Sunday, October 07, 2007

It's Not Our Fault We Can't Make Good Movies, It's the Fault of All Those Wimmin

(again, via Feministing)

Robinov is a douche*:

We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead.


but Gloria Allred rocks:

If that's what he said, when movies with men as the lead fail, no one says we'll stop making movies with men in the lead. 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.

Instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of judgment about which scripts to make, directors to hire and budgets to OK, some men in the movie industry find it easier to place blame for their lack of success on women leads and to exclude talented female actors from the top employment opportunities in Hollywood in favor of macho males. 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.


(emphasis mine)

The only problem is that of course they aren't going to confirm that that is their policy. So I say we skip that part and go straight to the boycott. Does Warners make anything that's actually good anyway? (Besides the Potter movies, and we have some time before the next one is due out.)


*by the by, so is LA Weekly, or whomever decided to make the URL "warners-robinoff-gets-in-catfight-with-girls/" instead of the article's headline: "Warner's Robinov Bitchslaps Film Women, Gloria Allred Calls For Warner Boycott"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking that the way to handle this (since it'll get heavily denied by the PR folk) is to boycott Warner save for films with female leads... tho that would cut out the Harry Potter films. (Personally, I'm not a fan of the films, especially after having to pause and explain things to my partner as we watched Goblet of Fire.)

Mickle said...

I've been thinking about it some more too....

I'm not really sure a boycott would work either way, because boycotts need lots of support to really work. And since the PR dept. will spin this as of, oh, right about now, since it's now 5 am on the east coast, a boycott won't have much support.

Plus, I'm as pissed at the fact that such stupid reasoning leads to crappy stories as I am that such prejudicial reasoning reinforces prejudice, so boycotting non-crappy movies doesn't really solve the situation for me.

(And hey, I liked...ok GoF wasn't too great. But OotP was fun! But, more importantly - as Ragnell pointed out - the next Batman is due out relatively soon.)

I think what we need to do is pretty much do what we've always done - highlight how insanely uniformly white, heterosexual, middle to upper class male most movies, etc. are.

Only now, we get to stick it specifically to WB -and it always helps to have a target, no matter if that target really deserves it any more than most other places.

Because the one good thing about them having to deny this is that, while they get to try to spin it as them being the injured party, we have them on record as saying that this isn't their policy. And since we all know it may as well be their policy no matter if they admit to it or not, we get to zing them on it every time we compile new stats. "WB may have denied rumors that (blah blah blah) but their movies themselves tell a different story (blah blah blah)."

In other words, we hound them with it a la Stephanie Brown.

Only this time, it's like they really did promise a memorial once upon a time, and then took it back.