Women in Hollywood – Bitch Flicks

How a ‘Little Evil Bookshop’ Helped Me Find My Role in Hollywood

It isn’t that I am or was passive in my acting career, it is that acting is a long game and it can be difficult to see where the road might lead. That is something I have accepted; sometimes it’s terrifying and other times it excites me. But for this achiever, perfectionist, and feminist, there is something unbelievably validating about the immediacy of payoff in this new venture called producing. They call it “producing” for a reason! At the end, you have made something, paved your own road.

Guest post written by Lena Raff.

An actress is pretty much the only thing I ever wanted to be, save for a few months in elementary school when bottlenose dolphin trainer and anthropologist were on the table. When I was young, performing gave me a rush, but I couldn’t have accurately verbalized why I loved it. It took me until now to comprehend and come to terms with why I am on this path. Being an artist means that you get to live in your heart and your body. Acting means constantly listening, feeling, and experiencing. It means getting to roll words around in your mouth and connecting with the other actors and your audience; you get to make people feel. It is all just so human.

The issue is that a person cannot simply go out and act unless they create content for themselves. Writers can write at home or in a cafe; try “acting” in either place and you are going to look very silly indeed. I can’t act in a vacuum. By definition, I need other people, and until now, I’ve needed there to be an existing project for which someone hires me. However, it’s difficult to get an acting job in TV and film. That old adage “You need an agent to get credits and you need credits to get an agent” is still widely true. So you have to have an agent who gets your photo in front of casting. Then, casting has to actually see your photo — one of thousands submitted online for any given role — like your look for the part, your abilities and credits, call you in for an audition, like and trust you enough to send you to the producers/director/studio/network who have to also like and trust you, and then you might get an offer. Given this, and the nature of the way projects are shot, the television and film actor will spend much of their time not acting, particularly early on. Even a highly successful and lucrative career can often mean only a few days on set every month, or every several months.

Much of the time, this life is joyous. I have met many wonderful people and artists who have become my soulmates. Classes keep me involved, focused, and skilled. I thrive on the challenge of a difficult scene, relish putting in the work for an audition, soak in every moment of going to work on set. Acting is a constant adventure and I am always learning. In my worst moments, though, this all feels futile. The odds are so steep, the gateways to entry are numerous but elusive. One can feel like one is floating through a nebulous landscape waiting for milestones to grab onto when they happen to appear. And although it has vastly improved in the past few years, Hollywood can seem like a boys club. Many projects still don’t pass the Bechdel test and the words “bikini ready” periodically make their way across my computer screen. But I am an autonomous being. This is what I, enthusiastically, signed up for.

Then I signed up for something else. This year, I began producing a feature film called Little Evil Bookshop with two other young women — Ashley Ellis (director/producer) and Jessica Schott (producer) — and it has been exciting and illuminating. I love the feeling of creative responsibility for something larger than myself, of concrete steps that need to be taken each day. This venture has made me feel capable and worthwhile. It isn’t that I am or was passive in my acting career, it is that acting is a long game and it can be difficult to see where the road might lead. That is something I have accepted; sometimes it’s terrifying and other times it excites me. But for this achiever, perfectionist, and feminist, there is something unbelievably validating about the immediacy of payoff in this new venture called producing. They call it “producing” for a reason! At the end, you have made something, paved your own road. It’s empowering and self-actualizing in an entirely different way from what I have experienced in my artistic life thus far. I have been inspired to examine the landscape in which I am creating as both and actress and producer. Being on feminist projects has always been important to me, but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to shape the narrative and be extremely selective about what I put my effort and skill into.

Recently, while working on this project that centers around a middle-aged woman protagonist, I realized that even though the message of the film — a dark ensemble comedy about the staff of a small occult bookstore attempting to impress a revered author and spiritual leader — isn’t feminist in the political or ideological sense, it is feminist by nature of the fact that it is telling a woman’s story. This is the story that three young women want to tell, have put our time, energy, brain-space and hearts into sharing with the world. We are crowdfunding via Seed & Spark and networking. We have committed to diverse and inclusive hiring and casting to deepen and enrich this film about identity. We are standing up, asking for our abilities and voices to be valued.

Through this lens, I started looking around and seeing many incredible women, and many actresses in particular, prolific, daring, and unapologetic in their art. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Pamela Adlon’s Better Things are two shining examples. With two very impressive respective acting careers between them, Waller-Bridge and Adlon have recently debuted two deeply personal, groundbreaking, and critically acclaimed series of which they are the creators, showrunners, and stars. Issa Rae co-created, co-writes, and stars in the acclaimed series Insecure based on her hilarious web series Awkward Black Girl. Shonda Rhimes created a television empire with creating and producing her women-centric dramas Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder. Jill Soloway (who identifies as non-binary) changed television and the culture at large with Transparent and its representation of the LGBTQIA community and whose new show I Love Dick depicts women’s sexuality in perhaps unprecedented ways. Now the highest paid woman director in history, Patty Jenkins revolutionized big budget, superhero films with Wonder Woman, “the highest-grossing live-action film to be directed by a woman” and “the highest-grossing film in the DC Extended Universe.” Brie Larson will be Captain Marvel, co-directed by Anna Boden. Gina Prince-Bythewood will direct Silver and Black, “the first Black woman to direct a superhero film.” Ava DuVernay is the first Black woman filmmaker to direct a film with a $100 million budget with her upcoming adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. She also created Queen Sugar, a beautiful and powerful dramatic series telling the story of a Black family, and hired all women directors for both of its two seasons (she was the showrunner for season one while Monica Macer is season 2’s showrunner). Reed Morano recently became the first woman in 22 years to win an Emmy for Best Directing in a Drama Series and the show she won for — the undeniably, ruthlessly feminist The Handmaid’s Tale — swept the night, except for the awards offered up to the women-centric ensemble miniseries, Big Little Lies. Lena Waithe took home an Emmy award for Best Writing in a Comedy — the first Black (queer!) woman to do so — for a Master of None episode about coming out to her family.

I am so looking forward to the time when these achievements do not strike us as the exception to the rule, but rather, are the lay of the land. For now, I chose to take my place among these artists. I am raising my hand, and learning to stand up, not just for what I believe in, but in full ownership of my talent, effort, and ability.

I am not saying that acting isn’t feminist or empowering. I am not saying that producing is a more worthwhile or fulfilling pursuit. I’m not saying I won’t wear a bikini on-screen, or ask someone else to do so. What I am saying is that both of these endeavors, especially coupled together, have allowed me to take a look at my life and career with a consciousness that I didn’t have before. It is heartening to see such poignant stories told by women about women find critical acclaim as well as commercial success. I know I have a place in this exciting world, in whichever role I chose.

Little Evil Bookshop is currently crowdfunding via Seed & Spark until October 13, 2017.

Lena Raff is an actress and producer in her 20s living in Los Angeles. Originally from the suburbs of Boston, she earned a BA in Theatre Studies from Emerson College. Lena can raise one
eyebrow, but only when she’s on camera and isn’t trying to do so.

Links: littleevilbookshop.com | http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5299012/
Instagram: @Lenaraff | @littleevilbookshopfilm

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Aziz Ansari’s Hilarious New Show Tells Stories Rarely Seen on TV by Amy Lam at Bitch Media

10 Awesome Feminist Films From the ’90s by Gisselli Rodriguez at Ms. blog

Documenting Women’s Stories: November 2015’s Crowdfunding Picks by Laura Nicholson at Women and Hollywood

For A Year, Shonda Rhimes Said ‘Yes’ To All The Things That Scared Her at NPR

Shonda Rhimes On Running 3 Hit Shows And The Limits Of Network TV at NPR

Watch 25-Minute Conversation with Gina Prince-Bythewood on ‘Love & Basketball’ & Indie Filmmaking Challenges by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

10 Female-Directed Movies on Netflix That You Need to Watch Now by Allyson Johnson at The Mary Sue

Reese Witherspoon Gives Glamour Awards Speech: Female-Driven Films “Are Not a Public Service Project” by Ashley Lee at The Hollywood Reporter

Why Catherine Hardwicke Started to Fight Back Against Hollywood Sexism by Ramin Setoodeh at Variety

The ‘Ishtar’ effect: When a film flops and its female director never works again by Rebecca Keegan at LA Times

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Sister Suffragette: ‘Slave’ T-Shirts Highlight White Feminism’s Race Problem by Kirsten West Savali at The Root

The High Stakes for “Quantico” and its South Asian Star by Stephanie Abraham at Bitch Media

Watch 1981 Report on Racial Stereotyping & Lack of Opportunities for Black Actors (What’s Changed 30+ Years Later?) by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Female-Driven Movies Make Money, So Why Aren’t More Being Made? by Thelma Adams at Variety

The Hollywood gender discrimination investigation is on: EEOC contacts women directors by Rebecca Keegan at Los Angeles Times

Ava DuVernay: For Women and People of Color, Hollywood is “A Whole Bunch of Locked Doors” by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Study shows how women directors get blocked in Hollywood by John Anderson at Fortune

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Mabel Normand was once known as “The Queen of Comedy” and “The Female Chaplin.” Her name was featured in the title of her shorts as their star attraction, which she soon parlayed into creative control as director. Normand mentored Charlie Chaplin as well as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on to mentor Buster Keaton in his turn. Mabel is, therefore, a cornerstone in the development of the American slapstick auteur, but one whose role is regularly overlooked. Her indirect connection with scandals, from Hollywood shootings to Arbuckle’s sensational trial, was used to tarnish her image and spark campaigns to ban her films, exploited by what biographer Thomas Sherman calls “behind-the-scenes Hollywood power brokers seeking to reshape the existing order.” Because of her early death in 1930 from tuberculosis, Normand is now remembered mainly through portraits by male co-workers, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, rather than her own words.

“Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.” – Mabel Normand (close friend of Mary Pickford)

Normand began her career as a model and bathing beauty. In 1910, she joined D.W. Griffith’s Biograph, where she met Mack Sennett and showed potential as a serious actress in The Squaw’s Love, The Mender of Nets and The Eternal Mother. At the rival Vitagraph, she was mentored in film comedy by the duo of Flora Finch and John Bunny, saying “every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies.” Comedienne Ruth Stonehouse had also been on the scene since 1907, but Normand would become the first director of this cinematic comedienne pack. As Mack Sennett’s lover, Normand left Biograph for Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1912. In 1914, Normand began to direct shorts and starred with her protégé, Charlie Chaplin, in Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length comedy, a fat-shaming extravaganza that nevertheless ends with solidarity between its female rivals and the rejection of their manipulative suitor. Dissatisfied with simplistic slapstick, Mabel strove for emotional authenticity, believing “if you seem to have any idea that you’re playing at something, you won’t get across” and claiming “no director ever taught me a thing.” Such naturalistic theories visibly influence the later aesthetic of Chaplin and Arbuckle. As Normand had in Mabel At The Wheel, Tamara de Lempicka would later use the image of driving to craft an icon of the empowered New Woman.

"Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti" - 1925 — “Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti” – 1925

In 1915, Normand’s engagement to Sennett broke up over his affair, with Normand suffering major concussion when rival Mae Busch hit her with a vase. This marked the end of Normand’s directing career, after less than two years. A male director would surely be assessed for future promise, yet even Normand’s defender, Thomas Sherman, writes dismissively that “she never had pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer.” Roscoe Arbuckle, however, highlighted Normand’s active collaboration, saying “Mabel alone is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture” (see Fatty and Mabel Adrift). Of Chaplin, Normand said, “We reciprocated. I would direct Charlie in his scenes, and he would direct me in mine. We worked together in developing the comedy action, taking a basic idea and constantly adding new gags.”

More than a collaborator, Normand’s biography contradicts claims of her limited ambition. Spurred to leave Keystone in 1916 by difficult relations with Mack Sennett, Sennett lured her back by offering her her own studio. The fact that Normand swallowed her pride, for the sake of her own studio, surely indicates how important creative control was to her. She dismissed three directors before handpicking F. Richard Jones to craft her star vehicle, tomboy Cinderella story Mickey, from a scenario by Anita “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes“ Loos. Normand was involved in every aspect of production. The release of Mickey was shelved for over a year, which Sennett blamed on lukewarm responses from distributors, pushing Normand to sign a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Once released, Mabel Normand’s Mickey became the highest grossing film of 1918, only too late to save her studio.

Normand with Cheyenne co-star and friend, Minnie Devereaux

Mabel Normand was noted for her generosity in refraining from upstaging other performers, and for her insistence on a slapstick equality in which she took a pie to the face as often as she threw one, in shorts like That Ragtime Band. She was the original “girl tied to the train tracks” in Barney Oldfield’s Race For A Life, but rescued her love interest on screen as often as she was rescued. Normand’s slapstick should be appreciated for its pioneering stunt-work as much as comedy. Mabel’s stunts included: leading a lion on a string, piloting a plane, diving off a cliff into a river, wrestling a tame bear, riding a horse bareback, jumping off a second story roof, dangling from a third story roof, being thrown from a moving vehicle, being dragged through mud on a rope, brick-throwing fights, and driving speeding race cars.

Mabel’s Strange Predicament – 1914

“I had nobody to tell me what to do. Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer)

The film that developed Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, begins like later Chaplin films, with the pathos of the disheveled Tramp’s rejection by Mabel’s hard-hearted snob. The focus then shifts to Mabel’s own predicament, locked out of her room in pajamas and falling prey to farcically escalating sexual misunderstandings. Pajamas were considered so provocative that the film was banned in Sweden, explaining Mabel’s panic. Mabel’s own “sweetheart” almost strangles her after finding her under his friend’s bed (hiding from Chaplin’s persistent advances). Her sweetheart’s married friend reveals willingness to harass Mabel, as soon as the two are alone. A wedge is thereby driven between Mabel and Alice Davenport, who sees Mabel as sexual competition. In all this, Chaplin is utterly useless, blindly pressing his own suit. Only Mabel’s dog offers unconditional friendship. This kinship with animals would fuel many set-pieces in Mickey. Despite the film’s flippancy and happy ending, the overall impression is of a Mabel constantly stifled by the possessiveness of others.

By shifting the focus from Chaplin’s scorned heart to Mabel’s predicament, our interpretation of both characters shifts, too. Mabel begins the film as the snooty girl, but ends as the victim of exhausting demands on her affection. Conversely, Chaplin begins sympathetically as the archetypal Tramp – a whimsically drunken, lovelorn underdog – but ends as an oblivious and entitled sex pest. Most accounts agree that Chaplin was infatuated with Normand, fueling tension with Sennett. In Mabel’s Strange Predicament, we understand her beauty as a nuisance and hindrance to Mabel’s liberation, not a mere motivator for men. Perhaps the resulting unflattering impression of Chaplin explains the film’s top-rated IMDb review by Michael DeZubiria, calling it “a disappointment for Chaplin fans, but it is a curiosity piece to see what results when he works under a different, and far less talented, director.” A Cinema History, however, spotlights the skill of the “far less talented” 20-year-old Normand’s dynamic editing, keeping a tight pace with cross-cutting and short duration shots.

Suggested Soundtrack: TLC, “No Scrubz”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5WtaPhTMQo”]

Mabel At The Wheel – 1914

“I hated to be simply a means by which someone else was creating something.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being an auteur)

Mabel At The Wheel showcases Normand’s daring as a stuntwoman, brawling, tumbling from moving vehicles into mud, and racing cars. Its dynamic climax also shows her mastery of parallel editing, rapidly cutting between simultaneous events to build tension, a hallmark of her original mentor, D.W. Griffith. Mabel at the Wheel is the film where tensions with Chaplin exploded, with Sennett restrained from firing him only by distributors clamoring for more Chaplin pictures. IMDb’s trivia suggests that this is owing to Mabel being “quick to dismiss [Chaplin’s] own ideas for more refined comic business,” though her slapstick is visibly subtler and more naturalistic than Chaplin’s at this point. As Mabel at the Wheel itself depicts, when men fight over Mabel, it’s always Mabel who gets hit. Chaplin’s autobiography, My Life In Pictures, and Thomas Sherman both suggest the real problem was Chaplin’s inability to “countenance this girl, years younger than himself, directing him in his films,” despite Normand being his mentor in cinema. The jealous saboteur and shrieking bully that Chaplin plays in Mabel At The Wheel is therefore interesting, not only for contrasting with his later self-authored image, but for reflecting his reported behavior on set.

Chaplin never found a comic partnership to rival Mabel’s with Arbuckle, Margaret Dumont’s with Groucho Marx, Flora Finch’s with John Bunny, Lucille Ball’s with Vivian Vance or Stan Laurel’s with Oliver Hardy. He never again found, or perhaps permitted, a co-star with Mabel’s ability to rival both his physical daring and his emotional range, despite the undeniable spark this gives their interplay. A “Battle of the Sexes” angle, that debates whether Chaplin or Normand is more talented, surely misses the point: couldn’t both have grown to their fullest potential through equal collaboration? Wouldn’t Chaplin have sparked off madcap Mabel, as her naturalist theories inspired the developing emotional depth of his comedy? Wouldn’t Mabel, who had never performed comedy for a live audience, have developed discipline and sharper timing by learning from Chaplin’s years of vaudeville experience? Chaplin’s insecurity is not solely responsible for torpedoing Normand’s directing career, but his support could certainly have saved it.

Suggested Soundtrack: Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuDqb1mp4oo”]

Mabel’s Blunder – 1914

“To make a farce heroine more than a mere doll, you must think out the situation yourself and, above all, you must pay great attention to every little detail in the scene. The little bits of business that seem insignificant are what make good comedy“ – Mabel Normand

Mabel’s Blunder, written and directed by Normand, suffers from Mabel’s lack of a really talented co-star, but further develops themes from her earlier films. As Chaplin does in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Mabel’s boss and future father-in-law finds himself sexually harassing a man who has been substituted for Mabel, making male viewers imagine themselves as the harassed woman. Mabel’s forced smile, while harassed by her boss, pointedly contrasts with her privately expressed disgust. Normand again symbolizes her independence in Mabel’s Blunder by taking the wheel, posing as a chauffeur to spy on her cheating fiancé. Mistaken for a man, Mabel is attacked by a jealous suitor for talking to another woman, once more exploring how jealousy suffocates female freedom. Her cheating fiancé applauds the jealous suitor, exposing his double standards. The pointedness of this gender commentary is undermined, however, by a traditional happy ending in which the “other woman” is harmlessly revealed as the fiancé’s sister, while the implications of his own father’s harassing Mabel are never really confronted. All in all, Mabel’s gender reversals are not as biting as Alice Guy’s, but the two have a comparable comic perspective, a distinctive voice that was suppressed by the exclusion of female filmmakers.

Suggested Soundtrack: Yoko Ono, “What a Bastard the World Is”

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

While Lois Weber and Mabel Normand were helping to shape Hollywood’s cinematic style, back in Alice Guy’s homeland, France, Germaine Dulac was busily birthing experimental film and auteur theory. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone performs stand-up and cabaret, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and slapping sticks.

Stop Leaving Money on the Table: Change Who’s Sitting At It

Men are spoilt for choice; women are starved. Targeting women is like selling ice to a Bedouin, during a heatwave, in a particularly bad year for the ice harvest. Quality content for women has scarcity value.

This is a guest post by Zoe Samuel.

We live in the age of data, on the personal and demographic scale. Research is changing our understanding of who consumes content, how they do so, and what value they offer advertisers and partners. We know now that there is a group of people who control 70 percent of domestic consumer spending; spend more time on social media; buy 52 percent of movie tickets and 68 percent of theater tickets; and watch more TV than any other group. This demographic is vast: 51 percent of the population.

The group in question is, of course, women. The market opportunity represented by this demographic, as creators and consumers, remains the greatest source of untapped or under-exploited revenue in entertainment.

The amount of competition for the attention of women, when compared to the amount of competition for men, is still currently very low. This demo is horribly under-served, both in the quality and the quantity of content available to it. As far as quality, when it looks at a screen, it is perhaps surprising that it doesn’t have a rage fit and throw things. If it were to buy into how it is portrayed on the screen, it would see itself as few in number; vapid and narcissistic; over-sexualized but rarely possessing any actual desire of its own; an unfunny mirror for other people’s comedy; limited in age range; almost entirely devoid of agency (bearing in mind that feistiness is not a substitute); and just plain stupid. Even given all of this, it is still the bedrock of the market.

Regarding quantity, the mere fact that content is predominantly still aimed at men is proof in and of itself that instinct, not data, is guiding decision-making here, and that that instinct is about 40 years out of date. Men are spoilt for choice; women are starved. Targeting women is like selling ice to a Bedouin, during a heatwave, in a particularly bad year for the ice harvest. Quality content for women has scarcity value.

There is a huge opportunity here. If women buy even when they are not targeted, they buy many times over when they are. This demo rapaciously consumes any content that speaks to it as it is, and as it wishes it could be: three-dimensional, flawed, sexual, old, young, eccentric, powerful, intelligent, funny, varied. Whenever it is treated with this sort of basic respect, it shows up in vast numbers: Bridesmaids, The Heat, The Hunger Games, The Fault In Our Stars, Gone Girl, Divergent, Frozen, Cinderella … these are not aberrations. This is not a niche. This is the invisible hand at work, throwing huge piles of money at people who are paying attention.

This is a demo worth aiming content at, and that requires creators who get their audience’s needs and wants. Selling to a demographic you don’t understand is essentially impossible. And the only way to understand women is – just as with men – either to listen to them, or be them. Clearly men who listen to women can write for women: the songs that made Frozen a hit were written by a married couple, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Andersen-Lopez. Joss Whedon has impeccable credentials when it comes to appealing to women. Shakespeare was doing it centuries ago. It works in reverse, too: Kathryn Bigelow has made a stellar career out of making very dudely movies watched mostly by dudes.

That said, there are certainly correlations showing that women on the team result in women on the screen, and we’ve already established that women on the screen equals bringing in the green. The same way that women in the boardroom correlate with higher profits, women on the creative team are good for the bottom line. In the words of Sheryl Sandberg, “If men want to make their work teams successful, one of the best steps they can take is to bring on more women.” Shows with a more mixed writers’ room enjoy higher audience retention and are more likely to get a second season. Just as people typically hire in their own image, they tend to create in their own image, which means a team with a bigger variety of voices is more likely to competently portray a variety of characters. It’s not because the creators are better, but that they are unlike each other. It’s Darwinian; their strength comes from their variety. (It is probably–and it would be great to see data on this–also because the sort of company that hires and promotes against stereotype when it comes to women is self-evidently adaptable and creative, and is thus more robust in other ways, such as hiring the highest quality men.)

Women, as an audience, represent more value for less effort. Data is everything, and the data doesn’t lie. What’s happening to the media marketplace is not a trend. It’s not even a movement. It’s the economy, stupid, and it’s not going away.

In short, it doesn’t matter how you feel about women qua women. What matters is how you feel about money, qua money, in your wallet, paying your bills, sitting on your driveway in the form of a really expensive car (that, statistically speaking, your wife bought). The last person into any market has the toughest time. The wise course is to get in now before all the best seats are taken, and then fill a bunch of them with women. Alternatively, leave all that money on the table, and wait for someone else to come along and take it.

Zoe Samuel is a British-born writer who writes for stage and screen from her home on a plane between New York and London. She’s also VP of Theater for Concert Live, who provide mobile merchandising and data analytics for live events. Talk data to her at zoesamuel.com and @zoe_samuel.

Vintage Viewing: Lois Weber, Blockbusting Boundary-Pusher

Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors.

Written by Brigit McCone.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

“No women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber” – film historian Anthony Slide

Lois Weber: social justice warrior

The career of Lois Weber demonstrates the importance of mentoring between women; entering Gaumont Company as an actress in 1904, Weber was encouraged by the original film director, Alice Guy, to explore directing, producing, and scriptwriting, while Weber mentored female directors at Universal like Cleo Madison and Dorothy Davenport Reid. Weber’s career also demonstrates the importance of precedent: elected to the Motion Picture Directors’ Association and the highest paid director in Hollywood, her success inspired Universal to promote female directors such as Ida May Park to replace her when Weber left to found Lois Weber Productions. Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors. The only survivor into Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dorothy Arzner, was great for transmasculine representation, but an indicator of how exclusively masculine-coded directing had become.

Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber and Jeanie MacPherson — Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber, and Jeanie MacPherson

For her first feature film, 1914’s The Merchant of Venice, Weber chose a Shakespearean classic whose brilliant female lawyer, Portia, resolves the plot’s dilemma. Her 1915 feature, Hypocrites, is a lush epic. Made the year before D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Hypocrites parallels the medieval past and the present in a moral allegory, anticipating Griffith’s most admired film. Weber’s Hypocrites criticizes mob mentality and organized religion, as a medieval monk creates an icon of truth as a naked woman and is murdered by a mob for lewdness. Using innovative traveling double exposures and intricate editing, Weber constructs her naked star as a disembodied phantasm, who confronts congregation members with their own urges for money, sex and power, bypassing slut-shaming to examine society’s fear of the naked woman in the abstract. Fact mirrored fiction, as audiences flocked to Hypocrites for its nudity, before Weber faced a backlash of hypocritical outrage. Weber’s film also features vast canvases and landscapes, using mountains with interesting silhouettes and the highly reflective surface of lakes to compensate for the low light-sensitivity of early cameras. Film critic Mike E. Grost points out that this pictorial quality is associated with the cinema of John Ford, who started his directing career working for Weber’s employer, Universal, in 1917, two years after Hypocrites. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJBJvEEPegI”]

Extract from Hypocrites, showcasing Weber’s pictorial allegory

In 1915, Hypocrites was banned by the Ohio censorship board, as was the racist The Birth of a Nation. The all-male Supreme Court’s judgement in Mutual vs. Ohio, that free speech protections should not apply to motion pictures, centers sexual “prurience” as their concern however, not hate speech. By 1915, female directors Alice Guy and Lois Weber had explored gender role reversal, gay affirmative narratives, social pressures fuelling prostitution, the evils of domestic abuse, and the hypocrisy of male censorship of the female form. The following year, Weber would condemn capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe, while the Supreme Court’s decision enabled widespread censorship of films by Weber and Margaret Sanger advocating birth control. By the time free speech protections were extended to film, with 1952’s Burstyn vs. Wilson decision, female directors had been eliminated from Hollywood’s studio system.

More than just social propaganda, Weber’s films were equally noted for her talent at drawing out effective performances, shown in this extract from 1921’s exploration of wage inequity and the credit crisis, The Blot. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ttuOKdPC4″]

Margaret McWade‘s dignified humiliation in The Blot (extract)

Though most of Weber’s films are credited to the husband and wife team of Weber and Phillips Smalley, Weber was the sole author of their scenarios. She went on to write and direct five feature films after her divorce from Smalley, while he never directed again. Nevertheless, film historian Anthony Slide claims that her productivity declined post-divorce as she could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband. Her drop in productivity actually parallels most of her female peers, with outside investors playing an increasing role in 1920s Hollywood and preferring to back male productions. Despite setbacks, including the bankruptcy of Lois Weber Productions, Weber entered the sound era with lost film White Heat in 1934, depicting a plantation owner ruined after discarding his native lover and marrying a white society girl. This echoes Weber’s 1913 short Civilized and Savage, in which a heroic native girl nurses a plantation owner and departs unthanked. Though Weber’s brownface performance in Civilized and Savage, and her use of “tragic mulatto” clichés for White Heat‘s martyred heroine, can be criticized, both films are theoretically anti-racist. Weber died of a ruptured gastric ulcer, aged 60, in 1939, dismissively eulogized as a “star-maker” rather than a distinctive artist with her own voice and politics.

Suspense – 1913

“The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it.” – Carol J. Clover

In Carol J. Clover’s influential study Men, Women, And Chain Saws, she expresses surprise at finding feminist enjoyment in horror, where majority-male audiences are expected to identify with a female protagonist. But slashers were not the male creation she assumed them to be. Gothic horror was popularized by Ann Radcliffe, writing from the perspective of a vulnerable yet resilient heroine. Radcliffe’s Final Girl was raped by Matthew Lewis’ Monk, parodied by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and made lesboerotic by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, but her role as the conventional protagonist of horror was fixed, her impact discussed by Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia. Male artists obsessively sexualized the Final Girl, but didn’t create her.

In Lois Weber’s 1913 short Suspense, the Final Girl crosses into cinema, now unsexily a wife and mother. Ideologically, Suspense is not radical: Weber’s middle-class heroine is a damsel-in-distress, shrieking and clutching her baby as she’s imperiled by the house-invading “Tramp,” waiting passively for her husband to rescue her. What Suspense brilliantly achieves is a cinematic language of the female gaze, inducing male viewers to identify with the heroine. From the mother spotting the Tramp from an upper window in dramatic close-up, to the Tramp’s slow ascent, viewed from the woman’s position at the top of the stairs, to Weber’s close-ups of the mother’s terrified reactions, Suspense demonstrates that identifying with the imperiled woman is essential to produce… suspense.

Weber’s split screens, and the dread she builds by allowing the Tramp to initially lurk in the background, were also innovative. From George Cukor’s Gaslight to Hitchcock’s Rebecca to John Carpenter’s Halloween, directors would use Weber’s techniques of female gaze to induce the male empathy that they required for their suspense effects, creating the accidental feminism of horror that Clover celebrated. Though often remembered for her moralism, Weber mastered the craft of popular entertainment, scripting the original 1918 Tarzan of the Apes, and being drafted to recut the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera after initial versions tested poorly, successfully crafting it into an acknowledged classic. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wkw5Fr_I8″]

Where Are My Children? – 1916

“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.” – Margaret Sanger

“Must She Always Plead In Vain?” by legendary feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers, 1919

A Cinema History slams Weber’s influential 1916 film with the claim that “even more strongly than D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, this film defends the superiority of the white race… the film is in the first place defending eugenics.” It is true that Weber’s film invokes eugenics in her courtroom defense of birth control, but her case studies are of impoverished white families in circumstances unsuitable for children – abusive relationships, overcrowded homes and ailing mothers. Weber’s argument, “if the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out,” actually anticipates research by popular book Freakonomics. The irony of Where Are My Children? — that birth control and abortion are available to women who can afford children, but not to the poor — mirrors current realities in Ireland. Though the activism of Women on Web has reduced the number of Irish women driven overseas for terminations over the last decade from over 6,000 yearly to around 3,000, the law almost exclusively impacts institutionalized women, illegally trafficked women, asylum seekers, homeless women, hospitalized women and victims of reproductive coercion – that is, groups most at risk of sexual exploitation.

Like Weber’s choice of a white actor for the Tramp of Suspense, and her argument in Civilized and Savage that civilized values are independent of race, her choice of white families as negative case studies in Where Are My Children? dodges eugenics’ racial aspect. To understand why she is using eugenics, one must appreciate the philosophy’s widespread acceptance before its adoption by Nazism, shaping US debates on immigration and converting celebrities George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill in the UK. Weber covers her bases by invoking religion as well as pseudoscience, using Calvinist concepts of election as a metaphor for the “predestination” of planned parenthood, with cherubs representing pregnancies that were unfilmable at the time.

The prosecution of Margaret Sanger inspired the film’s Dr. Homer. A Cinema History questions Weber’s feminist cred by demanding, “Why did Lois Weber turn this positive female character into a man?” Why A Cinema History considers eugenicist Sanger “a positive female character” while criticizing Weber is a mystery, but here’s why Dr. Homer’s a man: the success of Where Are My Children? emboldened Weber to make The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, starring Weber herself as a woman on trial for advocating birth control. The film’s original title Is A Woman A Person? echoes Ireland’s #iamnotavessel. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle was censored across the Northeast and Midwest, and is now lost.

Alison Duer Miller, sarcastic suffragette bitch (in a good way)

The suppression of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle demonstrates the necessity of Weber’s patriarchal approach to Where Are My Children? (including remaining uncredited to obscure its female authorship), as classic deliberative rhetoric. Weber harnesses popular horror of abortion to present birth control as the only alternative to “stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of unwilling mothers.” The hero, Walton, fails to consult his wife on having children, driving her to secret abortions which render her unable to conceive, punishing him with permanent childlessness. In a Dirty Dancing twist (another female-authored blockbuster), the housekeeper’s daughter dies by tragically botched abortion, blamed on the wealthy “wolf” who seduced her without consequence.

Though A Cinema History claims the film shows “how moral values have shifted since the 1910s,” their interpretation of Weber’s frankly depicted unwilling mothers, as “refusing motherhood out of pure selfishness,” rather suggests little has changed. Where Are My Children? is not a free expression of Weber’s eugenic or anti-abortion views (whatever they were), it is calculated propaganda for an age when advocates of birth control were prosecuted by male juries, under obscenity laws created by legislatures for which women were not yet entitled to vote. Watching Where Are My Children?, you see our foremothers going to the mattresses for freedoms we (even me, thanks to Ireland’s Contraceptive Train) now take for granted. Despite its outdated imagery, or precisely because of how that imagery reflects Weber’s anticipated audience, Where Are My Children? is a milestone in the struggle for reproductive rights.

Suggested Soundtrack: Joan Baez, “Baez Sings Dylan”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwrkAyH0-8A”]

See also at Bitch Flicks: Erik Bondurant reviews Where Are My Children

Lois Weber was only one of many actresses who took creative control over their films by moving into directing in the silent era. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female artists (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

For White TV Writers Who Have Considered Racism When *Ethnic* Diversity Is Too Much by Jai Tiggett at Shadow and Act

Critics are Pissed That People of Color are Finally Being Represented in Media by Sesali B. at Feministing

At the Box Office, It’s No Longer a Man’s World by Brooks Barnes at The New York Times

Hollywood’s Women Problem: Why Female Filmmakers Have Hit the Glass Ceiling by Gili Malinsky at The Daily Beast

What DreamWorks movie ‘Home’ means for Hollywood representation by Alexandra Samuels at USA Today

New Web Series “You’re So Talented” Gives Us a Black Female Protagonist to Root For by Evette Dionne at Bitch Media

Two New Films About Girls – One a Dystopian Sci-Fi, the Other a Gritty Indie – Announced by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Agent Scully is Back! by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Reading Mae West’s ‘Sextette’ as a PUA Manual

Watch and learn, average frustrated chumps

Written by Brigit McCone.

PUA (pick-up artistry) is a strange beast. Its core technique relies on teaching men to dehumanize women as “targets” in order to numb themselves to rejection, making it psychologically easier to approach larger numbers of women and therefore, statistically, to enjoy greater sexual success, though at the cost of emotional connection. PUA thus represents the art of maximizing sexual success by minimizing sexual satisfaction. Mae West’s 1978 film Sextette is also a strange beast, and a fascinating film. When I say that it’s fascinating, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s good. Sextette is a car crash of a film, a head-on collision between a lavish MGM musical and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It is a perfect candidate for interactive midnight screenings and ironic appreciation, which should be mandatory at every festival of women’s film.

The usual responses of male reviewers label Mae West as “delusional” and “grotesque” for her iron conviction in her own seductive power at the age of 84 (minimum). West was Billy Wilder’s original inspiration for the aging, predatory narcissist Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., while reviewer Nathan Rabin says of Sextette, “stick in a coda revealing that the whole thing was a ridiculous fantasy by an impoverished washerwoman nearing death, and the whole film would take on an unmistakably bittersweet, melancholy dimension.” Yes, the guy who invented the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” label, to criticize self-centered male sexism, suggests that female fantasies of lifelong desirability are only valid if they are affirmed to be impossible in real life. The irony. It burns.

Real life, however, differs from such critics’ expectations of “realism.” Far from ending her life as a sex-starved, “impoverished washerwoman,” Mae West actually had a flourishing relationship with the ruggedly handsome wrestler Paul Novak, almost 30 years her junior, who remained devoted to her for 26 years in one of show business’ greatest romances, nursing her at her death but discouraging her from including him in her will.

We may squirm at Sextette, to see an 84-year-old lady claim irresistible attractiveness without the apologetic, self-deprecating irony that we demand of older women’s sexuality, but Mae’s claims are securely grounded in her proven track record of seduction. If you will it, Dude, it is no dream. If Mae had listened to dominant culture’s messages about the female sell-by date, she would never have dared to play a sex-bomb in her late 30s, her age in her Hollywood debut, or selected a much-younger and undiscovered Cary Grant for her co-star. We owe Cary Grant’s career to Mae’s “denial,” while her selection of a young Timothy Dalton for the leading man of Sextette shows a similar eye for star potential, the film prophetically comparing him to 007.

I don’t necessarily recommend Mae West’s narcissistic seductress as a role model for all women, but I strongly recommend her as Laverne Cox’s definition of a “possibility model”; Mae is a reminder that we define our own roles and culture is created partly by our consent. Mae West’s Sextette is the most perfect illustration that the values of dominant culture depend on its male authorship, while female authorship (Mae insisted on writing or co-writing all her films, dictating to directors on set) can just as easily create images of octogenarian vixens commanding the lustful worship of entire “United States athletic teams” of half-naked musclemen, and brokering world peace through their irresistible sexual power (why haven’t you seen this film yet?). Sextette uncomfortably tears down the curtain and reveals the balding wizard behind the Great and Powerful Oz of cinema’s “realism,” just as Singing In The Rain exposed the artificiality of Lina Lamont’s glamour by swapping the sex of the voice behind the curtain. Here lies Sextette‘s true countercultural anarchy, and the reason it deserves midnight screening immortality. But the film also represents, as we shall show with our trusty pualingo.com, a classic PUA manual.

Abundance Mentality

Abundance mentality is defined by PUA lingo as “the belief and life perspective that there is no shortage of hot girls to meet in any man’s lifetime.” This principle is continually reinforced within male-authored culture, from the female disposability fantasy of James Bond to the geriatric desirability dreams of Woody Allen, which influential New York Times critic Vincent Canby might have considered “a poetic, terrifying reminder of how a virtually disembodied ego can survive total physical decay and loss of common sense” if he hadn’t already said that about Sextette. Conversely, our culture constantly depicts narratives of female anxiety over their “biological clocks” and their “last chance for love,” reinforcing a scarcity mentality whose psychological impact is dramatized with wincing accuracy by the desperation romcom of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Mae West, however, modeled an abundance mentality throughout her life, in defiant immunity to cultural pressures. Though acknowledging her life partner, ruggedly handsome Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, was a “good guy,” she quipped in her mid-80s “course there’s 40 guys dyin’ for his job!”

The filmmakers originally intended West’s character, Marlo, to weep over Timothy Dalton’s abandonment, while goth-rock legend Alice Cooper (with tangerine tan and poodle perm, naturally. Why haven’t you seen this film?) serenaded her with piano ballad “No Time For Tears,” but Mae insisted that her character would not cry and forced Cooper to perform the jazzy, uptempo “Next, Next” (“he blew his chance with you! Next, next! Lost you to someone new!”), maintaining her character’s positive vibing so that the film’s advocacy of abundance mentality would not be compromised. West and Dalton’s final reconciliation suggests that this was only a soft next on Marlo’s part, however. Male critics interpret such abundance mentality as delusion, in a woman who resembles a macabre apparition and the monster from beyond time, but West’s track record of sexual success suggests that such protests be understood as token resistance.

Midnight screening suggestion: bring a loud buzzer to hit before yelling “next!”

DHV: Demonstration of Higher Value

Marlo's target, acknowledging her higher value — Marlo’s target, acknowledging her higher value

While male sexual value peaks between the ages of 21 and 30 (as clarified by Sextette‘s “happy birthday, 21!” anthem and Mae’s criticism of Tony Curtis as an unsuitably elderly screen lover, only 30 years her junior) and is largely dependent on the man’s rugged looks and muscle-tone, a woman may increase her sexual market value (SMV) at any age by a canned routine of humorous quips, positive vibing, displays of wealth and willingness to walk away or “soft next,” as Mae demonstrates throughout the film. The best technique for a DHV is to avoid direct bragging (which can actually read as desperation, and thus a demonstration of lower value, or DLV), through the use of wings to praise you on your behalf. In Sextette, the role of “Marlo’s wing” is played by Everyone Who Is Not Marlo. Before the central couple arrive, Regis Philbin brands Marlo “the greatest sex symbol the screen has ever known,” while an obliging crowd sings her DHV anthem “Marlo! The female answer to Apollo! As lovely as Venus De Milo! A living dream!” the press corps laugh at her every word and even ex-husband Ringo Starr shows willingness to wing for her: “You know when your wife was my wife? Your wife was some wife!” Such consistent DHV naturally provokes Timothy Dalton’s target into the production of expensive diamonds as well as verbal IOIs, in this clearly approval-seeking ballad (click. I dare you). Claims by male reviewers that this moment is like “gazing upon one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, something so momentously and unimaginably monstrous that even perceiving the edges of it threatens one with madness” are best interpreted as manifestations of their bitch shields (BS).

Midnight screening suggestion: wing for Marlo by wolf-whistling and dangle bracelets of sparklers whenever she mentions being turned on.

NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming is the art of conditioning the target‘s responses through ambiguity and anchoring. In an NLP context, ambiguity is the use of normal, innocuous words that sound like sexual terms, to unconsciously stimulate a man’s sexual senses. Mae West reveals herself a grandmistress of this art, with statements such as “I’m the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night,” referencing her busy schedule as an actress, but subconsciously suggesting sexual stamina to the receptive male mind. “Everything goes up for Marlo!” literally refers to a pink cassette trampolined into a statue’s mouth (don’t ask) but on a deeply subtle and subconscious level could be regarded as sexually suggestive, while “when I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m better” might conceivably be associated with a sexual “bad girl” rather than with theft or arson. After this ingenious technique has made all men uncontrollably aroused by the octogenarian West, she is free to select her targets at will from their superabundance. Next!

Anchoring, meanwhile, is the art of associating gestures with emotional states through their repetition. In Sextette, Mae uses her anchors, such as trademark hair-patting, to elicit Pavlovian arousal by evoking her earlier performances, while groping her own breasts is a classic point to self (PTS) to anchor her feeling of success. A related art is kino, the regular touching and stroking of the target that prevents octogenarian actresses from ending up in his friend zone, which Marlo can be observed demonstrating on Ricky, the 21-year-old team mascot, throughout Sextette‘s gym scene. When male commentators describe the film as “like watching your grandmother at a gangbang,” the key is to reframe that observation, for example by cocking an eyebrow and purring “does that excite you?”

Midnight screening suggestion: Recognize NLP Ambiguity by clicking fingers and barking “you’re under!” in the style of Little Britain’s Kenny Craig, while all PTS maneuvers should be mimicked.

Peacocking

By wearing something showy, like a huge feather headdress or semi-transparent gown, a PUA is able to differentiate herself from her competition. Peacocking is a term derived from the biological behavior of peacocks and from Darwinism, not from the ginormous plumes crowning Mae West like a kooky cockatoo. Peacocking lures the PUA’s targets into starting conversations with her, offering her openings such as “what is that thing on your head? You look like a kooky cockatoo!” By wearing something completely ridiculous, the PUA also opens herself up to shit tests from men, such as New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s claim that Mae resembles “a plump sheep that’s been stood on its hind legs, dressed in a drag-queen’s idea of chic, bewigged and then smeared with pink plaster.” By demonstrating that she can deal with this social pressure, Mae shows her irresistibly alpha characteristics. It must be admitted that, in the striking costumes of legendary, eight-time Oscar-winner Edith Head, Mae looks like a damn chic sheep dressed as sexy lamb.

Midnight screening suggestion: the most ridiculous feather boas and fascinators you can get your hands on, for regular stroking throughout the screening.

So what’s the moral of this study? Should we be inspired by Mae’s conquests of the screen and of ruggedly handsome wrestler, crowned Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, to endorse the indomitable positivity of PUA philosophy (go West, young woman)? Or point to the reactions of squirming male viewers to finally prove that PUA is creepy, once and for all? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between, in cultivating a confident independence and immunity to cultural pressure, while still respecting the consent of others? Who knows? Only one moral is certain: never, ever play a drinking game in which you do a shot for every sex pun in this movie. Seriously. You could die. [youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_j-DNJwZA”]

The trailer alone would get you bombed

Brigit McCone over-identifies with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns out of the corner of her mouth.

Vintage Viewing: Alice Guy, Gender-Bending Pioneer

‘Bitch Flicks’ presents Vintage Viewing – a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy?

Alice Guy: she's the man — Alice Guy: she’s the man

Written by Brigit McCone, this post is part of Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers.

When discussing opportunities for women and minorities created by new media, Kathleen Wallace highlighted the explosion of female directors at the birth of cinema, later squeezed out by the studio system. The list of vintage female directors is long, varied, and multinational. Yet, theorists like Laura Mulvey define feminist cinema by its resistance to the Male Gaze™, virtually ignoring the precedent of the female gaze. When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Bitch Flicks presents Vintage Viewing – a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy?

Alice Guy may be compared to Ada Lovelace, who published the original computer program and first predicted the wider applications of computing. Like Lovelace, Guy was the pioneer who envisioned the future of her field. Like Lovelace, her legacy is only now being reappraised after decades of neglect. Though Guy’s memoirs indicate she may have directed the world’s first fiction film, her massive output, estimated at almost 1,000 films, is really more remarkable for its overall grasp of film’s potential, both technical (hand-painting color film, pioneering the close-up, synchronized sound, and special effects such as superimposition) and in establishing tropes from melodrama to comedy to action to suspense.

Click here to watch an excellent youtube documentary.

Alfred Hitchcock once cited two thrilling early influences: D. W. Griffith and Alice Guy. But Guy wasn’t simply an influential pioneer who happened to be female; she repeatedly challenged gender stereotypes in her work. Though sexologist John Money only coined the concept of a “gender role” in 1955, Alice Guy’s cross-dressing films were interrogating gender’s socially constructed nature 50 years earlier.

Pierrette’s Escapades – 1900

“We have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.” – Audre Lorde

Pierrette’s Escapades is one of the hand-painted demonstration films that Alice Guy produced for Gaumont in France, before her move to America. This film is particularly interesting for probably containing cinema’s first lesbian kiss. Guy recognized the power of representation, not only for queer visibility, but with 1912’s affirmative Jewish narrative A Man’s A Man, and cinema’s first Black cast in that same year’s A Fool and His Money, a story of hustling and hard luck inspired by blues narratives. Within a lushly tinted, escapist sensuality, the women of Pierrette’s Escapades play roles from anarchic Commedia dell’Arte and carnival traditions. As such, their flirtations and kisses can be explained by the established relationships between these stock characters, but Guy has taken conventionally heterosexual love scenes and reimagined them with an all-female cast.

The femme Pierrette, in her throbbing pink dress, resembles a coquettish Columbine, the trickster wife of sad clown Pierrot, and mistress of witty Harlequin (the 16th century’s Bugs Bunny). As rivals, Harlequin and Pierrot represent the two faces of love, its triumphs and disappointments. The film opens with Pierrette reveling in her costume and powdering herself for Harlequin. A figure sidles into frame, in the traditional costume of Pierrot. Pierrot’s baggy clothes and white-powdered face make it difficult to identify the figure’s sex, who clumsily moves to embrace Pierrette, while she dodges impatiently, before Pierrot steals a kiss on her bare shoulder. Pierrette angrily orders her husband/wife to bed and primps for Harlequin. In the skintight, checkered costume and hat that identify the character, Harlequin is unmistakably feminine. In contrast to her coerced affection with Pierrot, Pierrette blossoms with female Harlequin, swooning and spinning before melting into her arms. Guy cuts the film at the moment of their kiss, leaving it open-ended and suggestive.

Pierrette’s low-cut bodice and the raising of her skirts mark this film as teasingly erotic for the time. Records indicate that Guy filmed cinema’s first striptease three years before Pierrette’s Escapades. Since the forced hypersexuality of women on film has become an expression of male control, modern feminists often read such images as objectifying. It’s worth remembering that a female director, Lois Weber, filmed the first female full-frontal, while Mae West provoked the paternalist Hays Code with her sexual frankness. The eroticism of Pierrette’s Escapades is a reminder of the liberating power of playful, sexual self-representation. Like the suffragettes, who wore lipstick as a symbol of defiance, it challenges sexless definitions of feminist orthodoxy. Isn’t viewing female bodies only from the imaginary perspective of an objectifying Male Gaze™ itself oppressive? Soundtrack suggestion: Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun“ [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeByzgJFLMs”]

Walk in the sun

The Consequences of Feminism – 1906

“Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.” – Betty Friedan

Alice Guy’s work regularly explored the status of women. She moulded Vinnie Burns into cinema’s first action heroine, and depicted women in traditionally male professions such as magicians and dog-trainers. In 1912’s Making an American, “Ivan Orloff and his unhappy wife” represent a caricature of East-European cultures of wife-beating – Orloff’s wife is yoked to his wagon as a beast of burden. When the couple emigrate to America, Guy shows Americans constantly intervening to correct Orloff’s treatment of his wife, presenting resistance to domestic abuse as an American value fundamental to the “Land of the Free.” 1914’s The Lure was a sympathetic examination of the forces pressuring women into prostitution. Nevertheless, many feminist viewers struggle with Guy’s 1906 farce, The Consequences of Feminism, an apparently reactionary nightmare in which feminism creates a world of “sissified” men, who rebel by reclaiming their clubhouse and toasting the restoration of patriarchy. Discussing Pamela Green’s Guy documentary Be Natural, Kristen Lopez concludes this film depicts “the bad side” of feminism, before apologetically suggesting “the very idea that a woman was exploring social issues in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote is astounding”. Is this really all that can be said? That it’s cool to see a woman having enough of a voice to argue against women having more of a voice?

The Consequences of Feminism does not depict a society on the verge of collapse, it depicts straightforward role reversal. In her lost 1912 film In The Year 2000, Guy also reverses gender roles, with Darwin Karr playing the objectified “Ravishing Robert”. This anticipates later female authors who used sci-fi to interrogate gender, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman with 1915’s Herland, or Ursula LeGuin with 1969 Hugo and Nebula prize-winner The Left Hand of Darkness (off topic: am I the only one shipping the Wachowski siblings to adapt?). Compare “Turnabout Intruder,” the genuinely reactionary 1969 finale of the original Star Trek series, which used role reversal to attempt to discredit second-wave feminism. In “Turnabout Intruder,” Dr. Janice Lester voices feminist grievances: “your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women,” before swapping bodies with Captain Kirk and attempting to command. Kirk shows calm authority in Lester’s body, while Lester is emotionally incapable of handling Kirk’s command and “red-faced with hysteria.” As “Turnabout Intruder” shows, discrediting feminism through role reversal requires a demonstration that women are incapable of performing male roles.

The Consequences of Feminism, by contrast, uses a farcical depiction of feminist rule to demonstrate that, while women thrive in male roles, men could not endure Friedan’s “sexual sell” of trading desirability for loss of power. Male viewers are confronted with a vision of themselves as passive “Ravishing Roberts” who must feign sexual resistance to preserve their reputation, laboring in domestic servitude while women supervise at their leisure. Society’s devaluing of domestic labor is shown by the women ridiculing their clubhouse’s sole washerman and pelting him with linens. If male viewers are relieved by the ending, in which a father revolts against a woman who disowns her child, and leads the men in storming the women’s clubhouse, they must acknowledge that collective rebellion against oppressive female roles is justified. Guy’s tongue-in-cheek film is the opposite of stereotypical, humorless feminism, but it demolishes the illusory power of “feminine mystique” just as effectively, as relevant for today’s MRA as for the chivalry of Guy’s own era. Soundtrack suggestion: Missy Elliott, “Work It”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMbkHQO3w”]

Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it

Algie The Miner – 1912

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” – Gloria Steinem

As a subversive populist, Guy was a master of the bait-n-switch. In 1913’s Officer Henderson, she offers audiences macho police officers dressing as women to catch crooks, the joke being the ridiculous juxtaposition of their fighting skills and feminine image. Then, at the end of the film, Guy substitutes the police officer with his wife, who reveals equal skill in tackling the crook. Officers watch and laugh at their supposed crony brawling in drag, but Guy’s real joke is revealed to be on the men themselves, for assuming that women are incapable of violence or self-defense.

Algie the Miner‘s IMDb entry lists Guy as “directing supervisor” and producer to Edward Warren’s director, at a time when the distinction between producer and director was ill-defined. Her fingerprints are all over the film, however, which she’s often credited as directing. Algie the Miner offers the joke of a flamboyant “sissy” man, contractually obliged by his future father-in-law to “prove himself a man” in rugged Western pursuits, but this is only the bait-n-switch for Guy’s critique of toxic masculinity and homophobia. Rugged pioneer Big Jim gives Algie directions to a frontier town and Algie kisses him in gratitude, leading to an explosion of violent insecurity from Jim. After discovering how non-threateningly puny Algie’s gun is, Jim thaws and agrees to become his mentor in manhood, settling into a cohabiting relationship whose separate beds recall Sesame Street‘s Bert and Ernie. Despite Algie’s female fiancé/beard, Algie the Miner is celebrated as a milestone in the history of gay cinema. When shown his separate bed in Big Jim’s cabin, Algie appears to lean into Jim suggestively before being rebuffed, giving grounds to view him as bisexual. As such, Algie’s final empowerment is gay-affirmative, as well as vindicating feminine values.

Though the rugged pioneers howl with laughter and ridicule Algie’s tiny gun, his willingness to kiss larger men demonstrates an effortless physical courage greater than that of his sexually insecure cowboy hosts, anticipating Marvel’s Rawhide Kid. Over the course of their relationship, Big Jim will teach Algie manly skills, but Algie will rescue Jim from ruinous machismo, nursing the alcoholic through his delirium tremens, saving Jim’s life from robbers and bravely defying the macho peers who pressure Jim to drink. Algie’s resistance to peer pressure, as well as his self-sacrificing nurturing instinct, vindicate feminine courage in the face of macho weakness. When Algie plans to return and claim his bride, Jim is visibly downcast until offered the chance to accompany him. Every Big Jim needs an Algie. The film ends with Algie “proving himself a man” by forcing his future father-in-law to bless his marriage at gunpoint. Closing with the father-in-law’s terror, the viewer must question whether such stereotypical masculinity is truly superior. In all, Alice Guy’s Algie the Miner offers cinema’s most affirmative portrait of male femininity until Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Soundtrack suggestion: Hole, “Be A Man” [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYYa0WxLXA”]

I’m potent, yeah

After almost single-handedly inventing the language of narrative cinema, Alice Guy mentored director Lois Weber, whose blockbusting success ushered in the golden age of female filmmakers in Hollywood. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Lois Weber, Blockbusting Boundary-Pusher. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone may now officially be an Alice Guy fangirl (Guynocentric?) She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns.

‘Beyond the Lights’ Premiere: Interviews with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Price-Bythewood: “It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.”

New+York+Premiere+Relativity+Media+Beyond+JSRkDgZtCe6l — Gugu Mbatha-Raw, left, and Gina Prince-Bythewood

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Read ahead for interviews with Beyond the Lights star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so good earlier this year in Amma Asante’s Belle as a biracial woman raised in aristocracy in slave-era England, is just as impressive in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights as Noni, a pop singer who yearns for her identity and authenticity even as she’s pushed to perform sexy numbers in skimpy costumes. Mbatha-Raw’s fiery performance, which showcases her talent as a singer and dancer, just earned her a Gotham nomination for best actress to include her in the company of Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson.

As for the talented director, Prince-Bythewood, it’s been way too long between movies; her last feature film was The Secret Life of Bees in 2008, and before that, the critically acclaimed Love & Basketball, back in 2000.

I chatted with Mbatha-Raw and Prince-Bythewood on the red carpet at the New York premiere of Beyond the Lights last week.

Co-stars Nate Parker, who plays the security guard who becomes her love interest after he saves her from a suicide attempt, and rapper Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker, who told me he writes lyrics that respect women, joined Mbatha-Raw on the red carpet, along with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her producer husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood. (Minnie Driver, who gives a powerhouse performance as Noni’s manipulative “momager,” and in one of the best scenes in the movie has a blow-out argument with Noni over the direction of her career, was sadly not at the premiere.)

First I got to speak to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who went from the film’s pop diva vixen in the film to an elegant 1940s-style Hollywood glamour queen on the red carpet.
Bitch Flicks: How did the musical scenes come together?

Mbatha-Raw: It’s been such a gift of a role. I grew up singing and dancing as a child, but more sort of musical theater style and classical dancing, so for me to be able to embrace this hip-hop style, you know I had a lot of help. Gina surrounded me with some wonderful people in the industry, not just herself, who’s had a background researching a lot of the hip-hop world, but also Laurieann Gibson, the choreographer (Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry), The Dream (Kanye West, Beyonce, Jay-Z), who wrote all the original music (Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyoncé) and also Machine Gun Kelly, who’s here, who really is a rapper in the industry and brings so much charisma and authenticity cause he really is from that world, so really I sort of had a lot of things to draw upon and felt very well-supported by the research cause we knew about the movie, or I knew about the movie, for almost two years before we got to shoot it.

BF: Were you uncomfortable performing the sexually suggestive numbers?

Mbatha-Raw: I felt very supported by the choreography. We rehearsed it; Laurieann Gibson as I mentioned, created that whole routine and that was something we rehearsed in the studio in front of a mirror for many hours, you know, and adding the elements of the hair, the makeup, the wigs, the amazing hair designs by Kim Kimble (Beyoncé), and the costumes of course, so we really were building this character on so many levels and then it was just really down to kind of doing it and singing the song and projecting that energy into the lens, which was a new experience for me, because usually as an actress you’re pretending the camera isn’t there but obviously for a music video in that style you have to look directly into the camera. And that was scary initially, but I had to get over it.

BF: Talk about your upcoming projects, including Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowski siblings sci-fi film. (It co-stars Eddie Redmayne, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum.)

Mbatha-Raw: I just have a small role in that, but it’s a really exciting movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it because I haven’t seen it yet. It’s sort of an epic space adventure and I play a character’s who’s half human, half deer.

I also shot a movie in the summer called The Whole Truth with another female director called Courtney Hunt. I don’t know when that’s coming out yet (Renee Zellweger, Keanu Reeves), and I’ve just started work on another project that’s called Compassion with Will Smith about brain injuries in the NFL.
BF: (To director Gina Prince-Bythewood about her search for an actress to play Noni.)

Prince-Bythewood: I thought I wanted a real musical artist in the lead when I first wrote it (2007) and then realized for this character I needed an actor because this character goes into some pretty deep depths. And I found Gugu two years ago and it was an amazing thing to find a woman who had incredible chops, could sing, and was brave enough to go there. And she really is brave.

BF: How did Gugu prepare for the musical numbers?

Prince-Bythewood: She put in so much work. She has a background in musical theater, which I didn’t know originally. But she worked with Debra Byrd, a vocal coach, one of the most renowned, and then the Dream; he did all the original music, and for her it was hours in the studio singing to his demos the way that Noni would, where they tell you exactly how to sing a word, how to breathe, how to sing a note. There’s no control and that’s what I wanted for Gugu the actress to have to experience, because that’s what Noni would experience.

BF: Your movie besides being entertainment has a message. How important was that to you as a filmmaker?

Prince-Bythewood: It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.

BF: You talk about how women are sexually objectified in pop culture, but how do you avoid that trap in your portrayal of Noni doing those sexy moves?

Prince-Bythewood: It starts with the message of the film and Gugu and I talked a lot about why we were doing this film and it was really to talk to young girls who are only emulating what they see right now. Can we give them something else to aspire to? So going in we knew for the character of Noni, the less she wears the less you see of her, that was the mantra, so we had to make a big jump from her as little girl and that sweetness and innocence about her, to the jump to what she is 15 years later. It has to be dramatic so that you wonder what damage happened in between. Trust me, I’m a female filmmaker, it’s a little tough sometimes to shoot things like that, but we had to compete with what the videos are out today and honestly, we could have gone further. If you see what’s out now, so we had to be authentic so that we could take the character on a journey and bring her back to an authentic place and the place that she wants to be.

BF: What’s your next movie?

Prince-Bythewood: It will take me about a year to write. It focuses more on female friendship and the way it changes through the years.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Waiting in the Wings: Why Hollywood Should Make More Comic-Based Films

Geek culture is big business. The big summer Hollywood blockbusters this year are almost exclusively drawn from comics and other science fiction, or fantasy franchises. From ‘X-Men Days of Future Past’ to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ what was once a small audience has become a massive source of revenue for Hollywood. It’s also big business for the comic’s industry. The release of ‘Guardians’ sparked one of the largest sales months for comics in recorded history. This is great news for the two big players in the world of comic publishing, as they attract new audiences and new readers to their franchises. DC and Marvel have television and film media planned well into the next decade.

This is a guest post by Lisa Pavia-Higel.

Geek culture is big business. The big summer Hollywood blockbusters this year are almost exclusively drawn from comics and other science fiction, or fantasy franchises. From X-Men Days of Future Past to Guardians of the Galaxy, what was once a small audience has become a massive source of revenue for Hollywood. It’s also big business for the comic’s industry. The release of Guardians sparked one of the largest sales months for comics in recorded history. This is great news for the two big players in the world of comic publishing, as they attract new audiences and new readers to their franchises. DC and Marvel have television and film media planned well into the next decade.

This is also very good news for those who care about how women are portrayed in modern media. That may seem counter-intuitive, given that comics have long been criticized for how they depict women, and how women are treated in the industry. However, an influx of new creative talent, an enthusiastic and ever more diverse fanbase, and a host of characters with long, and complex histories have made comics a wellspring of vast potential for new and better stories. The products created based on comic books can, when done right, be far better than the average action/adventure fare and has the potential to bring more and higher quality action-oriented female roles to the big and small screen.

It’s true that the comic genre has issues with women. There are problems within the industry in how female creators and critics are treated, issues with the art styles that often objectify women’s bodies, and serious issues when women venture into spaces where geek culture is present. In a Bitch Media article, Janelle Asselin published her research on sexual harassment in the comics industry. In her survey of more than 3,600 respondents, 59 percent felt that sexual harassment was a problem in the industry and 25 percent had experienced harassment themselves. In the world of convention goers, 13 percent reported comments of a sexual nature and 8 percent reported sexual assaults while attending cons. Asselin notes that with the growing number of women attending conventions and other fan-centered events, those percentages means that more than 10,000 women in attendance at San Diego Comic Con (one of the largest comic conventions of the year) would have experienced harassment of some kind. As a comic fan, writer, and critic, Asselin knows that the industry is hostile from first-hand knowledge. In May of 2014, she criticized a Teen Titans cover on Comic Book Resource (a comic industry website) and received not only hate mail, but also rape threats. It’s clear that there are systemic issues within both the industry and among the fans. So why is Hollywood’s embrace of comic culture a good thing?

First, because the established source material hosts a slew of strong female characters. Art aside, women were superheroes in comics long before they were fighting the good fight in films or on television. The first female superhero appeared in comics in the 1940s, long before Wonder Woman came along to break TV barriers. Mainstays of current hits like the Avengers can trace their hero backstories to the 1960s when Pepper Pots and Black Widow made their debuts. Catwoman, who most recently appeared in The Dark Knight Rises first appeared in comics in 1961. While their level of agency and influence has certainly changed over the years, characters who have been appearing in comics this long have a great deal from which to draw. And their art aside, women in comics are often far stronger and wield far more power than their counterparts in action television and film. Superhero women not only pass the Bechtel test time after time in the pages of comic books, unlike the run of the mill action heroines, they rarely are saved in their own stories.

Take, for example Black Widow and Maria Hill in the aforementioned Avengers. In the film, neither woman is saved by a male character, and both are strong members of their respective teams. Now this could be because the film’s director, Joss Whedon, has long time devotion to both strong female characters and the comic genre. He’s reported that the second Avengers film will host four female lead characters and will feature them as strong members of the team.

So from where do bad superheroine portrayals come? The problems often arise when these characters, who all have extensive and complex backstories, are translated by those who really don’t understand them. For example, in June David Goyer who will be bringing the new Justice League film to life, was asked what he would do with a long running character, She-Hulk, in a film. His answer was that this character was probably created so that geeky men could fantasize about her having sex with the Hulk, and that she was a “green pornstar.” The reaction among fans was immediate. Comic fans and producers responded to the quote calling out Goyer. Even Marvel magnate and geek guru Stan Lee responded to the controversy defending She-Hulk’s background and personal agency. Even though she bears a name derived from a male character, they laud her feminist values and strength as something they love about the series. She would make an excellent female lead, but this producer could not see beyond the way she was drawn. It’s clear that this producer didn’t take the time to really appreciate the legacy that comics offer for their strong female characters.

Moreover many studio producers just don’t think women can carry action films. This idea is being systematically disproven and it seems like even Hollywood producers are beginning to see the potential of tapping these franchises. According to an article in Time Magazine, Sony pictures will be expanding its Spider Man franchise to include a female super hero and Marvel studio president Kevin Feige said that a female-led Marvel film would happen “sooner rather than later.” This could be in response to new data that says in the last year, films with female leads made more money than those without a strong female presence.

There seems to be reason for optimism here. The new art for Wonder Woman’s role in the Batman vs. Superman film shows a short, but reasonably costumed with Gal Gadot’s stance powerful and strong in the middle of the frame. No butt shot, nor over the shoulder look. We can only hope her characterization will be as good as the image seems to indicate. Marvel also announced at San Diego Comic Con that Thor, a key role in the Avengers universe would be taken over by a women (not for the first time) and that the transformation would be a long, non-temporary story arc. While many critics were unhappy with the choice, wondering why they wouldn’t create a new female character, it presents even more interesting opportunities within the hero context.

While there is cause for excitement among female fans about seeing old favorites finally make it to big screen, many are more excited to see some of the work being produced by some of the newer talent in the industry. Beyond the world of the Avengers, Batman and Superman, there is an exciting cast of characters ripe for film or television adaptation. A new renaissance is happening within comics that is producing a greater variety of characters and characterizations. From Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy’s Captain Marvel who has inspired an entire fandom called the Carol Corps, to Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga series which was, until the release of Rocket Raccoon #1, the best-selling comic on the market, a greater diversity of writers and artists are making new characters that Hollywood could, and should draw from.

These titles are bringing new fans and a greater female audience, and they are active, excited, and involved in their media. The aforementioned Carol Corps that formed around the new Captain Marvel specializes in body positive, family friendly cosplay, and produces Carol wear for those fighting cancer. Another online campaign, I am Comics was created in response to Janelle A.’s experience over the Teen Titans debacle, and the ConSent campaign was created at the San Diego Comic Con to help those engaging in cosplay to feel safer in that context by raising awareness that cosplay (dressing up as a character) does not give anyone permission to engage in harassment.

The efforts to make comics a more welcoming place is also coming from the industry. In the aftermath of Asselin’s harassment, the hosting website, Comic Book Resource responded by resetting their forums and publishing a new policy on harassment and online conduct.

No genre is perfect, and comic books and graphic novels certainly have their problems. However, as art primarily created for the male gaze slowly changes, and as a greater diversity of writers and artists break into the world of comics, there is a great potential for dynamic and exciting storytelling that does what all art should: challenge, excite, and entertain us. The cast of film-worthy women continues to grow, and as they wait in the wings all we can do is continue to demand that their stories be told, and when they are, to vote with our dollars sending a message to Hollywood that their time has come.

Recommended Reading

If you are interested in trying out some comics with great female characters:

Fearless Defenders–A short-lived series about an all-female team.

Captain Marvel—In Pursuit of Flight: The first trade paperback in the series.

Lumberjanes–This series has been compared with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Saga–the number one best-selling series which tells the story of an interspecies war and a child born of two sides. NSFW!

Recommended Viewing

The Talking Comics Vlog on the Geek and Sundry Channel features great titles to get you started.

Black Widow is More than Just a Pretty Face

The Avengers: Strong Female Characters Failing the Bechdel Test

Lisa Pavia-Higel is a community college educator living in St. Louis, Missouri. When she is not raising her 3-year-old geeklet she writes, performs with an all-female stage combat troupe, and is currently teaching herself to sew, badly. She has also mastered the art of playing video games while yelling at the screen about the stereotypes present within them, which gives her feminist husband and gaming partner no end of joy. Follow her on Twitter @lisamariepavia