Just one year ago, Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director, an award that was voted upon by her peers, who themselves are the very force behind getting movies made in Tinseltown. Regardless, Jodie Foster is now complaining about Hollywood’s treatment of female directors, which I find rather contradictory. Jodie can speak in terms of chronic discrimination against women in the film industry, whereas she has no problem when her Hollywood friends treat women badly in a much more acute basis. For instance, she truly admires and supports Roman Polanski for being such a wonderful director and diffuses all discussions of his admitted-rapist status as “That’s not my business.” What is her business, however, is that Jodie (who, just like nearly every director out there, struggles to fund her art) feels really beaten down by the man as a female director. So naturally, she continues to support Mel Gibson, who actually beats women (such a nice symmetry there, right?) by sticking with him and proclaiming, “I will love this man for the rest of my life.” How would she feel if Mel punched a female director? That’s a question that shall remain unanswered, but Jodie’s merely sounding off on what actually affects her pocketbook. You know, other than the ill-advised decision to direct The Beaver:
In an era when women account for only 7% of the directors of Hollywood movies, Jodie Foster is the rare female whom financiers will back to helm any film, never mind a marketing challenge like “The Beaver,” her upcoming $20-million tragicomedy about depression starring Mel Gibson.
When asked about the industry statistics during a recent interview promoting “The Beaver,” Foster said she thought the low numbers of female directors were a result of studio executives’ fears of uncertainty.
“I don’t think it’s a plot and these guys sat around and said let’s keep these women out,” Foster said. “I think it’s like race psychology. When a producer hires a director, you’re hiring away your control completely. You’re bringing on somebody that will change everything. When you give that amount of power up, you want them to look like you and talk like you and think like you and it’s scary when they don’t, because what’s gonna happen? I’m gonna hand over $60 million to somebody I don’t know. I hope they look like me.”
When it was mentioned that many studio executives do, in fact, look like her — a 48-year-old white female veteran of the industry, Foster nodded. “And name the lists that come out of the female studio executives: guy, guy, guy, guy,” she said. “Their job is to be as risk-averse as possible. They see female directors as a risk.”
Foster got her first directing opportunity on 1991’s “Little Man Tate” from male executives at Orion Pictures. In 1989, she won the lead actress Academy Award for “The Accused.”
“I was acting in ‘Little Man Tate’ for almost no money and I had just won an Oscar,” said Foster. “They were under almost no financial risk whatsoever. The real pioneers are someone that didn’t have the ‘in’ that I had. I had guys who knew me. I was like their daughter.”
[From LA Times]
While I don’t have access to all of the male-to-female ratios of entering and graduating classes of accredited film schools, I’d be willing to wager that there isn’t some huge conspiracy at work involved at that level. The hard truth of the matter is that most film school grads, regardless of their sex, never get work as directors. Of course, a lot of directors (like Jodie) don’t go to film school at all and enter the profession after acting for a period of time before deciding, “[W]hat I really want to do is direct.” From there, it’s a matter of starting small and moving onto directing bigger films. So what I think is at work here, rather than what Foster is defensively labeling as “race psychology,” is that fewer women actually decide that they want to direct because, honestly, having a huge ego (and being stubborn enough to push past obstacles rather than whining about them) is part of the job. Even Woody Allen has a massive ego, and if Jodie truly believes that she’s the only director who’s had to start with small, low-risk pictures, well, she’s completely wrong about that. Even actors that move into directing (George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Zach Braff) have to start with little indie films, and they often appear in their own films too (something that Jodie complained about as an example of what she, as a female, had so suffer through), which in turn saves the studios money. No director starts out with blockbuster budgets; in fact, many of the large-scale directors like Michael Bay started out directing music videos. Jodie never had to do that.
Honestly, if Jodie Foster wants to start pullng the “race psychology” card, she needs to do two things: (1) Get her hands on real statistics and not assume that women have it harder because of her own path; and (2) Surround herself with allies that don’t include anti-Semetic rageaholics and child rapists who believe it is okay to sodomize a women even when she says “no.” Without further ado, let’s review this trailer for The Beaver, which pretty much says it all about Jodie’s inability to see the larger picture in the capacity of director:
Photos courtesy of WENN and Fame Pictures
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