The Athena Festival Kicks Off....

The Athena Film Festival kicked off last night at Barnard College with an awards ceremony honoring the breakthrough achievements of thirteen extraordinary film world mavericks, hosted by Lynn Sherr, Author and former ABC News Correspondent. 

Ten women stepped up to the podium to receive awards for their achievements as directors, producers, distributors, film reporters, screenwriters, cinematographers: Delia Ephron, Chris Hegedus, Debra Martin Chase, Anne Thompson, Debra Zimmerman, Nancy Schreiber, Tanya Hamilton, Leslie Bennetts, Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker.   An additional trio of awards for directing, screenwriting and acting will be presented throughout the Festival weekend to Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini and Greta Gerwig.

In an interesting spin, award recipients were asked to name their film world inspirations. With responses as unique and diverse as the women being honored, all underscored an Athena-esque theme of determination against the odds, adaptability and a vigorous nod to the importance of sisterhood networks in media biz survival.

Delia Ephron, celebrated with an Athena screenwriting award, cited her best friends as a resource throughout her career, and ended by encouraging aspiring writers to “locate the personal in storytelling.” Chris Hegedus, who received an Athena award for directing, acknowledged Hillary Clinton, featured in her celebrated 1994 documentary “The War Room,” as a revelation of unflinching determination and dedication to public service.

Debra Martin Chase, who accepted an Athena Award for “exceptional success as a motion picture and television producer”, has played a pivotal role in Academy-Award- and Emmy-Nominated films and television productions including The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Princess Diaries. Chase evoked Dorothy Dandridge as a role model for her industry breakthroughs in the 1950s, and her own determination to open doors wider for those who follow. 

Tanya Hamilton, 2010 Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance for debut feature Night Catches All, also earned an Athena directing award. She mentioned the news reporter Gwen Ifill as an industry role model and highlighted the pivotal mentorship of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program.

Leslie Bennetts, Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, was awarded along with Anne Thompson, for “distinguished reporting and commentary about women and film.” Bennetts noted the fearlessness and Internet re-inventiveness of Arianna Huffington as an inspiration, then quickly added, “even though I don’t agree with her non-payment of writers.”

Echoing their collaboration on the startling documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” about the successful Liberian Revolution which resulted in its first democratically elected female head of state, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker, took to the podium as a team. Awarded for “their extraordinary use of film for social change” Disney spotlit Reticker as her muse, while Reticker named Asmaa Mahfouz, the young Egyptian woman credited with launching the recent revolution through her online video call to action. Reticker concluded with a Susan B. Anthony quote: “Failure is not an option.”

On Friday night, Debra Granik, Director and co-writer of the Academy Award-nominated film “Winter’s Bone”  received a directing award and her co-writer, Anne Rosellini, a screenwriting award. Both were present after the screening for a fascinating Q&A.

Late Night Women Laughing

Women and Late Night Television

Thursday, May 13, 2010 6:30 pm ET
The Paley Center for Media, New York

Co-sponsored with the Writers Guild of America, East

In Person

Ann Cohen, Best Week Ever
Jill Goodwin, The Late Show with David Letterman
Hallie Haglund, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Morgan Murphy, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Meredith Scardino, The Colbert Report
Moderator: Allison Silverman, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Night With Conan O'Brien

Late Night Women Laughing

What is the sound of Late Night Women laughing? If the recent panel discussion at The Paley Center for Media in New York is any indication, it’s rather raucous.  

Moderated by big talent Allison Silverman, former Executive Producer and writer for The Colbert Report (2005-2009). Stephen Colbert describes her this way: “She’s got the cheekbones of Faye Dunaway, the hair of Bathsheba, and the mind of Jonathan Swift had he mated with the Cookie Monster.”

Hi-larious doesn’t begin to describe these behind-the-scenes big laughs originators, who have won majors awards for their wit (including Emmys) and written for some big boys of comedy: Michael Moore, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

Full disclosure: given the topic of the event: the dearth of female writers in late night television, I expected the night to be a bit of a bummer. Yet every time the conversation swung around to the down-low, one of the women on the panel cracked a joke, showed a clip, displayed some dazzling chutzpah about navigating their career. Depressing? Hardly. Upbeat is way more accurate.

Sure, the evening was inspired in part by a challenging numbers game in an industry dominated by the guys. This spotlit by recent pieces in the New York Times by Bill Carter  and Nell Scovell in Vanity Fair, which chattered across the blogosphere and Twitterverse last fall.  Despite the assumptions about the hostilities of the boys’ comedy locker room, these panelists radiated a love of what they do and in their day-to-day writers' rooms, were largely undeterred by their minority status as females. 

The best part of the event was the screened collection of clips penned from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and The Jimmy Fallon Show, among others. Wow factor alert that I’d viewed many without knowing “a woman” had written them, especially Stephen Colbert’s  “Crisis Garden” segment,
scripted by Meredith Scardino, a recent classic. Hallie Haglund’s piece on Chatroulette for The Daily Show created a lot of buzz when Stewart unbuckled his pants… to the tune of over 600,000 online views! 

So what gives? If all of these ladies are so funny and the world has given way to some big girl powerhouses in the world of comedy, why so few female writers in the late night scene? According to Jill Goodwin and Hallie Haglund who first served as writers assistants, it’s again in the numbers, but with a twist. The truth is, four times as many packets and pitches from the aspiring writers’ pool come from men. So, yes, the late night shows are hosted by men and yes, we need to break that ceiling at some point, but if you want to write for David Letterman, or Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, send your jokes in. Don’t just think about it. Do it.

Here are some tips from the pros:

1.     1. Target the Show you want to write for and memorize it inside and out. (Several of the panelists admitted to having every season of their target shows archived.)  So gear up the DVR.

2.    2.  Create a streamlined packet with your best material. “Pretend like you write for the show and give it to everyone you can think of…” (Meredith Scardino)

3.     3. Some shows don’t require an agent to represent you. (Including The Late Show with David Letterman, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show). Assistants read the slush pile and do recommend great material when they find it. (Jennifer Goodwin)

4.     4. Do Stand Up comedy. Open mics, whatever. It may lead to writing for a big comedian. Plus it’s a great way to network. (Morgan Murphy)

5.    5.  Post funny clips on YouTube and canvas your friends to view them. Repeatedly.

6.     6. Publish comedic pieces in magazines or on blogs. You never know who might be reading, or where it may lead. (Hallie Haglund)

7.    7.  Take entry level jobs at Comedy Shows. Internships, Receptions, Pages. Three of the panelists got in this way.

8.    8.  Envision yourself as the head writer of a late night show. It never hurts to dream big. Plus it’s funny. Read Hallie Haglund’s piece on finally meeting Conan O’Brien.

While none of the writers from Saturday Night Live were unable to attend the panel due to deadlines, I couldn’t help thinking about Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon and the whole “Betty While to Host SNL please?” Facebook fan page of over 500,000 that led to the recent hilarity on May 8. Talk about social media comedy consumer power!

Bottomline, some other numbers are in. Women are culture mavens. They buy more books, and they watch more TV than men. Women engage in social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter more than men do. And they blog more. So what’s stopping the funny ladies from stepping forward to find audiences? If the Paley Center response is any indicator, the laugh track is there to guide them.

After the panel, I switched on a freshly DVR’d episode of 30 Rock. Another hilarious round of my own version of Late Night.

Additional Reading//Viewing:

Here’s a YouTube clip of Morgan Murphy (The Jimmy Fallon Show) doing stand up.

Letterman Show Hires Female Writer, Jill Goodwin

Stephen Colbert Interviews Allison Silverman for Elle

Hit Girl: a Kali-esque Vixen

We've certainly never seen a character like Hit Girl before. She's a Kali-esque vixen, a vigilante warrior machine in fast mo, who still manages to be cute and smiley when she takes off her purple wig and eye mask. With Hit Girl's appearance in "Kick Ass," pop culture just added another icon of girlhood. And this one, at eleven years old (the actress who plays her, Chloe Grace Moretz, is just thirteen)...has upped the ante on what's possible for the bubblegum years in a storyline.

With a head's up about some serious "Kill Bill" style violence ahead, I knew I'd have some eye covering scenes (my daughter says: wimp), but I am just not inured to blood, to killing, to bone-crunching. Not in this lifetime, anyway. And yet, despite the flinches, seeing this able-bodied girl take down the bad guys single-handedly provided some intense fantasy satisfaction reminiscent of 1991's "Thelma and Louise." Could it be the petition I'd signed earlier in the day to end trafficking of girls and women in Hawaii? Is the emergence of an archetype like Hit Girl part of a global sea change for girl power?

There were a lot of girls at the screening on Saturday night, at the late show, even. Some as young as eight or nine years old were recapping scenes in the Ladies' Room afterwards...(not the last time I wished for my Flip camera)...They loved the movie, though agreed: it was WAY violent and they were  still a bit shaken by it....

Once again we cross into the terrain of "real" violence versus "fantasy" violence. Is it a pure cartoon or does it link to the real world? Compare these bloody scenes to the dust clouds produced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer's well-placed stakes into Undead hearts and we've got a very different kind of drama going on, at least in terms of blood-letting. And even though Hit Girl does back flips and flies through the air, the scenes lacked the martial artful zen explored by Jen Yu, the teenage warrior girl of Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000).

A lot of people were laughing in the movie theatre, partially because the character of Kick Ass himself is so awkward and unable to pull off the superhero get-up. But nobody laughed when Hit Girl whirled the guns and knives like a dervish. They held their breath.

A couple of troubling issues remain: in this motherless universe of "Kick Ass", demented or clueless fathers rule the world. And, faithfulness to Mark Millar's graphic novel aside, did Hit Girl have to be so young to pull the impact? Did she have to don a jail-baity plaid skirt and knee socks of Catholic girl porn to gain entry to the villain's lair?

What kind of girls are we really looking for in pop culture, that dreamscape of collective symbology? Do we really want girls who can wield guns, knives, spears and tasers? Truth is, many are looking for continued change in the real world of girls so they can acquire the power to manifest as activists, artists, advocates and innovators--without being silenced, starved or abused. How do the worlds of cinema and everyday life interweave and overlay?   I look forward to all the continued conversations.  Having broken a new set of taboos, Hit Girl will be on rewind for a long while,  and her saucy language is the least of it.

The Ada Lovelace Engine

This year on Ada Lovelace Day, March 24th, I participated with thousands of techies, geek girls and virtual revellers in celebrating the woman credited with being the world's first computer programmer. My participation was of course, computer based: a sign-on to the Finding Ada web site, followed by multiple tweets and a Facebook post.  A virtual shout-out to Ada "in the cloud."

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a visionary math whiz, was the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbank, an abolitionist. Her breakthrough piece of the computer puzzle?   In side notes to a translation of Luigi Manabrea's article on the work of Charles Babbage, a Cambridge professor who designed and wrote about The Difference Engine and The Analytic Engine, Ada composed an algorithm encoded for machine processing. Though Babbage dubbed her "The Enchantress of Numbers," her contribution to the development of computers was unacknowledged until the 1970s.

Here is what she had to say: We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Fractals, anyone? The daughter of a poet, you might say?

That Ada mused about this long before IBM was a scratchpad concept or Steve Jobs invented the Apple of his eye is quite extraordinary. She's a heroine of zeroes and ones, and the great grandmother of geeks everywhere...

Click on the link to view some clips from  Lynn Hershman Leeson's  1997 film, "Conceiving Ada," with Tilda Swinton as Ada Lovelace.

Watch Me: Alice in 3D

Full disclosure: I have vintage copies of Alice in Wonderland, The Annotated Alice, and a set of Alice Christmas ornaments. You get the drift.  In 9th grade, I played Alice in an experimental version based on improv, which is where Alice Central began. No doubt, Alice is a key icon of the Anglo-American lexicon. The book was first published  in 1865,  just as photography invented captured illusion on paper. The original Alice has remained so brillig, she even exists in cyber-form. See Inanimate Alice for an example. 

Up till now, "falling down the rabbit hole" had all kinds of connotations. Go ask Alice. Add to that the 3D experience of Burton's version,  which clearly drives the entertainment quotient. After a momentary "say what about the Jabberwocky?", I suspended Carroll fidelity expectations, reveling in Tim Burton's wild dialogue with the classic. In addition to the Mad Hatter's glowing green eyes, and dormouse weapon-brandishing, Alice morphs into a heroine with a Joan of Arc streak. All the "Eat Me" and "Drink Me" sequences provide a blue silk fluency of dresses and fabrics reapplied to Alice's ever-changing size.

Tim Burton's take on the classic tale is very much a new spin. How much he let Alice Liddell in on his storyline (written by Disney veteran Linda Woolverton) is up for grabs. That he produced it under the aegis of Disney holds some irony, since Mia Wasikowska's Alice bears no resemblance to the treacle-y cartoon produced by Walt back in 1951, anymore than that Alice resembled Lewis Carroll's friend. For starters, this 19-year-old Alice is a bit older than 10-year-old Alice Liddell, a clear segue into the coming of-age story.

Helena Bonham Carter, special effected into an extreme "off with their head" Red Queen, manages to steal scenes from that otherwise larger-than-lifer, Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter. Visual effects rule the ride with more Wonderland awe than the lackluster 50s cartoon conveyed. A surprise voice visit by Alan Rickman adds some smoke to the landscape, and the Cheshire Cat's twisting disappearing acts startle throughout.

While the black lipstick and nail polish give Anne Hathaway's White Queen a bit of quirky goth, her sisterhood of the opposition with the Red Queen yawned me a bit, especially compared to the feisty expansion of possibilities for Wasikowska's Alice, who bucks Victorian gender rules, pressure for royal marriage and dons a sword for a climactic moment. This Alice is good news for girl icons everywhere even if the humdrum bipolar battle-of-the-queens returns as the old Disney trope that women just can't get along....

The nonsense quotient in Burton's world is oddly less non-sensical than Carroll's original.  Yet this Alice more than braves the riddles and outsmarts the Red Queen, resulting in a net value to the pantheon of girl possibilities. Mia Wasikowska's feisty Alice battles the dragon herself; she doesn't stand by waiting for a rescue from St. George or The White Rabbit.

Bigelow's Big Time

Like millions worldwide, I applauded with large scale tweet fire when Kathryn Bigelow won the Best Director  and Best Picture Oscars for The Hurt Locker. What a pivotal moment for those who have tracked statistics about women behind the scenes in Hollywood, like Martha M. Lauzen and Melissa Silverstein. In case you've been hiding out in a cave, Bigelow is the fourth woman ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar and The Hurt Locker brought her to this historic home run. And, like many of those who yahoo-ed big time on March 7th, I, er...hadn’t seen it yet.

Say what?

Don’t get me wrong. I had planned to see it. Many times. I checked the listings all summer. But war movies in general are not my chosen realm of entertainment. I find them nail-biting, and I don't bite my nails. To whit: I never saw Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List. And from everything I read about The Hurt Locker, I knew it would be an emotional, intense adrenaline shift. Every time I considered it, I just wasn't ready for the ride into Iraq.

As a huge cinephile, especially the girls’ rite of passage variety, I reveled this Fall in Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Lone Sherfig’s An Education and many other films, indie and blockbuster. Sci-fi battles, okay. Star Trek? Check. Avatar? Check. Intense, yes, but not going for "reality." See, my experience of movies is to become, shall we say, emotionally, visually and intellectually invested--a full-bodied, 3-D experience, with or without the glasses. (My daughter rolls her eyes. “Mom, are you crying again? The movie barely started.”) And yes, I must add Precious to the list but that's another kind of war zone to traverse. Soon.

I broke the spell this week by watching The Hurt Locker on pay-per-view.  Grueling, emotional, intense, desert gritty—the movie brought you there, into the Hummer, into the streets of Baghdad, into the soldier’s crash pads. Fists clenched? Tears? All the fireworks in my own living room. Without the benefits of surround-sound, thank you very much.

Within the first few scenes, I knew Bigelow’s win was not based on politics, gendered or otherwise, so much as well-honed, stellar storytelling skill. At times, she created documentary-esque illusion with a visceral, you-are-there immediacy. The film is a masterwork of tight editing, character build and yes, stress. This sheer war-driven stress is fed by intimate, close-up sound, hand-held camerawork and some astounding acting. Bigelow deserved her Oscars. Big time. And it's some of the best use of HD that I've seen so far.

The Hurt Locker does not raise a glory flag to war, not by any stretch. But it does provide us with unsung heroes of a war industry--career soldiers who arrive in an alien terrain of chaos, misunderstanding and inhumanity that numbs them and often kills them. (The bomb suit’s resemblance to astronaut gear, enhanced by smoke and dust effects did not go unnoticed.) The Hurt Locker combines elements of science fiction and cinema verité. And, when the actors dismantle bombs, you can hear them breathe inside their protective helmets, as if you are nearby, tension-bound as the search extends to car innards and rubble piles.

Like Kimberly Peirce’s under-recognized 2008 film Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker shows how searingly difficult it is for soldiers not only to return to civilian life but to head back into the desert where there is no dessert, especially after a glimpse of dinnertime.

In one heartbreaking scene Staff Sergeant William James  (Jeremy Renner), at home briefly after months in the Middle East, is too numb to immerse himself in his infant son’s burbling happiness. As he clears leaves from the wintry gutters, the pull back to a modest house underscores how paltry the military's financial reward is, even for those who risk their lives dismantling bombs on a daily basis.

That Bigelow won the Best Director award for a film dealing with a “male” subject, a “male” action genre, and a war movie at that, will no doubt be dissected for years to come. That James Cameron was nominated for Best Director in the same year for Avatar, a film that proved his “feminine” empathetic ability alongside his destructo-gaming visuals, has already been covered in print and in the blogosphere. 

Will this be the decade of an end to glass ceilings, to leadership gender divides in an industry that produces one of America’s biggest global exports? One can only continue to dream in celluloid. Big dreams. Like Bigelow’s.

To PIerce or Not to Pierce: That is the Question

To pierce or not to pierce: that question echoed around my house for the past year and half. My daughter Finn started asking for a nose-piercing around the age of 14 and then eventually I said, ok, for your 15th birthday, which (oops), came and went without any action. I'll admit: I kept stalling. Nose-piercing is a fairly permanent decision that I didn't want her to regret. Or me!

Finn kept reminding me in her inimitable gentle yet persistent way. Um, Mom, my 15th birthday present? Truthfully, I was hoping the idea would fade to fad. Testing her level of commitment, we talked about pros and cons, the long healing process, the sports issue (by regulation, piercings have to be covered up during softball games...league rules...). Despite all of the caveats she still didn't waver. So I got the message: she was serious.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against piercing per se. While some looks are more extreme than others (go ahead: Google Images), a tiny glint on the nose looks fabulous on millions of women (especially when paired with a sari...). It's just that I personally have never even pierced my ears, so the whole process seemed daunting....

I tasked Finn with finding THE BEST piercing place by polling her friends, asking around. She located Venus by Maria Tash in the West Village NYC, highly recommended by her friend Caroline. Finally the event took place just before Christmas 2009.

These days, I'm the first to point out Finn's elegant fleck of bling, and in her circles she's had many rounds of thumbs up. Plus, she's been religious about taking care of it. Her choice to pierce? A bona fide rite of passage without an apparent downside. Style transcends the hesitations. And wins.

(If you're thinking about it or have a daughter exploring the idea, you can always contact Penelope Silverstein at Haven Body Arts in Northampton, MA. She's been featured in print, blogs and on the news....a real pro. http://havenbodyarts.com/)