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Women in the Film Industry

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Topic: Women in the Film Industry

Research Question: how can women become better represented in Television and film?

 

 

France, L.R. (2017). Female Directors Becoming Rarer in Hollywood. CNN. Cable News Network. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/12/ entertainment/women-directors-hollywood/.

 

Lisa France’s article focuses on the noticeable drop in numbers of female directors

working in Hollywood as of January 2017. She skims the surface of this blatant gender

inequality being observed within the Hollywood system and cites supporting data from

an extensive study of women behind the camera in Hollywood which was released by

San Diego State recently. She also acknowledges an unchanging “boys club”

environment that festers within the industry and the tendency for old, white, male

directors to take young, white, male directors under their wing, leaving women directors to fend for themselves. One of the problems that arises from this favoritism of white male directors is the circumstance in which these men are given huge budget films sometimes on their first or second time directing, whereas women are hardly ever

considered to be on the short list.

8/7/17 5:48 PM

A senior writer for CNN’s Money Media, Lisa France could be considered an

experienced journalist for the CNN news team. What gives her article the most

credibility, however, are hyperlinks to the journal article released by San Diego State

on gender inequality in the film industry titled The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-

Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2016. Although

the article itself is not the most informative, it contains links to other, much more

knowledgeable sources on the material.

 

Although this article addresses the lack of female directors in Hollywood, it would not

alone be very useful for my research paper because it is comprised mostly of quotes

from industry insiders on their take on the situation and summarizations of data

published in scholarly articles. This article is, however, useful in that it led me to more

credible sources that were used by France to write her article.

 

Lauzen, M. M. (2016). The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2016. Women In Tv/Film. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University. Retrieved from http:// womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2017/01/2016_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf.

 

Recording 19 years’ worth of female employment in the film industry, Martha Lauzen’s

research is presented in three different categories which break down her findings into

percentages of women working in different jobs behind the scenes on film sets and how

female employment in 2016 compares to employment in the past 18 years. Lauzen

found that on the 250 top domestic grossing films between the years 2015 and 2016 the

percentage of women directors, producers, executive producers, editors, and

cinematographers declined. The only position that slightly increased was female writers.

These percentages are also compared to statistics of the same jobs held by women in

1998 and Lauzen reported that the percentage of directors, editors, and executive

producers declined from 1998 to 2016 while the percentage of writers and

producers stayed the same.

 

Lauzen is credible as an author of material on gender inequality in Hollywood

employment because she is recognized as an expert on both women employment on

camera and behind the camera. She is a professor at San Diego State University and the

executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. The

information she presents in this research publication is reliable because it reports on

workplace trends of hiring women in different positions on a film set over the course of

19 years, so the data she has collected is extensive and representative of a large portion

of film history.

 

This source will be useful to me as a way of establishing the fact of female

underrepresentation in Hollywood because a majority of the data is presented as

percentages of women in specific jobs on films each year for 19 years. She includes

graphs of these trends that I may include in my paper. I will use the article a reliable

reference point for the number of women involved behind the scenes on films for nearly

two decades, which will strengthen my argument that more needs to done to correct this

inequity.

 

Molina-Guzmán, I. (2016). #OscarsSoWhite: How Stuart Hall Explains Why Nothing Changes in Hollywood and Everything Is Changing. Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol 33, No 5. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from http://nca.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295036.2016.1227864 scroll=top&needAccess=true. 23 Apr. 2017.

 

Molina-Guzmán’s scholarly article reflects on the lack of diversity within

Hollywood’s internal structure and why racial and gender discrimination has been

able to persist within the industry for so long, seemingly uncontested. This piece

builds on Stuart Hall’s theories of culture, representation, ideology, and hegemony

and how they can be used to explain why the Hollywood industry has hardly been

challenged on their significant lack of employed minorities working on film and

television sets. A reoccurring explanation throughout the article for this phenomenon is

the observation that Hollywood and television are increasing representation of

minorities onscreen, which satisfies audiences but does not put pressure on film and

television production sets/crews to attain the same level of diversity behind the

scenes.

 

Molina-Guzmán focuses the article mostly around racial discrimination of minorities

within the Hollywood system while also touching on gender because both in the film

industry are not given equal opportunities to white men. This text is a good starting point for understanding the structure of the Hollywood system and how it is built

around historical prejudices, resulting in hegemony of white men over others within the

industry. This rigid structure is a major reason for racial discrimination and sexism.

 

The section Hollywood Exceptionalism Frame will be best suited to my paper on the

lack of female involvement on film sets because it discusses how film is much farther

behind than television in regards to diversity of production crews. This part of the

article presents the statistic that between 2013 and 2014, 82.4 percent of films

released were directed by white men and only 1.3 percent of the films released were

directed by ethnic and racial minority women.

 

Smith, S. L., Choueiti, M. Scofield, E. & Pieper, K. (2014). Gender Inequality in Popular Films: Examining On-Screen Portrayals and Behind-the-Scenes Employment Patterns in Motion Pictures Released between 2007-2012. Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California, 2014. Retrieved from http://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/MDSCI_Gender_Inequality_in_600_films

 

Stacy Smith and co-authors wrote this paper about the gender inequality they

discovered from their research over the span of five years (2007-2013) from the 100

top grossing films released each of those years. One situation they found was that the

gender of the content creator, whether it be the director or screen writer, was correlated to how girls and women were represented on screen. Smith reported that over the five-year span, films directed or written by women were far less likely to depict girls or women in a sexualized manner such as wearing alluring, revealing clothes or being shown partially nude. In her conclusion she suggests that ideally this problem could be solved by hiring more women on film sets thereby influencing the representation of women on screen. In reality there has been little to no change in nearly five years so the battle for equality continues.

 

As noted below in the annotation for the TED Talk, Smith is highly qualified and

knowledgeable in her field of expertise. This article is credible and reliable because it

reports on research that was conducted over the course of 5 years. This strengthens

claims of unequal work trends and treatment of women in the film industry because

data collected from several years showing little to no change in women employment

supports the main argument of gender inequality.

 

This source presents insight into the issue of content creator gender for a research paper focusing on trends of female employment in Hollywood. It will be important to

understand how a film being directed by a man versus a woman can negatively impact

the way in which female characters are depicted onscreen. Pointing out this correlation

will help me to engage my audience and demonstrate to them why this topic is worthy

of their attention.

 

Smith, S. L. (2017). “The Data behind Hollywood’s Sexism.” TedTalksWomen. YouTube, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kkRkhAXZGg.

 

Stacy Smith’s talk at TEDWomen in October 2016 was given with the purpose of

informing an audience of the problematic social issue of gender inequality and sexism

in the film industry. She introduces data she and her research team found after

conducting an 8-year-long study of the top 100 grossing films released each year from

2007 to 2015. For every film, they recorded the total number of speaking characters,

the ratio of male to female characters, and gender of the directors. They discovered

that, in over 32,000 speaking roles in 800 films, only 1/3rd were female and that of

over 800 directors working on these films, 4.1% were women. Smith introduces this

data with the intention of lighting a fire in her audience (most of whom were women)

before launching into the second half of her talk which discusses how to take action so

these statistics may change in future years to be more representative of women in

Hollywood.

 

Smith has a PhD in Communication and is an associate professor at the University of

Southern California. Her areas of expertise include entertainment, gender studies, and

media portrayals, which gives credibility to the information she is presenting. The

goal of her talk is to inform people of a pressing social problem that is not being

perceived as one due to the industry it is associated with, Hollywood. This source

could be considered biased, however, because Smith only reports on the trends her

data shows and does not reference any other sources or studies that may contradict

her claims.

 

The data on female representation in the film industry, as well as Smith’s two suggested strategies for correcting the absence of women in movies and behind the camera, will be a helpful starting point for my paper, which will examine into why the Hollywood system has been relatively unchanging and historically less inclusive of women. Although not a source that is as credible as a scholarly article, the data Smith presents could be useful to me as a starting point for asking questions why there is a lack of female employees in Hollywood.

 

Sneider, J., and Doty, M. (2017). 20th Century Fox, Paramount Have No Female Directors Through 2018. TheWrap. Retrieved from http://www.thewrap.com/20thcentury-fox-paramount-have-no-female-directors-through-2018/

 

Jeff Sneider and Mariah Doty’s article deals with the upcoming number of female

directors attached to films set to be released over the next couple years. They break the

article up into different sections dedicated to specific film companies and their

upcoming films/directors. They found that films scheduled to be released up until 2018

from Paramount and Fox have no female directors attached to any of the movies. Many

of these movies have been in the pre-production pipelines for a couple years, before the

demand for gender inequality in the film industry became as prominent as it is now.

Only a couple of film companies have hired or are talking to some female directors to

be attached to upcoming projects, but even so Sneider and Doty argue that no real

significant change in gender equality will be seen in the film industry for a couple of

years since a majority of the movies released between now and 2018 will be directed by

men.

8/7/17 5:

The Wrap is a media news website that was founded and has been active since 2009. Its

founder, Sharon Waxman, originally worked as a correspondent for news sources such

as the New York Times and Washington Post. This source is credible as a news site

because it has won many awards for its investigative journalism, and was even named

the best online news site in 2012 and 2009. Being linked to Sharon Waxman also adds

credibility to the source, as she is an award-winning journalist and specializing in

entertainment media.

 

This source will be useful in demonstrating how women are currently being

underrepresented in the film industry. Many of the scholarly articles noted above look at data collected from the last several years and suggest a probable trend that is associated with such low numbers of women working on film sets. This article, however, looks at future films and how women are still not being considered for films scheduled to be released into 2018. This will help me to establish that this is a trend that my audience should continue to track into the near future.

 

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