to like you.

Caryn James: What has been the turning point in your career? Has there been a moment when you really got some help or made some breakthrough that made you think “I can do this”?

Nadia Hallgren: I think the moment comes and comes. I think it’s an ongoing evolution. Being a cinematographer, every new experience kind of does that for me. I’m always surprised at what I learn and that that teaches me something about myself.

Caryn James: Did you go to film school?

Nadia Hallgren: No

Caryn James: So how did you know what to do?

Nadia Hallgren: I would stare at magazines. And I loved composition. I didn’t know why or what I was doing. It was just very attractive to me. Then I got into a photography program, a community program in the Bronx. I still didn’t understand what I was doing, but a lot of it was just watching movies, talking to people about movies, trying to understand what was happening in front of me and just doing.

Caryn James: Reed, did you go to film school?

Reed Morano: Yeah, I went to NYU and I went with the intention of writing and directing. And then when I got there, just from the very first shoot as a PA (production assistant) I just couldn’t stop watching what the DP was doing. I was like, “That must be the most amazing job,” because you make everyone see what you see. You control that. I asked everyone: to become a DP what do I have to do? And the only advice was: take every technical class. Everyone at NYU wants to be a director, so no one wants to take technical classes. Then I would tell everyone, “I want to shoot your movie.” They all didn’t care because they just wanted to be directing. So I shot a few. At the time I was in film school everything was pretty much shot on 16 mm or 35. It was a big, scary, cool moment, but everyone was in it together which was helpful and you came out of it with sort of a reel but not really. You get to make your mistakes with other students. The “doing” part of it for me was the most important part. I don’t think I really learned how to light until a few years after film school.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Skeleton Twins’: Suicidal Siblings

The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be, “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for ten years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

When I was a kid, adults (who had no idea I would grow up to be queer) would talk about how gay men killed themselves once they reached a certain age. The adults acted as if they were talking about some strange species of animal featured on a National Geographic special instead of the people they (whether the adults acknowledged them or not) passed on the street and interacted with every day. The “queers commit suicide” trope was a film staple, one that Vito Russo denounced in The Celluloid Closet and shows up in clips from the documentary of the same name. Now that openly queer people (sometimes) get to write and direct their own films, the trope comes full circle with The Skeleton Twins, directed by out gay man Craig Johnson (who also wrote the script with Mark Heyman), which begins with a gay character (Milo, played by Bill Hader) turning the volume all the way up on Blondie’s “Denis“ in his Los Angeles apartment just before he gets into the bathtub and slits his wrists (cinematographer Reed Morano does a great job in this scene as well as the rest of the film).

We see Milo’s estranged twin sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), about to swallow a potentially fatal handful of pills when her disconcertingly cheery ringtone interrupts. The hospital is calling to inform her of Milo’s suicide attempt. So, in the manner of middling scripts through the ages, a character, Maggie, is able to take an unspecified time off work (with no notice), book a last minute flight across the country, invite her brother to recuperate at her home in upstate New York, then spring for an extra plane ticket for him. No one, not the hospital, nor later, her mother or husband seem in the least concerned that Milo could try to kill himself again, or that a suicide attempt is a symptom of an illness which should be treated to prevent the person from dying after a fresh, successful attempt.

The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for 10 years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in Cold Comfort Farm was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Twins’ Milo and Maggie appear to come from a working-class background. Maggie is a dental hygienist (which requires training but not a four-year college degree) and Milo seems to have skipped college to try to become a “famous actor” in Los Angeles. Later we find out Milo’s childhood bully now works as an electrician. But neither Hader and especially not Wiig act or speak like the working class members of my own family or anyone else’s–though Wiig’s self tan, which makes her look as if she were rubbed with the shavings of a burnt-sienna crayon, makes her resemble some working class folks I know. Luke Wilson, on the other hand, is hilariously natural as Lance, Maggie’s good-natured, good-looking, but not terribly bright, blue-collar husband. When he announces he and Maggie are trying to have kids. Milo says,”I can’t wait to be the creepy gay uncle.”

Lance answers,”You’re hired!”

Another trope that appears in the film is: all the siblings’ problems (even their father’s suicide!) seems to be the fault of their mother (Joanna Gleason in a brief, badly written, poorly conceived role) whom we see having dinner with her children. Again, the mother’s New Age leanings as well as the home she maintains in Sedona plus the ability to jet across the country for a meditation retreat are usually the provenance of the middle class and the wealthy, so the working class status of the family seems tacked-on.

Wiig has some nice moments outside of her comic rapport with Hader (all their best scenes are in the trailer) but she’s miscast. A person with this much to hide would probably present a sunnier facade to the world, the way politicians with draconian platforms cultivate a “friendly” persona. And the script doesn’t do Wiig any favors, calling on her character to smash a fish tank in not one, but two separate scenes to show her state of mind.

Hader plays his queeny character convincingly (though perhaps not as skillfully as an out queer actor would), but Milo seems to have had pretty much no life during the 10 years he was estranged from Maggie (the decade seems to correspond with how long the characters have been out of high school–but Wiig is 41 and Hader is 36, which adds to the film’s dissonance). We see in Milo’s apartment at the beginning a tank of goldfish and a photo presumably with an ex and those two items are the sum of the years the twins have been separated. Maggie, has, on the other hand, acquired a steady job, a house, a husband, and a history.

The characters have a way of joking in a “just kidding (but not really)” way that frustrated people use to blow off steam, but the script doesn’t really explore this dynamic. When Milo is reading Marley and Me he asks his sister if she’s read it and she tells him she has and found it “sad.” He asks why and she says, “You don’t know what happens?”

“What? Does the dog die at the end? Look how much I had left,” Milo spits, motioning to a few chapters worth of pages at the end as he tosses the book aside. He later tells her he knew all along that the dog died.

The jokes in the film are good, but there aren’t enough of them to carry the movie. They are disjointed, like skits (though they are better than the skits the two were in when they were both on Saturday Night Live), instead of a language the two siblings use to communicate with one another. We don’t need to know every detail of adult siblings’ background to believe in the characters bond and relationship: You Can Count On Me made Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo’s brother/sister pair seem real, even though we didn’t learn much about their shared past and Linney and Ruffalo, like Wiig and Hader, look nothing alike. The scene in which Maggie confesses to Milo she is cheating on her husband is very much like the (superior) one in which Linney’s character tells Ruffalo’s that she is sleeping with her married boss.

Skeleton piles on the tragedy, so it becomes ridiculous. Not only did their father kill himself, but their mother is an unfeeling bitch! And Milo’s teacher in high school sexually abused him! And both Milo and Maggie have more than one scene in which they try to kill themselves! Any one of these elements would have been enough to build a film around, but put together they become an unwitting joke, like the compounded tragedy (Incest! Dead best friend! Closeted football player boyfriend!) made The Perks of Being a Wallflower laughable in spite of some good main performances.

Skeleton Twins is the second film I’ve seen (Mysterious Skin was the first) in which a gay man says the adult man who had sex with him when he was underage is the love of his life. In Mysterious Skin this claim made a little more sense: the audience heard it as evidence of how screwed up Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was. In Twins we don’t get the sense that Milo’s affection for his abuser is anything he should suppress, and Milo’s feelings of love don’t ring true. As I’ve noted before, no matter how “in love” they thought they were, minors who have sex with their teachers usually see, when they grow up, the power imbalance and manipulation in the relationship they were too young to perceive when they were students. Milo has had no such epiphany and for that reason alone–even without the suicide attempt–he should be seeing a therapist.

Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, when she interviewed Tina Fey a few years back, asked about Saturday Night Live‘s checkered history with its women cast members, and Fey countered by saying that a lot of women had great opportunities to showcase their talents on SNL–and not many chances to put that talent to use elsewhere after they left the show. Although former cast member Wiig had a hit with (and co-wrote) Bridesmaids, subsequent films (which she had no hand in writing) like this one seem to have little idea what to do with her. She and Hader were not only on Saturday Night Live together but appeared in minor roles as the couple who ran the amusement park in the underrated (pre-Bridesmaids) Adventureland and I couldn’t help wishing someone had made a film that starred those characters–or another pre-Bridesmaids Wiig character, the one in Drew Barrymore’s Whip It–instead of Milo and Maggie.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhULZJDXLaE”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.