Great Indiewire Piece on Gender Bias in Film

From Indiewire: Jane Campion and her female Cannes jury members

Great article on Indiewire about gender bias, with data and info for women filmmakers.

I know, I know.  I'm just as tired as you are of complaints that women don't get a fair shake in the film biz. We have to get over that fatigue, in my opinion, just like marathon runners have to get over being tired halfway through a race. The inequity is real.  It's entrenched.  Changes are happening at a glacial pace, if at all.  But I like to think that maybe Stephen Jay Gould's concept of "punctuated equilibrium" for evolution applies to social change as well. The system, unfair though it may be, is trying to maintain its identity in equilibrium.  So it will resist change that threatens to radically alter its identity.  A few random "mutations" may survive or breed out in a generation without shifting the species, like the few lucky women who catch a break.

(NOTE: I don't call them "lucky' because they succeeded entirely on luck.  I know they are all incredibly talented and hard-working.  Their luck is in having their hard work get suddenly rewarded, while other equally hard-working and talented women get bupkiss.)

When external pressure creates situation where the old attributes no longer fit the environment,  survival suddenly encourages mutations that fill the niches of opportunity.  At these times, species evolve very quickly and dramatically until they settle into a new equilibrium that fits the new environment.

Look at how gay marriage initiatives, stalled and thwarted for so many years, suddenly reached critical mass and state after state has been passing marriage equality legislation.  If we keep the pressure up with our "complaining" and keep making films on whatever platform we can, these may turn out to be good times to be a female filmmaker.  After all, we're already in the middle of a flux period in the entertainment business. Technology is putting on some pressure.  Changing social norms are putting on more pressure.

(Hat tip for the Indiewire article to Judy Chaikin and the Alliance for Women Directors.)

Genetic Differences vs. Societal Influences: A Personal Story by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

Hat tip to Upworthy.com for posting a video from 2009 that highlights a story by Neil DeGrasse Tyson that was in response to a question about genetic differences in women possibly accounting for why so few women enter scientific fields.  His story about his journey to becoming a scientist illustrates his final point, which is that BEFORE scientists - and the rest of us - talk about genetic differences, we have to come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

The Upworthy video doesn't play, however.  Here's a YouTube link that should start just before his comments, which begin in answer to a question at 1:01:48.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEeBPSvcNZQ#t=3690

Incompetent Men vs. Competent Women

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

Great article in the Harvard Business Review blog titled:  Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (hat tip: AWD member Klaudia Kovacs)  It seems that women's greater emotional intelligence prevents them from engaging as much in blowhardism about their abilities.

Here is an excerpt of the meat of the argument:

... the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women. 

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women.

Followed by:

 The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

And capped with:

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to "lean in" has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

Most of the character traits that are truly advantageous for effective leadership are predominantly found in those who fail to impress others about their talent for management. This is especially true for women. There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. 

Scripts Needs an Audience

*cross-posted with Broadhumor.blogspot.com

Today, I'm thinking about the difference between playwrights and screenwriters, and in particular what screenwriters can learn from their theater counterparts.  It's a jumble, so this may or may not coalesce into lucid ideas.  I'll give it a go.

Playwrights exercise absolute control over material, screenwriters do not.  Part of the reason is that the playwright controls timing while in movies, the director and editor control timing. If you write comedy, timing can make or break a  laugh, but drama is also about the building and delivering of emotionally triggering moments. Screenplays just are not as complete as play scripts. Screenwriters don't know if their story works so long as it is only on the page, which makes it hard to grow and get better. 

Playwrights also can't know from the page either if their play works as theater, only if it works as literature the way Shakespeare does. Text on the page doesn't tell you if a joke will work as dialogue.  Reading Moliere, I don't laugh. Yet almost any production of Moliere delivers one belly laugh after another.  Playwrights have opportunities to get a read from real audiences on their work at every stage of their development. They get plays produced by small theaters and hear their words come out of the mouths of various performers. They cannot blame the director or actors if the same scene falls flat in two different productions. They learn how to write scenes that actors can act and that audiences will respond to.  Staged readings will draw an audience and allow playwrights to test their work in a theater with live actors.  But readings of scripts are not the same as readings of plays because the screen is not a stage.  What is a screenwriter to do?

The Seven-Minute Itch

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I want to take a minute to talk about the 7-Minute Itch. After 8 years of looking at hundreds of short films for the Broad Humor Film Festival, films that started well but then sagged and died despite all the good work that went into them, I think many of the failures of comedy are in the structure of the overall script. In a short film, somewhere around 7 minutes, the story needs to take a turn. A big turn, to change the game entirely for the audience. It doesn't have to be a Hollywood change where the stakes for the main character suddenly escalate, thought it can. It could be any turn that wakes up the viewer lulled into "knowing" what the film was about and ready for it to be done. Curiosity is aroused. Instead of being ready for it to end, I want to see where it goes from there, at least for another 7 minutes. Then wrap it up. Or take yet another turn, a different turn, and then I'll be with you to the end of your half-hour. (Stories over a half-hour long need even more in terms of story, with almost as much depth as a feature, and they have a very hard time finding a home in film festivals.)

CAVEAT: When you hear 7 minutes, do not think of a stopwatch. Think of a cigarette. Cigarettes burn at different speeds depending on how much and how often you puff on them, but if a cigarette stays lit, it has a maximum span before it fizzles and goes out. If you want to keep smoking, you have to light another. A completely new cigarette. Likewise, your story after your 7-minute turn, should feel like a new movie. You can stretch it a bit if you are bringing your film to a bang-up finish. However, if you add another five minutes of interesting complications in the same vein as the rest, it causes a kind of despair: I'm tired of this. Let me go! You may love the charm of the moment, but if I feel the mental and emotional equivalent of an attack of claustrophobia, your charming scene becomes torture to me, no matter how well done.

 EXCEPTION: If you are making a film that is more experimental, an artistic deconstruction of comedy, or a recursive philosophical parody (we had a French film like that the first year that was 26 minutes) all bets are off. But a discussion of comedy and aesthetics has to be for another day.

The 3-Fold Path to Writing

When the left brain writes without the right brain, the result has no value.  Nothing new gets said.  When the right brain writes without the left brain, the result has no value.  It is too disorganized to say anything intelligible to the reader.  You need both.  Unfortunately, neither side likes working with the other.  That is where YOU come in. 

You must be the horizon that both connects and separates the two.

Psychology has talked about this trinity. So have some religions.  They give it different names.  Freud called it id, superego, and ego.  The id is impulsive and childish, full of life energy but no control.  The superego is all about control, and following rules, but has no humor, no compassion, no creativity.  The ego is the self that negotiates the world, reining in the id without crushing it and softening the superego while honoring its sense of duty. 

I like the image on the Tarot card called The Chariot.  The most common image shows a person standing in a chariot pulled by two sphinxes (sometimes they are horses): one black and one white.  The charioteer holds the reins loosely if at all.  Whether the two beasts are resting or running, they are perfectly balanced. 

How does this work in writing?  The left brain likes things to be tidy, to be the same every time.  This allows it to process information faster and faster, and it feels very pleased with itself. Anything unexpected or unusual confuses it. It doesn’t like to wait until the creative right brain can figure things out.  So the left brain will want you skip over any idea or demand that would need input from the right.  It does this by writing the first thing that comes to mind and moving on as quickly as possible.  The result is boring and the reader’s right brain stays asleep. It the left brain then becomes stuck and can’t think of what to write, it yells over to the right brain for help, but gets no answer.  Why would the creative genius that is the right brain care to help the disrespectful bullying of an unappreciative left brain? The left brain, getting no answer, swears the right brain is lazy and finishes the writing however it can just to get it done.  Then, when the result is weak, it says, “I can’t write” and it has a tidy excuse for its bad performance.

And that statement is true.  The left brain can’t write.  Nor can the right brain. Only YOU can write. And it is you who must remember that when the right brain is asleep, it is not lazy.  It is Snow White and the poison apple is boredom.  To wake it up, you must be more than the mirror of your two brains: the jealous queen and the innocent child.  You must become the king, who is missing from this fairy tale.  The absent king allows the mischief to happen.

The king’s job, like that of the charioteer in the tarot card,  is to guide his people onto the right path.  To pull the load evenly.

Why You Never Learned to Write

Many people go through school with good grades and yet will swear that they can't write. Their problems usually come from a deep misconception about how to approach writing. I mean, if you tried to use your toes instead of your fingers to play the piano, you probably would think you had no ability at music.Your fingers are much more flexible and powerful, so why would you use your toes?  Because that is what you were taught.


Well, the part of your brain that writes, or at least the part that invents narrative through abstraction and metaphorical representations using imagination, is your right brain. And most education fails miserably to engage that part of the brain. Some people learn to write despite the weaknesses of their schooling, but then some people like Mozart can play concert piano at age four.

Left Brain/Right Brain  People who know a little bit about the difference between the two halves of the brain say the left side is logical and the right side is creative. Jordan Peterson suggests that it is more useful to describe them as novelty seeking versus order structuring. A neurobiologist once described it a little differently. She used computer language and said the left side is a serial processor and the right side is a parallel processor. What she meant is the the left side works in a straight line. It stops to finish one task before it can go to the next. This can go very fast, and is extremely efficient in known situations. However, if it comes across an unknown, it stops completely. The right brain doesn’t get stuck because it operates within a field of associations. If you drive on a road and there is a big cow in the middle of it, you have to stop until the cow moves. But if you are driving in a field with a big cow, the cow presents no problem. You drive around it. Everything in your right brain connects to everything else, and it can get from here to there in many ways. The problem for the right brain is focus and detail. You are an expert at switching from left to right and back again. When you look at the forest, you are not looking at individual trees. If you shift focus to a specific tree, you lose sight of the forest as a whole.  Writing requires this shifting right/left balance and you should be able to do it effortlessly.

Left-Brain Education Education has a purpose. Teachers have very specific learning goals, and so they break the information into pieces and feed them to you one at a time. Then the points taught can be tested, and most teachers are satisfied. Yet the original purpose was not to teach you the pieces; the original purpose was to teach you the whole. The teacher may have shown you every tree, but has not taught you how to see a forest. Seeing the forest is a right brain leap of imagination and cannot be taught. It must be discovered. Teaching to the right brain means creating an environment where you can grow your concepts. Good teaching is like a petri dish filled with nutrients, water and warmth. And patience. The teacher must wait to see what each student grows and help each to connect that to the individual pieces of knowledge necessary for mastery.  

Language and the Brain Some subjects like math and science can be taught more easily through left-brain processes than other subjects like philosophy and art. Perhaps the hardest subject to learn through the left brain alone is language.  Language uses the whole brain. Take one word of vocabulary: cat. One side of the brain holds the mental picture of a cat and the sound of the spoken word. The other side recognizes the letters “c-a-t” and connects that to a definition.  For every single word you read or say, your brain does an amazing dance between the left and right brain. The process is constant and rhythmic like the way your car engine cycles between the cylinders to give you power. When the cylinders are timed perfectly, your car hums along and you don’t think about the engine at all. You are free to think about your driving. However, if even one cylinder is just the tiniest fraction off in its timing, the car will be noisy, will chug and buck, will stall, and at some point, refuse to go. Trying to learn anything to do with language using only one side of your brain fails the way trying to start a car with only half the cylinders functioning does.  Even if you get started, you bump and stall ever step of the way.