Meet the Women Who Want to Fix Hollywood's Gender Problem
An all-woman slate of directors. The first woman to direct a superhero movie featuring a female protagonist. A remake of a classic movie starring four women instead of four men.
Each of these Hollywood headlines is cause for celebration-but their rarity isn't. The underrepresentation of women in Hollywood is a chronic problem that isn't getting better.
Through Her Lens, the Tribeca Chanel Women's filmmaker program, is now in its second year and aims to change that very fact. Five emerging filmmakers-Ani Simon-Kennedy, Joey Ally, A.V. Rockwell, Catherine Eaton, and Sonejuhi Sinha-were selected to participate in the three-day workshop, which brings together women from every part of the film industry to provide support. One of the five will receive full financing at the end of the program to produce a short film; the other women will also receive grants.
In addition to funding, the program also offers the collective wisdom of Hollywood stalwarts. On Tuesday, the program kicked off with a lunch at NYC's Locanda Verde. Host Jane Rosenthal, a film producer and the Executive Chair of Tribeca Enterprises, opened with a sly greeting to all the "nasty women" present, who seemed to rather appreciate the epithet-in this context, at least. Among the attendees were women from all over the film business; some, like Rashida Jones and Jennifer Westfeldt, were lending their expertise as mentors and jurors; others offered enthusiastic support.
Katie Holmes, whose first directorial effort All We Had will be out this December, noted that she herself had received a lot of support from other women, including Rosenthal. "It's a pay it forward situation-I've been given so many opportunities by women," she said of her film career. "Just like when you say it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to be an actor, it takes a village to be a director-it takes a village to be in this industry. It's not easy. And for women, it's particularly challenging."
It takes a village to be in this industry. It's not easy.
Mentorship of the kind offered by the Tribeca Chanel program is exactly what Holmes suggests young aspiring female filmmakers seek out. Drawing from her experience as an actress, she said that the industry can be labyrinthine and intimidating: "There's a lot of things you don't know when you're entering [the industry] that you might feel shy about. You think that line should be changed? Go tell them why you want it changed. Have a point of view."
"I surround myself as often as I can with really talented women who are way better at things than I am, so I can learn from them," Jenni Konner told me, echoing that notion of learning and community. The Girls writer, director, and producer is clear on women's ability to make change happen in Hollywood: "One thing I've learned is that if the women aren't in charge, women aren't getting hired...Girls has a very high ratio of female crew and cast, and I think that you have to make it a mandate."
Of course, that doesn't mean the traditionally male domain of film will necessarily welcome the women knocking at its door. Konner mentioned an anecdote she recently relayed in Lenny Letter about a male director/producer who asked Lena Dunham to convince an actress to "show her tits." "Sexism is very pervasive and very real," Konner said, "and if there's one thing in the world that we can put a positive spin on about Donald Trump, it's making people talk about sexual harassment and sexism."
Sexism is very pervasive and very real
Actress and producer Emily Mortimer is both a staunch supporter of the program and the ultimate example of its intended outcomes. Last year, Mortimer served as a Through Her Lens mentor; she ended up starring in fund recipient Kat Coiro's film Wig Shop. "What's wonderful about this is how excited everybody is to be part of it. Not just the filmmakers, but everybody else who's here is just so psyched to be involved and wants to give their expertise." The benefits of a program like this can be immediately obvious; Wig Shop "was entirely made by women," she said. "The only characters in the cast were women, the filmmaker was a woman, the producers were women, the writer was a woman, the cinematographer was a woman."
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"We've been creating this world which is representing a completely skewed version of reality," Mortimer told ELLE.com about the film world's gender imbalance. Despite her decades of experience, Mortimer says she is treated differently because of her gender all the time: "It's sort of boring at this point." "I hadn't thought about it until a couple of years ago-I had just gone along with the program," she said. "Now that I've started to really think about it and really understand it, I've become passionate about it."
Even though initiatives like Through Her Lens connect women with each other, Mortimer says that the underrepresentation of women in film is actually everyone's problem-not for women to bear alone. "Like in the election," she said, "women's issues have become everybody's issues." Still, Through Her Lens represents an invaluable step. "We're all dreamers-we're all people who have these madcap ideas," Mortimer said. "There's so much we have in common. We should train ourselves to look for help and give help wherever we can."
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