1. Why should I care about the gender of a director? All I want is great movies. Give me films equal to The Godfather or On the Waterfront.
2. The focus on blockbusters reveals the true metric: money. Maybe the people who finance movies are afraid that female directors can't deliver big paydays as reliably as male directors.
That isn't "male privilege." It's greed, which is blind to gender.
Agreed and well stated. However a well researched and written criticism is never actually effective against dogma. Religious zealots of the feminist sect, are impervious to logic. Their protestations are in fact a power play. Which does not require a foundation of logic, but rather a veneer of rhetoric to inflame followers. So while you have my agreement 100%, I have no idea how we're going to ever stamp out dumb feminist-think.
Crazy. This is misinformation. But the same people working at the Inclusion initiative is going to have zero self-criticism regarding these methods. It's just meant to tell a story. No method
This was an insightful read and not to make your life difficult but I would love to read the "truly useful exercise" that you posit in your piece:
"Actually following cohorts of both men and women, who are trying to break into the top 100, comparing and contrasting what genre of films they made, how they performed at the box office, and how they took the next step would be a truly useful exercise, as would systematically interviewing the top box office performing women each year to see what can be learned for future cohorts."
I'm wondering if you could do it for the current incumbents in the blockbuster director cohort and if that would give further insight into the bottlenecking of women and bipoc directors. Great work again!
Thanks! To my knowledge there’s someone else, a very smart person working on it as we speak, inspired by this essay, which was exactly what I was hoping for.
How about more great movies? I don't care who directs them. Diversity is a harmful, artificial benchmark.
1. Why should I care about the gender of a director? All I want is great movies. Give me films equal to The Godfather or On the Waterfront.
2. The focus on blockbusters reveals the true metric: money. Maybe the people who finance movies are afraid that female directors can't deliver big paydays as reliably as male directors.
That isn't "male privilege." It's greed, which is blind to gender.
Agreed and well stated. However a well researched and written criticism is never actually effective against dogma. Religious zealots of the feminist sect, are impervious to logic. Their protestations are in fact a power play. Which does not require a foundation of logic, but rather a veneer of rhetoric to inflame followers. So while you have my agreement 100%, I have no idea how we're going to ever stamp out dumb feminist-think.
@theankler @tfp @variety @hollywoodreporter @latimes @nytimes should be paying you for your well researched articles.
Thank you!
Crazy. This is misinformation. But the same people working at the Inclusion initiative is going to have zero self-criticism regarding these methods. It's just meant to tell a story. No method
This was an insightful read and not to make your life difficult but I would love to read the "truly useful exercise" that you posit in your piece:
"Actually following cohorts of both men and women, who are trying to break into the top 100, comparing and contrasting what genre of films they made, how they performed at the box office, and how they took the next step would be a truly useful exercise, as would systematically interviewing the top box office performing women each year to see what can be learned for future cohorts."
I'm wondering if you could do it for the current incumbents in the blockbuster director cohort and if that would give further insight into the bottlenecking of women and bipoc directors. Great work again!
Here’s the piece I mentioned, published yesterday and added to the end of this one:
P.S. For an excellent followup, have a look at Stephen Follows new piece responding to this one, and identifying the actual pipeline: link here:
https://stephenfollows.substack.com/p/how-do-people-end-up-directing-a?r=6sy9zj&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for sharing this. Very illuminating.
Thanks! To my knowledge there’s someone else, a very smart person working on it as we speak, inspired by this essay, which was exactly what I was hoping for.
Oh amazing, looking forward to it and to your next piece.