The Mary Sue: In an effort to diversify its directing pool, and the directing pool of Hollywood in general, Warner Brothers created its first Emerging Directors Program this year in an attempt to encourage and support marginalized talent. Those awarded the opportunity to participate in the workshop were announced today, and guess what? They’re majority female!
6 comments:
One of my favorite things about this article, and many articles like this is the question "Is this enough?". First, who are you asking? Yourself? The author? Me? Ah thank you so much for asking. Look the answer to this question is no it's not enough. It'll be enough when we aren't writing articles about it anymore and no one gives a shit that after a gabazillion years of men being the majority in everything women got this one little conference, and sure it's nice but it's not equality it's an itty bitty little teeny weenie step toward me someday being treated the same as my male counterpart *sigh* yeah I guess it's enough. It's great that women are dominating this conference. It's great that they are even allowed to participate in the conference, but the fact that I just typed the word "allowed" completely seriously means that it's not enough. I'd like my kids to live in a world where women just do, and it's never a big deal that they do because they are the same as everyone else and we can all hold hands and have male and female birth control and sing Billy Joel together, but that's a long ways away, so in the mean time stop asking if it's enough when you damn well know the answer. It's not. Let's figure out how to make it that way. start writing articles with suggestions, instead of questions.
I really agree and enjoy Warner Bros. push for nurturing new directors. The ability to boost new directors allows for Hollywood to diversify its films with fresh talent entering the game. I agree with the author when they state: “What’s important in this opportunity isn’t the budget so much as the access, the opportunity to work with world-class filmmakers and producers. The opportunity to take advantage of all the resources Warner Bros. has to offer, make studio and industry contacts, and to have Warner Bros. Pictures behind your film once it’s finished, introducing it to the world and getting it seen by more people than might be likely otherwise”. This exposure and backing from a major studio will allow for these directors to hopefully rise into the ranks of famous directing. And the fact that a majority of the directors are women shines a beacon of hope for the male-dominated directing field. I’m glad the numbers for the program are kept low, this makes it more exclusive and the directors will have more specialized mentoring.
I applaud the effort of Warner Bro's for not only supporting young/new directors but showing acknowledgement to gender and race equality in the movie industry. While I'm not sure what is a acceptably and reasonably standard budget for a short film, I do think $100,000 is a lot. However, compared to Warner Bro's normal productions, $100,000 probably wouldn't even suffice for three minutes of the film. So the money is a lot, but not a luxurious amount. Becoming a part of Warner Bros. Emerging Directors Program is different from pulling things out of the directors' own garage, doing everything by themselves - now they probably are able to have a real team and use better equipment and rent a better studio. I believe the intention of allocating $100,000 to each participant is to provide them the opportunity to work on a bigger scale of production, and to experience the negotiation and cooperation with a bigger budget. The program will pave the way for these finalists to work on even bigger productions in the future.
It's a bummer that only 5 out of 5000 applicants can actually have this precious chance and it is far from enough. There are so many more new directors who are just as talented but are living a marginalized life. When we keep questioning if something is enough, it's an indicator that it is NOT enough. This one brilliant program with female dominating the final selection group is not enough and people should not stop here and pat on themselves. I'm glad to see that there are more and more programs that aim at nurturing newly graduated students, females, ethnic minorities, etc. Hopefully these programs will help solve the inequality in this ever booming industry eventually.
It may surprise a few people, but having women in charge of a creative process is not a recipe for disaster. A project will not turn from dramatic moral commentary to rom-com overnight, or suddenly have a quirky Elle Woods narrator and pastel color scheme. One will not find themselves sudden victim to the rages of the mysteries of PMS. For the past 20 years or so. more and more women throughout the entertainment industry have been entering the workforce with the intent of shattering glass ceilings and closing wage gaps (although there's still a huge amount of work to be done there, unfortunately). The fact that 4 of the 5 accepted participants in this "Emerging Directors" program are women is pretty huge. When trying to name Hollywood directors, the two people who I asked offhandedly just now came up with names like Tarantino and Spielberg, giants in their own right, but had a very hard time coming up with a woman. In short, this is very good news.
Any article that starts with the phrase “women dominate” will get my attention! But of course, we cannot have our cake and eat it too. While it is very cool to see that Warner Brothers’ emerging directing program is majority female and includes 2 people of color, of course these sorts of programs don’t solve all of our problems in terms of diversifying the entertainment industry, and I don’t think any single action will ever. Progress is about making strides, not trying to overturn an entire way of thinking in one day. While I agree with the author that we still have a long way to go, I don’t agree entirely with all of the points they make against this program. They probably wanted to keep the group selective by choosing only 5 people out of 5,000, and wanted to give those 5 specific people a large sum of money to make the prize seem worth their while. I agree that it would have been nice to see some people on the list who maybe weren’t able to attend film school, or who weren’t already “so close” to the industry, but then again those may have just been factors in crafting the resume that got them their spots. But all in all, it’s very cool to see such a big organization giving women voices in this way. Like Sarah, I too hope that one day we will live in a feminist world where we can all hold hands and sing Billy Joel together, but until ⅘ doesn’t feel like such a crazy number, I don’t think that time is yet upon us. :(
It's really great to see that Warner Brothers is invested is helping up and coming directors advance their careers, and it's especially good that the majority of the people that they selected were women. In order to create more work that's inclusive of women there must be more women in higher up positions. Supporting female directors will hopefully trickle down and lead the support of other women in film. I think that Warner Brothers should expand this program to also include new writers. I know that I'm tired of seeing the same generic throwaway female characters over and over again. Fostering new female talent could really make a real change in this area. I do think that the author makes a good point in acknowledging that this is only a baby step, but I'm still really happy that Warner Brothers has decided to create this program. Maybe in the future they can make this program even bigger, but it has to start somewhere.
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