Pajiba

Speaking of aesthetics, Marcia Gay Harden's one of those women where it PAINS me to know that someone probably does think she looks a little odd.

Plus I do still want to marry Catherine O'Hara and Martha Plimpton, and I'll always love "Amanda Plummer" for "The Fisher King".

Amanda Plummer, that is. Punctuation got away from me there.

I'm still trying to reconcile the words "imperfections or unusual features"
and "Daniel Day Lewis". HUH?
Which part of that man is anything less than handsome, hawt, and de-lish...
or oddly placed?

Catherine Keener... aaah, no, I don't think so.

As for Catherine O'Hara I disagree for a completely different reason. My take on her is that she CHOOSES her projects, she seems to gravitate to particular roles (see her appearances on all of Chistopher Guest's films)

Meant to add: those other three guys (A Brody, W Defoe & 'R Patz')....
SO not my cuppa joe. Not handsome nor sexy, to me.

@becks:
I submit Dangerous Liasons - the banter between Mr Malkovich
and Glenn Close. Delightful.

Does anyone know what's up with Pajiba's RSS feed? It hasn't been serving up feeds since last week sometime.

I had the same issue and changed the feed to the one in the 'Overlord' drop down menu. It works although I don't get the full articles. I guess that's the point.

Laura Linney has owned a piece of my soul ever since You Can Count On Me.

One of the problems is that it doesn't seem a lot of women write screenplays, writing outside your gender is much harder than writing within it....

Posted by: Georgina at November 18, 2009 12:10 PM
------

It's a bit more complicated than that.

There are more male screenwriters and playwrights, but male writers are also more prolific. I remember hearing something like the average male playwright averages 4 scripts a year while the average female playwright averages around 1. That would account for a vast gap before you even get into the fact that there are more men than women writing in the first place.

There was a (Princeton?) study where they had producers rate scripts by apparently male and female playwrights. Male producers and screeners either liked a script or they didn't, regardless of whether the writer was allegedly male or female (or the actual gender of the writer). Female producers and screeners were downright harsh on scripts that were allegedly written by women (regardless of who actually wrote them).

So, if there is a bias against female writers, it's coming from their fellow females, not men, and it has nothing to do with the content of the scripts, only the writer's gender. That's interesting and not what the woman conducting the research expected at all. It seems the sheer number of male-written scripts is what accounts for almost all of the difference, at least in writing for the stage. I have no reason to believe it's any different for the screen, though I'm hardly an expert.

Isn't Madeline Kahn dead?

So if there's a female counterpart to Bill Murray, why haven't I married him, erm... her yet?

I dunno, isn't Kathy Bates already the Giamatti equivalent?

Fantastic list.

I think the biggest problem is not just the lack of "meaty" roles for women, but also a lack of roles similar to those glorious bitch alpha female roles from the fifties. Men have an abundance of those roles, of course a man can be crazy and alpha-man like, but heaven forbid a woman can be like that because now they aren't bound to being barefoot and pregnant anymore now they are out and about being just as good if not better than their male counterparts.
So yeah... if you understand that rant, congratulations.

So, the moral of the Hollywood story is: it's ok for a woman to be beautiful and then uglified, but you can't have gotten there naturally. Men, you can have it all.

Ah Celery, thank you!

Thank Gawd Tarantino gave Amanda Plummer a memorable role!

I like this list. This list is good.

+1 for Melissa Leo. She's awesome.

I think part of the problem is that "women's movies" are stuck in the chick flick/rom-com ghetto. It's obviously not impossible to get a movie that doesn't fit those parameters produced, but I bet it's a lot easier to get a movie greenlit if it's like "Steel Magnolias" or "27 Dresses." Just as I bet it's easier to get a ridiculous "action" movie greenlit than something like "Memento." Not saying there is no sexism in Hollywood, I'm sure there's plenty of it, hell, they put it up on the screen and call it "sexual tension," but pretty much everybody in Hollywood would have more interesting careers if Americans didn't throw so much money at shitty movies.

And it's kind of like the Disney kid movie thing: females will more willingly watch a movie where the protagonist is a male than the other way around. And women are the ones propping up the rom-com genre. "Pretty Woman" is Julia Roberts' highest-grossing movie (in which she is the star/protagonist) in the U.S.

Great article, Celery. And good point about going to great pains to uglify the pretty girls for the role.
Do you think part of the draw for that is so the audience will go "Ewww, god, look at how bad (blank) looks! Thank GOD that's not real!"

Because that's pretty sad.

Also, yes, I agree, Madeline Kahn would have a more interesting movie career if she were not deceased.

I miss her.

Mr. Supercomfypampertimefloatythrone and I have also discussed
how many female actors would have had better careers and
opportunities in the heyday of the studio system when they made
"women's pictures" and such.

It even extends to cartoons, you know. On the show we make our
son watch because we like it so much (Penguins of Madagascar,
can I get an amen?), there are NINE male
characters and ONE female character. Mr. Supercomfypampertime-
floatythrone didn't even notice until I pointed it out.

my sharona,

Someone told me that at least in the case of "Monster" it was a project Theron wanted done and a role she wanted to play. Because I've wondered the same thing about actresses getting uglified for roles. Why not just give the job to an actress who's already ... um, not that attractive? Couldn't those people use a nice paycheck better than, I dunno, Cameron Diaz in "Being John Malkovich"?

Ah, but CD's name on a poster sells tickets. Jane Slobotnik doesn't.

Excellent, excellent list, Celery. Hollywood is up it's ass when it comes to beauty and talent.

Do you think part of the draw for that is so the audience will go "Ewww, god, look at how bad (blank) looks! Thank GOD that's not real!"

Yes, I definitely think so. It's like watching The Soup or Jerry Springer - people want to see something ugly, have it end, and go back to a reality that is a little more beautiful for having seen the ugliness.

Also women have babies...kind of a setback to any career

To weigh in on this female screenwriter issue, I think the problem is that there's almost no room for them in Hollywood. Consider how many female directors you know. Now remove from the list any that don't work in Hollywood. How many are left? Three? How many of you could only think of Nora Ephron?

For as few opportunities as women have on screen in Hollywood, I'm very sorry to say they have even fewer off.

Posted by: vercordio at November 18, 2009 12:51 PM
------
Ephron, Bigelow, and women who own their own production companies, like Barrymore.... so that's 3. Not a huge list. Witherspoon has her own company, yes? But she produces rather than directs so far?

In any case.... Vote with your dollar, wot?

The system is ruled entirely by what makes money. If well written screenplays by female writers made "Transformers" money, we'd be ass-deep in them. The pervy iconoclasts who hang out here would shift gears and bemoan how Amanda Plummer was ruling the screen and why can't we get some old fashioned tits and ass up in here already? What the fuck happened to Ryan Reynold's chiseled abs? Since all the male romantic leads are being written all realistic like, he put on 15 lbs. We'd be passing the hat to collect money for Michael Bay to make a comeback.

I'm not sure I want to see that world, honestly. Rather than throw all our money at good screenplays, let's work out a system whereby for every ticket to Bay-tastic-T&A-explosionfests, we also have to buy a ticket to....

OK... I can't actually think of anything written by a woman other than Nora Ephron.... how sad is that? My joke was DOA due to gender imbalance. There does seem to be a problem here.

Laura Linney has owned a piece of my soul ever since You Can Count On Me.

ACK. Nicole: ME TOO.

ALSO NOTE: BOO CAPS DAY.

Also worth adding:

Hollywood has no use for comediennes. None whatsoever.

Pretty actress cute funny talk snarky learn love = Good

Female Arnett Stiller Farrell Rogan Black Carrey = Bad

Cheri Oteri and honourable mention Molly Shannon deserve the
same careers as the frat pack and yet they are denied.

The fact that Catherine O'Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, and Parker Posey- some of the most hilarious women in all of film- have never really been able to find a niche outside of Christopher Guest films. Sure they all get the odd character role in a big comedy, but none of them have ever really been given the chance to have a well-developed character in a very long time.

I would've added Jane Lynch to this list as well, but recently she's been absolutely everywhere. At least we have that.

P.S. After re-viewing Dr. Strangelove last night, I'm throwing this out as an idea for a new SRL. Worst Presidents in Television and Film- with President Merkin Muffley taking a place of honor, of course

mimimimimimimimimimi

I agree with Georgina, but I wonder if it's more that a lot of women's screenplays aren't being produced, either due to more men having more connections, or just good old fashioned sexism.

I mean hell, I know more female writers than male.

Posted by: Lucas at November 18, 2009 1:48 PM
---------

And I know more female skydivers and certified dive masters than male. But it turns out that my experience isn't particularly generalizable. If we determined demographics based on who we know, I would live in a world where more than 50% of the people are scientists and less than 10% were in a corporate environment of any kind.

If we tried to generalize from this site to the rest of humanity, I don't even want to think about what the demographics would look like. The media would certainly take a less conservative view on talking about sex, I can tell you.

Have a Salon article on the research I mentioned above: http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/06/25/female_playwright/index.html

It misses most of the details, but the media always does that with science, psychology, and sociology. If it doesn't fit in a 3 second soundbite, they have to grit their teeth and power through, even at Salon.

FACT: Most producers are male. DATA: Males don't seem to discriminate against female writers.

FACT: There are a LOT more male writers and a LOT more male-written scripts.

It's easy to scream bias, and it's usually there. This time it's not where you expect it to be, even though the scientist in question looked really, really hard for it. The actual problem is there aren't enough women writing scripts. Period.

"The Man" isn't up to anything for once. I was surprised, too.

Could be. I'm not saying there was never bias among male producers, only that there doesn't appear to be any now. But do people really choose not to be writers in this day and age because they think sexist pigs will keep them from success? In my experience, for realz writers need to write, and commercial success is a happy accident. But maybe I'm just a purist. There seems to be plenty of market for awful "written-by-committee" scripts.

In fact, the article points out that female-written plays tend to sell more tickets, so if anything, there's a financial incentive to give female writers a shot in theater, at least. I'd be willing to bet that last doesn't extend to film.

And there is that weird fact that male writers are 4x as prolific. I hate to make an obvious sex role joke, but maybe male writers need to nurture their scripts a little more and female writers a little less.

for some reason I think that emily watson is so self absorbed that if she was a man she would implode.

@SupercomfyohhellI'mgoingbacktoHenry at November 18, 2009 1:23 PM

Unless I am mistaken both the 'oatburner' and 'whinny' references are intended to convey a certain gentleman's distaste of Julia Roberts' appearance, and liken it to that of a horse. A risky gambit indeed on this most feminine of all days. Since we ladies just LOVE seeing other women picked on for their appearance, especially when they are considered by many to be quite lovely.

Personally, I think Big Daddy is just looking for a spanking. I will deal with him later.

thanks for your comments.

i know that madeline kahn is dead. i meant that her career would have been better had she been a man.

holly hunter is a good one, but i left off women like her, rachel griffiths, edie falco, etc... because they've had so much success on television. but i totally agree with you that holly hunter should have made/be making amazing movies.

regarding catheine o'hara, i'm referring to earlier in her career. she should have had john candy size roles straight out of SCTV, and andrea martin could have had martin short-like success.

on the issue of female screenwriters.... ugh.... some other time. this one hits very close to home and (if anyone cares) one day, when i'm not exhausted, i shall share my thoughts.

Lucas, sorry if I came off combative. I seem to have bumped into this kind of thing a lot lately. People citing about some form of bias when the facts are clear and there is no bias.

This is a case where the facts aren't clear, or at least weren't until lately. So I was probably a little harsh to start jumping up and down with a citation in my hand.

They're also just interesting facts. What do they mean? Are women avoiding writing scripts because of a perceived bias? Are women simply not interested in writing scripts as much as they are in writing other things? There's no shortage of female writers in general, but female screenwriters and playwrights.... less common. And why are they writing so few relative to their male counterparts? Does my bad joke stand? Are they really spending more time on one piece of writing? Or are they writing all different kinds of things while the males tend to stick to one mode?

This is one of those cases where facts don't just end discussion, they open a new one. Or several new ones. I find that more interesting than having the old conversation again, especially when the old conversation is, well.... old and busted, it seems.

It's also just sort of fascinating to me that it's NOT just sexism. There's sexism and racism under every rock and tree stump in our society, but apparently not here. Why? I can't assume it's because the cats producing plays are actually more evolved than every other male with power in society. Or does the Almighty Dollar just happen to trump sexism for once?

How nerdy is this post? Honestly.

Lwa'e'

Go back and read that again. I was paying Seabiscuit a compliment, backhanded though it certainly was.

And now it's later, and I'm getting tired of bending over here ...

Would Keanu Reeves get a job if he wasn't good looking?

My vote goes to Patricia Clarkson. She's so great ALL THE TIME.