A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
#OscarsSoWhite has dominated much of the conversation surrounding this year's Academy Awards, but it's not like race is the only issue in Hollywood.
For example, a recent study out of The Center for the Study of Women in Film and TV found that among last year's 100 highest-grossing films, women accounted for just about one-third of all major and speaking characters. Those numbers were even worse for women characters who were black, Latina and Asian, and for all women characters older than 40.
Coincidentally, a new
has been launched which, in less than 24 hours, exploded the Twitter-verse. The account is run by film producer Ross Putman who uses it to shed light on how female leads are introduced in scripts. For the tweets he changes the actual character names to the generic JANE.
JANE, 28, athletic but sexy. A natural beauty. Most days she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros)
JANE, 28, athletic but sexy. A natural beauty. Most days she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled fuck-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros)
JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled fuck-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
As a producer, Putman gets a lot of scripts sent his way. So he created the account @femscriptintros to show how some writers view their female characters — and thus how those characters are cast.
Though drop-dead beautiful, JANE (40) has the appearance of someone whose confidence has been shaken. She is a raw, sexual force, impeded.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros)
Though drop-dead beautiful, JANE (40) has the appearance of someone whose confidence has been shaken. She is a raw, sexual force, impeded.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
Like draping the Venus De Milo in a burlap dress, Jane’s sensational natural beauty fights through her plain blue Ann Taylor outfit.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros)
Like draping the Venus De Milo in a burlap dress, Jane’s sensational natural beauty fights through her plain blue Ann Taylor outfit.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
In an interview with Jezebel, Putman observed:
Women are almost always, first and foremost, described based on their physical attractiveness ... The suggestion is that women are only valuable if they’re "beautiful." It’s not always true, but it’s an underlying current. Beyond that, scripts always make a point of quite distinctly saying when someone "isn’t beautiful."
And while Putman says he doesn't want to "shame individual screenwriters," it seems like his Twitter account could go a long way toward making some of the wider "systemic" changes that Putman wants to see in Hollywood.