Sources inside Warner’s tell me that, 1) Robinov doesn’t believe there’s an actress who can carry a movie worldwide since Julia Roberts, 2) Robinov has now gone so far as admitting to his studio colleagues that the decree I reported was made when he was “in the room”, 2) Robinov is acknowledging that the studio is reassessing the strategy of making action pictures starring women, 3) Robinov was inundated with calls on Monday and Tuesday from media and Hollywood types asking him about my posting, 4) Robinov has three pics currently in production and six in pre-production and not one stars a women as the main lead of the film, and 5) he’s nixed Wonder Woman as a stand-alone film, downgrading her to just one of four superhero characters in the proposed Justice League. Again, I stand by my story.
So, in other words, more of the same. Much more interesting, I think, is an excerpt from Lisa Chase’s interview with Finke in the latest issue of Elle, in which Finke explains why women in Hollywood “can’t get ahead.” More after the jump.
Warner production prexy Jeff Robinov insists he is moving forward with several movies with women in the lead. Indeed, he is offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny.
Action features starring women remain a hard sell for many moviegoers. But Robinov said he is still willing to put a femme star into an action role. “But, like any other movie, it has to be the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time,” he said.
Much more at the link, but like I said: the news wasn’t that the studio was turning away from (mis)casting female movies stars in action movies; the news was that they cast a bunch of Oscar-winning actresses over 30 in poorly conceived genre fare, and then dropped the ball on marketing. The real news nugget within Robinov’s protestation is that heavy reservation, “the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time.” The optimistic read on this is, “we’re taking a conscious step away from producing movies like The Invasion and The Reaping that bleed money, misuse high-caliber talent, embarrass just about everyone and please almost no one.”
I’ll leave the less optimistic readings to others. At the end of the day, the studio’s slate of projects is going to speak for itself. Nikki hasn’t yet responded, but you know it’s coming.
This is a holdover from the weekend, but it’s worth going back to: Nikki Finke says three people have told her that Warner Brothers is no longer greenlighting pictures build around female stars. This is apparently in reaction to dismal box office returns for The Brave One and The Invasion, but as Finke points out, those weren’t exactly the chickiest of flicks. Ergo, this seems to be less about the female audience and more about the general audience not responding to female stars. Or, it could be about WB looking for scapegoats to cover their own failure to efficiently market genre fare to grown-ups. Regardless: it looks bad, and, if it’s true, celebrity feminist/attorney Gloria Allred (who has been awfully busy lately with Britney Spears’ custody battle) isn’t going to let it slide. She tells Finke:
This is an insult to all moviegoers and particularly women. It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men…If that studio confirms that their policy is to now exclude women as leads, then my policy would be to boycott films made by Warner Bros.
This will probably go nowhere, because if pressed, WB will be like, “Of course we love women!” And it’ll all blow over as soon as Finke finds a tastier string to pull. But at some point, someone is going to have to explain to me how 40 year-old actresses having trouble finding work is anything other than business as usual.
The troublesome gender attitudes encoded within Disney’s animated canon have long been a hot topic for cultural scholars (for a 6-minute crash course, see Sanjay Newton’s video essay Sexism, Strength and Dominance, embedded above). But while the films themselves often telegraph mixed messages (Disney heroines are often stubborn and independently minded, but at the end of the day almost always function as damsels in distress), today Boing Boing’s Cory Doctrow has opened up the floodgates to reveal evidence that the institution that produced these films has always been, by design, an unambiguous boys club.
It all started when Doctrow linked to this rejection letter, on beautiful full-color Snow White-themed stationary, received in 1938 by a young lady who had inquired about Disney’s animators training program.
“Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen,” the letter informs a Miss Mary V. Ford of Searcy, AK. “For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” The letter goes on to say that although ladies were hired to do basic tracing and coloring in the Ink and Paint department, “it would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in relation to the number of girls who apply.”
A Boing Boing reader then went on to point out that this letter was not an isolated incident, but indicative of Disney’s institutional policy of excluding women from all non-inking work. This Disney Studio Artists Tryout book, also dated 1938, firmly states that the Ink and Paint sector is “the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists.’”
Both of the above examples are almost 70 years old, so it would be easy to write them off as relics. But then there’s the first-hand testimony of Danah Boyd. Today, Boyd is one of the most well-respected technology/social media bloggers/writers/thinkers out there; ten years ago, while a sophomore studying computer science at Brown, Boyd approached an Imagineer recruiting booth at a trade show. As Boyd tells Boing Boing,
I approached and asked if there were internships available, but the recruiter told me that there were no internships available for artists. I responded by saying that I was a developer and that I wanted to code. The response I received was, ‘but you’re a girl.’
“I walked away stunned and midway out of the convention hall, I ran into my advisor (Andy van Dam) and relayed this story. He turned beet red and ran off to ‘make things right.’ Not 15 minutes later, I saw the recruiter at Disney stomping out of the hall. I found out later he was fired. “
Interestingly, three years after Boyd’s incident, Disney inducted Harriet Burns into their Disney Legends hall of fame. This probably qualifies as nitpicking, but check out her bio on the Disney Legends site. After introducing Burns as “the first woman ever hired by Walt Disney Imagineering in a creative rather than an office capacity”, the bio then relegates the actual projects Burns worked on to the fifth paragraph; graphs one and two are devoted to the fact that Burns was “the best-dressed employee in the department.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Warner Brothers’ Jeff Robinov responds to Nikki Finke’s allegations that he’s put the kibosh on producing movies starring women. Anne Thompson writes:
