Rose tells Wright that "Jodie Foster once said [...] that if you'd wanted to, you could've been the best actress of your generation, suggesting that you didn't want to." Wright says "I never thought I was good," but later Private Lives of Pippa Lee director Rebecca Miller suggests that Wright has had "maybe not the most pragmatic career." And elsewhere Wright has mentioned passing on roles to spend more time with her kids. A recent Redbook interview quotes her as saying, "I turned down so many films because I wanted to be a mom that…they stopped offering." But she also makes it clear that this was a choice, something she "wanted" more than being the best actress of her generation, whatever that means. When Redbook's Stacy Morrison tells her, "People might be tempted to say, 'You gave up your life so he could be Mr. Sean Penn,'" she responds, "He was already Mr. Sean Penn. " And she says,

I really wanted to be a mom. I didn't want my kids to be raised by a nanny, which would have been the case if I were working two movies in a year, you know? And I would have been hospitalized with fatigue. So that's where the no-brainer came in. I did what I wanted to do: I raised my kids.

The fact that Hollywood's version of greatness is incompatible with Wright's preferred family life may be more Hollywood's problem than hers. Underscoring this, Wright makes it clear that The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the first movie she's truly proud of. It's that pride that appears to prompt Wright's tears, and she later says of working on the film, "Me personally, as an actress, I think I just went, 'get over being scared.'" This kind of confidence comes later in life for many people, not just actresses, and it's a shame that Hollywood is most interested in women when they've not yet developed the self-concept age can bring.

The obsession with youth may be one reason that, as NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis said yesterday, "women are starved for representation of themselves" onscreen. It's not just that older women want to see older women — it's also that women want to see female actors portraying the same variety of human experiences that male actors do, and in order to do that, they may need to mature a little bit. Much has been made of the male actor's ability to grow old and still get roles, but this isn't just about a few gray hairs and the ability to appear opposite younger starlets — it's also about the freedom to grow and change as an artist, something Hollywood doesn't allow very many women. The movie industry, like so many others, needs to make space for women to live their lives, which may include taking some time off to have kids, and definitely includes getting older and wiser.

Related: Robin Wright Penn: Life After Sean [Redbook]

Earlier: "Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck

Dargis' "fuck them" - the first of several - refers specifically to a fact she highlighted in her piece this weekend on the lack of progress in Hollywood films for and about women: Two major studios, Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, didn't release a single movie directed by a female, even in a year of renewed prominence for women in film. One bright spot: The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow (pictured above) is sweeping the early critics' awards: in the past two days alone she and her film have gotten top accolades from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, The New York Film Critics Online, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

In a wide-ranging conversation this morning on women in Hollywood, Dargis, who has been a chief New York Times film critic (a title she shares with A.O. Scott) since 2004, had similarly strong words for Hollywood conventional wisdom and the studio system overall. "My tendency is not to talk in sweeping terms, but one thing I can say in sweeping terms is that there's a lot of sexism in the industry," she says. Here are some of the other highlights from the conversation.

On why women in Hollywood aren't faring any better: This business is really about clubby relationships. If you buy Variety or go online and look at the deals, you see one guy after another smiling in a baseball cap. It's all guys making deals with other guys. I had a female studio chief a couple of years ago tell me point blank that she wasn't hiring a woman to do an action movie because women are good at certain things and not others. If you have women buying that bullshit how can we expect men to be better?

On working within the system: For me the most sobering thing of the last ten years is that there really was a point where four of the studios were run by women… and you would have thought that would lead to an uptick of women directors. I'm not saying I've done a systematic analysis, but it doesn't look like it changed very much… Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

On director Kathryn Bigelow's success (achieved in part by getting funding outside of Hollywood, detailed in Dargis's June profile of her): Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important. Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy – and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy – we'll see. We know that because women are allowed to make romantic comedies that they can make romantic comedies. That's in everyone's comfort zone. The idea that a woman can be a great action director is not is everyone's comfort zone. That's [Bigelow's] exceptionalism.

On Bigelow's chances for Oscar or future commercial success: The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

On male and female directors being held to different standards, as Dargis suggested in comparing Bigelow and Michael Mann in her piece: Do you think that a woman would have been able to get forty million dollars to make a puppet movie the way that Wes Anderson has been able to make, bringing to bear all the publicity and advertising budget of Fox? After two movies that didn't make a lot of money? I think this is true for a lot of black filmmakers too – they're held to a higher standard. And an unfair standard. You can be a male filmmaker and if you're perceived as a genius – a boy genius or a fully-formed adult genius – that you are allowed to fail in a way that a woman is not allowed to fail.

On whether there's an essential difference between male-made and female-made movies: Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. That's all we need to say about that. But I do think as 51 percent of the population we should be given a chance… It's very boring to watch the same people coming from a certain kind of background make the same kinds of movies.

On Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron: I personally don't think either of them is a good filmmaker — they make movies for me that are more emotionally satisfying but with barely any aesthetic value at all. I really like Something's Gotta Give, but I don't think it's a good movie…. I'm of two minds. Sometimes I think what women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That's just like, blech.

On Sandra Bullock, whom she recently wrote should use her production company to "start giving female filmmakers a chance to do something other than dopey romances": Use your power for good, Sandy!

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don't know what's happening. I think it's depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they're about men. All power to Apatow, but he's taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. ….We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow. But what are his movies supposed to be about? Nominally about the relationship between a man and a woman, but they're really buddy flicks. Funny People was supposed to have an important role for a woman, but she was uninteresting and an afterthought.

On representations of women onscreen: There's a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It's a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She's Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.

On women being taken seriously as moviegoers: It's a vicious cycle. We're not going to movies because there aren't movies for us. Therefore we're not seen as a loyal moviegoing audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…

That's why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City's a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what's going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We're 51 percent of the audience.

On this quote from a box office analyst for Hollywood.com, in The Washington Post: Fuck him. What an asshole. Yes, that's what I want! That's exactly what I want. If Angelina Jolie had been cast in a movie as a good as The Bourne Identity with a filmmaker like Paul Greengrass, I would have gone out to see it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone. That is absurd. That's blaming female audiences – you get what you deserve? Is that what he's saying?

On being a female critic reviewing and featuring women's films: I wanted to get [Bigelow] on the cover of 'Arts and Leisure'. I wanted this fantastic woman director to get her face on the front of the New York Times…[But] I am an equal opportunity critic. I will pan women as hard as men. I've had testy people imply that I should go easier on women's movies. I find that incredibly insulting. Are you kidding me? I don't want to be graded on a curve. None of us want to be a good woman writer.

I don't want to be the woman critic. I don't want to be the feminist critic. I don't want to be the shrew. What I want to do is talk about the art that I love and point out, every so often, inequities….It's a weird balancing act and I'm not saying there aren't contradictions.

On whether the prominence of women-directed films in 2009 will change anything, even if they're not statistically significant compared to other years: It's pretty shitty right now. Anything positive can only help a little bit. How's that for optimism?

Women In The Seats But Not Behind The Camera [New York Times]
Kathryn Bigelow Makes Movies That Go For The Gut [New York Times]
Now Starring At The Movies: Famous Dead Women [New York Times]
With Strong Female Characters, Hollywood Suffers From a Fear Of Failure [The Washington Post]

Related: Double X Films [The Atlantic]

Earlier: Things Are Not Getting Better For Women In Hollywood

The Hollywood Reporter's Roger Friedman, who previously was up in arms when The Gotham Awards ignored Precious (only to have its rival Independent Spirit Awards lavish the movie with attention), is now enraged with the NBR for not putting Precious in its top ten.

What's most upsetting this year: the absence of Lee Daniels‘ Precious. It's not a total surprise. The NBR is not a multicultural organization. They completely ignored Dreamgirls in 2006. Snubbing Precious fits in with Schulhof's track record perfectly. Let's just say it: They do not like black movies, period. To make up for it, they threw Gabby Sidibe a bone with Breakthrough Performance. This is what they did to Jennifer Hudson from Dreamgirls. It's pathetic. But the Oscars remedied this. She wound up winning Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars.

The NBR may well be, as Friedman argues, a "scandal-plagued freak show composed of wealthy fans and no actual reviewers," but it's a bit unfair to say they "do not like black movies period," at least judging by this year's list, which also includes Good Hair among the best documentaries and the Nelson Mandela biopic Invictus in its top ten. And African-American actor Anthony Mackie had a brilliant starring turn in NBR top-tenner The Hurt Locker, though his role was not as prominent as that of his colleague Jeremy Renner, who got a breakthrough actor award.

It's also unclear if any of this matters beyond these particular nods. Over at the Los Angeles Times' Gold Derby blog, Tom O'Neil points out that the NBR isn't always the Oscar predictor it's said to be. Quite the opposite, sometimes — their frequent favorites, Clint Eastwood and George Clooney, subsequently were passed over for Oscars, and they also ignored two more commercial Best Picture Oscar winners (A Beautiful Mind, The Lord of the Rings).

Also, who needs any of this stuff when you have Barbara Bush's endorsement?

Up In the Air Wins National Board of Review [EW.com]
"Precious" Scandal: National Board of Review Disgraces Itself [The Hollywood Reporter]
National Board of Review goes crazy for Clooney and Clint again ... Will disaster follow at the Oscars? [Gold Derby/LAT]
Barbara Bush: A Precious Moment [Newsweek]

I decided to ask a few professionals. Raves and nominations notwithstanding, as casting director Mark Bennett (The Hurt Locker, Junebug) puts it when asked for his professional opinion, "Unfortunately Hollywood is still a system that doesn't produce a lot of great parts for black women and doesn't produce a lot of parts for women who aren't conventionally beautiful. And that's not going to change overnight."

In a piece last month on The Root, cultural critic Stanley Crouch was outright pessimistic:

"Gabby Sidibe better enjoy her fame while she can because black actresses never have less than a hard row to hoe. Even if the inner life they bring to characters is as beautiful as they are physically, they have little chance."

Crouch cited several black actresses whose careers were, as he puts it, "pissed away by the system," and argues that even with Precious's success, at the end of the day, "Hollywood will continue to go along as it has gone." And he didn't even touch on the fact that Hollywood has had little use for any women larger than a size zero.

So far, Sidibe has shot a pilot for Showtime – The C Word, a dark comedy starring Laura Linney – and also wrapped a Sundance lab film called Yelling to the Sky. But her most significant post-Precious performance has probably been on the talk show circuit.

The greatest risk Sidibe initially faced was best articulated (inadvertently) by Roger Ebert in his November 4 Chicago Sun Times review of Precious:

"Her work is still another demonstration of the mystery of some actors, who evoke feelings in ways beyond words and techniques. She so completely creates the Precious character that you rather wonder if she's very much like her."

You can wonder, but the answer is no. "It's called acting," her manager, Jill Kaplan, says. Sidibe herself has skillfully, but seemingly effortlessly, put space between her character and herself with her television appearances, which exhibit both poise and comic timing.

"When you see her being interviewed, she's so charming. You look at her and say, I'd like to watch her in other parts so you can see her acting different personalities," says Bennett.

Both Bennett and Billy Hopkins, the casting agent who co-discovered Sidibe at an open casting call (and Precious director Lee Daniels' former partner), point out that cable television offers a far greater range and depth of roles for actresses. And they both speculate that she'd make a good talk show host. (An appealing, if entirely premature, prospect).

Hopkins sounds determinedly optimistic about Hollywood's receptiveness to an actress like Sidibe. "Is she a hard type to cast? Yes. But is she talented? Yes. So I think those will balance each other out," he says.

Eyde Belasco, who cast Sidibe in Yelling To The Sky and has worked on movies like (500) Days of Summer and Half Nelson, writes in an email that her own choice had "very little to do with her look and everything to do with her amazing acting abilities." She adds, "I think the best types of roles for Gabby going forward, to keep her from being typecast, are ones that are not linked to her look. Maybe it's about taking on a great supporting role (such as her role in Yelling To She Sky) that has very little to do with her physical appearance and all to do with her performance. If an actor can afford to do it, it's about waiting for the right role. Gabby does have a very specific look. But, hopefully, filmmakers and casting directors will want the best actress for the role."

It can be hard to get insiders to discuss industry prejudices on the record, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. "Hollywood tends to think of actors like Gabby as being perfect as a white person's friend. She'll have to work really hard to distinguish herself in their eyes," says Bennett. "The soft prejudice that she's going to face is going to be getting cast in parts that aren't written for a black girl. At the end of the day, I find there's a certain risk aversion in terms of Hollywood casting. It wouldn't surprise me if she finds her most fulfilling professional opportunities in the coming years outside of Hollywood."

Bennett's advice to her is not to wait to pursue the parts she wants: "It's a mistake for actors to sit around and assume that Hollywood as a monolith will have imagination. Actors have to insist on what they're capable of."

Kaplan, Sidibe's manager, is reluctant, for obvious reasons, to have the actress pigeonholed or even discuss that risk. She says Sidibe has gotten all kinds of scripts sent her way. "It doesn't have to be about changing Hollywood's ideals – it's just about a talented actress," she says.

She adds, "I think she can do anything. She's a prodigy – she's very funny. She really loves Judd Apatow movies and comedies in general. We're looking for a big fun comedy for her, or maybe something romantic…She loves superhero movies."

Speaking of Apatow and comedies, I tracked down Allison Jones, the casting director who has worked with him since Freaks and Geeks, and who was also responsible for the inarguably inspired casting on Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. Here's what she writes:

A good comedy director I think values instincts more than line readings...so if her comedy instincts are as solid as her dramatic ones (on talk shows she is a riot and so delightful), then she will have no problem... Someone's funny, she's funny. Someone's good, she's good. [In addition] as much as anyone's physical appearance can limit their appropriateness for a role (including the stick-thin actresses), she will not be right for everything. But maybe there are more opportunities out there rather than fewer.

Hopefully those opportunities will exceed the comic roles that the industry has so far offered larger black women (or men pretending to be them)—where their sexuality is a punchline in itself.

As the awards season kicks off, Sidibe's name is already on many ballots — she was just nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best actress — and expected to be on more, including those for the Oscars (announced February 3). And maybe that's what it'll take to clinch her broader appeal, should anyone need convincing. Kaplan doesn't want to make predictions. "I can't say what's going to happen," she says. "I'm definitely trying. I'm working on it right now. People are going to see outside the box."

Hollywood: Same As It Ever Was [The Root]

Related: Et Tu, Amy Poehler? What's So Funny About Desiring A Big, Black Woman? [What Tami Said]
Sumpin' Turrrrble: SNL's Keenan Thompson Performs Minstrel Act [Racialicious]

About midway through watching New Moon with two friends, I realized I was having a lightbulb moment. I got it. Suddenly, in the theater, I realized why this series is so popular, why all the criticisms of Meyer's work slide off like it is made of teflon, how the story of a somewhat codependent teenager torn between two increasingly controlling objects of affection is enticing enough to spend weeks on best-seller lists and to break box office records. To condescend toward this type of fandom is a mistake (even if said snarking is both hilarious and on point). In order to unlock the saga's chokehold on teens, we must use its own conventions. In other words - we need to learn how to reach teens from Twilight.

This may seem like a strange admission to make. After all, feminists and fans of young adult literature alike have been warning against Stephanie Meyer's siren song for years now. Newser points out how many of the headlines surrounding the massive success of the franchise focus on the sexism inherent in the series. Grady Hendrix, writing for Slate, notes:

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

Even Ms. Magazine, which has remained somewhat indifferent to pop culture, gets in on the action, with Carmen D. Siering explaining:

Fans of the books, and now a movie version, often break into "teams," aligning them- selves with the swain they hope Bella will choose in the end: Team Edward or Team Jacob. But few young readers ask, "Why not Team Bella?" perhaps because the answer is quite clear: There can be no Team Bella. Even though Bella is ostensibly a hero, in truth she is merely an object in the Twilight world. Bella is a prize, not a person, someone to whom things happen, not an active participant in the unfolding story. [...]

Maybe it's difficult for Edward to see Bella as an equal because Bella has almost no personality. Meyer writes on her website that she "left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes." But Meyer fails to give Bella much of an interior life as well; Bella is a blank slate, with few thoughts or actions that don't center on Edward. Outside of him and occasional outings with werewolf Jacob, Bella doesn't do anything more than go to school, cook and clean for her dad, write to her mother, read and romanticize over Victorian literature and find fault with her clothing. She has no other interests, no goals, few friends: Bella does nothing that suggests she is a person in her own right. If Meyer hopes that readers see themselves as Bella, what is it she is suggesting to them about the significance of their own lives?

And indeed, there is much to hate about the series. Hell, I even put forth an analysis of racism within the series.

So how can I suddenly advocate to understand Twilight, instead of destroying it?

I speak not to disprove what others spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.

To be a teenager is a difficult thing. Desires war against common sense, ephemeral things (like boy bands) take on deep, long lasting meaning, and you are devoted to friends, peers, and lovers. Everyone seems to want to separate you from what you want. And, even with the best intentions, those of us who hate Twilight are just feeding the mania. We bludgeon them with reason and forget two key things:

• 1. Fandom doesn't run on logic, and
• 2. A large part of exploring the boundaries of growing up is choosing things for ourselves - whether we make the wrong decisions or somehow stumble upon the right ones.

Sitting in the dark space I shared with another 40 or so people to watch the film last night, it dawned on me. I listened to the cheers that went up when Jacob Black removes his shirt for the first time, the laughter that erupted when Bella cracks her head while trying to cliff dive her way to Edward, and the radio silence when Edward confesses his undying commitment to Bella. I realized that Twilight does not represent a failure of feminism, but rather a golden opportunity to evaluate where we can focus on outreach.

How often do we get a non-personal opportunity to talk about issues with obsessive relationships? Promoting the idea of passive femininity and promoting an idea of controlling and all-powerful masculinity. While we may wince at the portrayals of Bella, Edward, and Jacob in the context of their relationships, it would be foolish to pretend that Meyer isn't just tapping into societal ideas surrounding heterosexual relationships and power dynamics that already exist. The documentary Micky Mouse Monopoly explores the messages portrayed in Disney films:

By exploring these themes with teen and preteen girls in a questioning, not a confrontational tone, adults can help them to discover for themselves why the things that Edward and Jacob do in the name of "love" are not okay. Conversely, teenage and pre-teen boys are also paying attention to the cues they are learning from Twilight. I was shocked last year to learn that my younger brother, whose sole ambition at the age of 11 is to sag his pants as low as possible, and to be as cool as possible by knowing every popular rap lyric on the radio, pulled out a Twilight DVD when I came to visit and offered to put it on "because this is what girls like." Apparently, his "girlfriend" - a term he defines as a female who gives him her phone number - and most of the other girls he knows love Edward or Jacob.

What are young boys learning about how to behave in relationships when they are exposed to Twilight?

A very similar message as to what they learn through Disney:

Just as Jacob started out as a genuinely nice kid who switched over to being a Nice Guy, when he realized Edward's tactics of being forceful and controlling were working on Bella, there are potentially thousands of boys who could decide that the way to win a girl's admiration is by emulating Jacob and Edward's controlling behaviors.

Only by understanding and critically engaging with the Twilight saga can parents and other adults start looking at what aspects of this series appeal to teens and where else they can channel their attention.

After all, the Twilight mania won't rule the world forever. The teenagers now will get older, a new crop of teen idols will arise. What will endure from Twilight won't necessarily be the messages of sexism - those are reinforced in thousands of different ways every day, and Stephanie Meyer will not be the last author to tap into them. What adults and pop culture critics should pay attention to is how Twilight breaks with many different conventions that have come to be accepted as normal. As Neesha writes on Racialicious, how often do girls get a chance to explore their budding sexuality in a safe (fantasy) space? I'm sure many of the young women who watch Twilight will have also seen the Transformers franchise, featuring Megan Fox as hyper-sexualized eye candy. How often do they see a movie geared at teens and young adults that allows for the main heroine to wear double layer shirts and oversized jackets? And how often do studios discount budding adolescent desire, and fail to consider that perhaps, girls would also like to see attractive, shirtless men parade around on screen?

Indeed, the mania resulting from New Moon and other parts of Twilight saga allows more than just an easy feminist critique - it also allows the opportunity for adults to influence the great Twilight-after. Eventually, all of the books will be read, and all of the movies will be left. What could be next? Can they help to exert small variations in the narrative by encouraging teens to write their own fan fiction (and guide Bella in their own ways)? Can they recommend other books to fill the aching gap left by the end of the Twilight saga with similar content but more progressive leanings? (Try Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet, The Silver Kiss and Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause, The Uglies Series, by Scott Westerfeld, and Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier, for starters.)

There is so much possibility within the world that Meyer has created to reach out to teens. And the way to do it isn't by dismissing their fandom, but engaging within their world, on their terms. As Nancy Gibbs writes in Time magazine, "Kids, like adults, resist force-feeding."

We can't force anyone to take their medicine. But what adults can do is allow teens the space to explore, grow, and come to their own conclusions on their own time. All they need to do is be ready, and willing.

O judgment! thou teens art fled to both brutish beasts (vamp and were),
And women have lost their reason. Bear with me;
Their hearts are in the coffin there with Edward (or in the forest, with Jacob),
And I must pause till they are ready to hear me.

New Moon' Breaks Midnight Record [Box Office Mojo]
LDS Sparkledammerung IS HERE! [Stoney321's LiveJournal]
New Moon Sexist, Say Critics [Newser]
Vampires Suck [Slate]
Talking Back to Twilight (Partial Article, Full in Print Only) [Ms.]
Running With the Wolves – A Racialicious Reading of the Twilight Saga [Racialicious]
Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power [Media Education Foundation]
Friends [XKCD]
Disney, Twilight and Bollywood: Reinforcing the Purity Myth or Fantasy of Safe Sexual Exploration for Young Girls (and Their Mothers)? [Racialicious]
The Gospel of Glee [Time]

Variety reports that Princess Tiana-oriented merchandise is outselling other Disney Princess-branded items by double digits. (Disney hasn't had a new princess-like character since Mulan in 1998.)

The LA Times spoke to The Disney animation team of Ron Clements and John Musker — who wrote and directed the The Little Mermaid and Aladdin — about the first animated African-American Disney heroine (who has an interracial relationship!)

Clements explains:

"Disney has actually been interested in the Frog Prince all the way back to Beauty and the Beast. They never got a version they were totally happy with. Weirdly enough, Pixar had been developing versions and they never got quite a version they were happy with. Their version actually started in Chicago and then moved to New Orleans partly because that is John Lasseter's favorite city in the world. Even more recently, Disney bought the rights to a book called The Frog Princess by an author called E.D. Baker and that was a twist on the fairy tale… We took elements actually from everything and came up with our version, which is basically an American fairy tale set in New Orleans in the 1920s."

The Princess and The Frog is family-friendly fare, but considering the fact that Precious broke records for an indie flick (and continues to see strong numbers as it goes nationwide) and New Moon broke a box office record set by The Dark Knight, Hollywood should be learning that women are not to be ignored.

"New Moon explodes the myth… that fanboys hold all the power," Pamela McClintock writes for Variety. Last year seemed to be the year of the dick flick, but with major successes from Julie & Julia, New Moon and Precious (keep in mind that New Moon's opening weekend beat Transformers, X-Men Origins: WolverineTransformers and Star Trek), the message is clear: Women buy movie tickets, and we're interested in great stories with women in the lead roles. And! Fangirls should be taken seriously. As Women & Hollywood's Melissa Silverstein writes for The Huffington Post:

Women accounted for 80% of the New Moonticket buyers; and [the audience was] divided evenly between women under and over 21. …There is an audience out there hungry to see films that appeal to them. I'm not trying to say that all women's films will be as successful as New Moon because that's silly. These kinds of movies come along rarely cause Hollywood hardly makes them. But this weekend's number indicate that they should make more of them.

'New Moon' Shines At Box Office, New 'Princess' Lifts Disney [Variety]
New Moon Brings a New Dawn in Hollywood [The Huffington Post]
Q & A With 'Princess And The Frog' Animators [LA Times]
Anika Noni Rose In Disney's 'The Princess and the Frog'; 'Dreamgirl's' Latest Role Is History Making [NY Daily News]
A Frog Of A Different Color [Newsweek]

According to a piece by Anna Stewart for Variety:

Brooks Brothers carries the Mad Men Edition suit, with costume designer Janie Bryant clearly credited.

But Bryant's fellow costume designers usually do not share in her good fortune. You will not find their names on those trendsetting dresses, those must-have leather jackets, those sought-after dolls — all those commercial goodies that came out of such films as Hannah Montana, The Matrix, Spider-Man, and Wall Street. Those creative minds didn't see a dime of your expenditure. And it's the same story for just about every costume designer in Hollywood.

In ye olde Hollywood, costume designers like Adrian (The Wizard Of Oz, Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story) and Edith Head (All About Eve, Roman Holiday, To Catch A Thief) were household names; and this list of iconic fashion statements in movies includes the designers — and costume designers' names. But you've probably never heard of Deena Appel. She designed the costumes for all three Austin Powers films, and tells Variety:

"When Austin Powers became dolls, Halloween costumes and board games, and it went on for years, not only am I not compensated for that in any way, shape or form, I am not even credited for it."

While Mad Men is on its way to making Janie Bryant a household name, what about the other costume designers working in film and TV? If we know the name Rachel Zoe, why not know Eric Daman and Meredith Markworth-Pollack — costume designers for Gossip Girl? As Hollywood style guru Cameron Silver says: "Because Janie Bryant is getting personal acclaim right now, other studios might see the opportunity to make money. Studios have forgotten that they could be developing household names for their costume designers."

Designers Push Recognizable Retail, Fashionistas Weigh In On Decades Of Style [Variety]

In her story, which just went online, longtime Times magazine entertainment reporter Lynn Hirschberg writes,

In the last month, Fox and her team - her agent, Chuck James, and her publicists, Leslie Sloane Zelnick and Dominique Appel - have grown increasingly nervous about her media image. The lack of success of ‘‘Jennifer's Body'' highlighted their concern: the outrageousness that made Fox an instant star was not attracting a paying audience, especially among females. They were hoping that hosting ‘‘S.N.L.'' and some recent appearances on talk shows on which she seemed demure might help to change the dialogue about Fox from the out-of-control sex bomb to the Fox they know, who is a homebody with a longtime boyfriend (the actor Brian Austin Green, who is 36) and a fondness for spending Saturday nights at Red Lobster, where she likes the cheese biscuits. That, they maintain, is the girl that girls should see. But Fox is less certain. ‘‘Women tear each other apart,'' she told me now. ‘‘Girls think I'm a slut, and I've been in the same relationship since I was 18. The problem is, if they think you're attractive, you're either stupid or a whore or a dumb whore. The instinct among girls is to attack the jugular.''

This isn't the first time Fox has (implicitly, at least) blamed jealousy for her apparent unpopularity among women. In June, she told Entertainment Weekly, "I come across as confident and [women] assume that means that I think I'm hot shit. And that makes them feel bad about themselves and so they hate me."

Hirschberg also has a theory: women, she says, are unmoved by Fox because they "tend to prefer movies that feature more approachable, less vixenish actresses, like Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston."

I happen to think Hortense had a more nuanced analysis in her post about Fox last September:

"Women don't hate Megan Fox because she comes across as confident; they hate the Megan Fox Archetype, because, in a way, it validates all of the high school notions of what sexiness is: porn-star poses, slow motion boob shots, and references to lesbianism and bisexuality as kinks instead of sexual orientation… She is the personification of the Cosmo brand of sex, and that is why women find her so annoying."

Of course, if every woman was truly turned off by the "Cosmo brand of sex," that magazine wouldn't still be selling 1.6 million copies a month. And although Elle raised eyebrows when it put the men's magazine staple on its June 2009 cover, a look at the Audit Bureau of Circulations figures indicates that wasn't a bad bet after all — the issue sold just over 300,000 copies, a respectable number on par with the same issue the year before. (It's too early to know how Fox did when she was actually on the cover of Cosmo).

Whether or not Fox is actually alienating all women, she herself is chafing against this cartoonish image of her, even as she's participated in building it, one self-consciously raunchy men's magazine quote at a time. ‘I have to pull back a little bit now,'' she tells Hirschberg. ‘‘I do live in a glass box. And I am on display for men to pay to look at me. And that bothers me. I don't want to live that character.'' Ironically, it might take even more tugs at the marionette strings from her people, this time in a different direction, to come up with something different. That, or walking away entirely.

Stardom Becomes Her [NY Times Magazine]

Related: Megan Fox, Fallen Angel [EW]

Earlier: Oh My God, I Think Megan Fox Is Winning Me Over
Megan Fox's 50 Best — And Worst — Bon Mots

It's unfortunate that we can't just talk about Amelia as a bad movie. As another unwieldy, under-characterized, over-cliched biopic trying to combine legend and humanity into one half-baked, generic panini, the kind made, inevitably, with chicken, crummy cheese and a few overwhelming hunks of roasted pepper. But when Amelia fails, it's an indictment of women's movie, of "older women's movies" (that's us ape-leaders over the magic 25) and of those with "strong female characters."

Of course, Amelia's part of a larger trend, which leads to inevitable analysis. As the NYT puts it, "For actresses, it is no longer enough to be young and beautiful onscreen, they have to be dead and famous, too - one of history's immortals." Amelia, Coco, Victoria - these are the Good Roles now, nevermind that biopics of either sex are rarely showcases for much other than scenery-chewing. (Maybe that's why a film like The Queen feels as revelatory as it did.) The WaPo piece that Hortense referenced this weekend said this:

The historical drama, about the pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart, represents a major risk in Hollywood, where studio executives have been increasingly chary of making movies about strong women. If "Amelia" earns respectable receipts, chances are it will be dismissed as a lucky break. If it fails, it will be cited as yet more proof that strong female protagonists are box office poison.

Here's something that bothers me: people seem to misunderstand what a "strong female character" is. They think it means flying planes or, James Cameron-style, wielding guns (both kinds.) Call it the "Demi Moore syndrome" in which she seemed to feel shaving her head or sexually harassing male characters functioned as acts of reclamation. "Strong women" are box-office poison? How about "underwritten characters showing they're strong by engaging in heavy-handed and essentially masculine antics?" Think about it: "strength" is defined narrowly as "defying femininity" and it's reductive and it's boring. (Alternatively, SFC's are occasionally allowed to be battered by love and tragedy and emerge singing or otherwise triumphant.) As the superbly-named Sady Doyle sagely puts it, "No matter how much you like strong female characters, this isn't interesting. And I'm reluctant to see any movie that looks this predictable and obvious out of some kind of womanly obligation. "Strength" can be just as bland as anything else – and just as limiting."

Look, no one's denying Amelia Earhart's accomplishments nor her place in history - rather, the inevitable interpretation. As the Los Angeles Times puts it, "The pilot, perhaps the most famous woman in the world in the early 1930s, has become for many a kind of two-dimensional pop-up icon, a name branded on public works and postage stamps — vaunted for her androgynous style, her lanky figure invariably adorned in breeches and a silk shirt, her hair cropped short. It's not for nothing that the Gap and Apple recycled her image for ad campaigns in the 1990s." And the film doesn't challenge that. Amelia was a crummy movie, no worse than any sweeping biographical epic. I'd forgotten it ten minutes after walking out of the theatre. But the consequences for its failure are, apparently, far more serious: it means "strong women" don't sell. Well, if that means an end to "strong women" as Hollywood defines it, frankly, I don't think that's such a tragedy. Sadly, what it probably in fact means is more Julie, less Julia. And it's really sad that, nowadays, a "women's movie" can't suck in a vacuum.

Dissecting Amelia [WomenandHollywood]
Now Starring at the Movies: Famous Dead Women] [New York Times]
Making A Private Woman Public For 'Amelia' [Los Angeles Times]
Women & Film [Washington Post]

Strong Women, Weak Box Office [Salon]
Related: Will Strong Female Characters Ever Make A Comeback On The Big Screen?

Rohin Guha catches a case of the feelings when she tries to reach out to interview Mo'Nique for BlackBook and receives a quick brush-off:

After a lot of hoop-jumping, I decided to track down someone on the inside to see if Mo'Nique would open up, if not about Precious, then about her new late night talk show and other projects in the pipeline. Because just like how Christiane Amanpour's passion lies in covering turmoil in the Middle East, mine lies in chatting with thespians who act in films like Phat Girlz. Instead I got a curt response to the effect of:

Hello Rohin,

Thanks for your interest in Mo'Nique, but unfortunately, there's no interest in your publication. Thanks.

Burn! A follow-up from her camp revealed that Mo'Nique, who has landed nearly every Essence cover since time immemorial, was gunning for a cover feature, but unwilling to compromise. To which, I would've responded, "If I could, I would! And shot by Hedi Slimane, too!" But I was too busy collecting the detritus of my shattered dreams and crushed hopes to do so. I was also too busy skimming this remarkably incisive feature on the flick over at the Times.

Guha backs up her story with tons of reported links, including this detailed post fromShowbiz 411 :

One source close to the production insists that Mo'Nique asked for $100,000 at one point to show up with the rest of the cast. The last time she did any publicity for the film, which is about to be released, was last January at the Sundance Film Festival.

Apparently, too, Mo'Nique's demands have been communicated abroad, too. Foreign distributors have also balked at her demands.

At Lionsgate, a spokesperson insists this isn't true. "Mo'Nique is doing the ‘Today' show for us, she's coming to the New York Film Festival. She had scheduling conflicts for Cannes and Toronto, but she did come to the Sundance festival. We're not paying her to do anything." Calls to Mo'Nique's publicist have never been returned.

However, it's this line that interests me most:

This is really a shame, too. The 41-year-old actress and comedienne, whose real name is Monique Imes, has been one of the hardest working women in show business all her life. She currently hosts a talk show out of Atlanta on BET, and has made countless TV appearances. Her work in "Precious" as Mary, the main character's abusive mother, is revelatory. Her whole career could change overnight.

Change in what way? As was mentioned, Mo'Nique is already at the top of her game, having sped past Queens of Comedy and The Parkers to host her own talk show and become a prominent pitch woman for various companies and health initiatives targeting the black community.

Perhaps the answer to Guha's question lies in the NYT Magazine article she lauds as "incisive" at the end of her post. There, the reporter explains:

Mo'Nique wasn't in town to talk about "Precious." She recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal with BET (Black Entertainment Television) to do a nightly 11 p.m. talk show, and she had back-to-back interviews for five days to promote it. Although there have been published reports that she will not support "Precious" by going to film festivals unless she's paid a steep fee, Mo'Nique seems unequivocally devoted to Daniels.

Perhaps Mo'Nique is just living by the old adage "time is money."

Is 'Precious' Mo'Nique Sabotaging Her Career? [BlackBook]
'Precious' Actress Mo'Nique: Show Me The Money [Showbiz 411]
The Audacity of Precious [NYT]

Good Hair follows Rock's journey to discover what exactly qualifies as, well, good hair. Over the course of the film, Rock visits beauty schools, a hair show, India, barbershops, and beauty supply stores in search of answers. He interviews Hollywood notables like Nia Long, Raven-Symoné, and Meghan Good. He visits relaxer factories and chemical labs. But through it all, the quest for a father to answer his daughter's question anchors the story. Good Hair appears to have done well for its opening weekend - it made over a million dollars on opening weekend ($6,005 average per screen) with a limited release, and was 14th over all.

We all agreed that Good Hair was enjoyable viewing - but was it good? Anna, Dodai, and I try to hash out our feelings below.

ANNA:

Okay, I'll start.

I've had 24 hours to digest the movie and I'm left with the same impression I had yesterday afternoon: Good Hair was comedic - lord knows I love a good Chris Rock joke - but it was not particularly challenging. But let me back up: I think that Rock and his producers' choice to frame the film with footage from the Atlanta hair show was a mistake. Certainly, the Atlanta hair show says something larger about black womens' hair - namely, the versatility of it, the money pumped into it, the theater of it - but that's about it. For me, the most compelling moments were the one on one interviews - especially Nia Long, who spoke uncharacteristically frankly for a Hollywood starlet, and Sarah Jones, whose joke about "tumbleweaves" had both my sister and I howling in our Times Square theater - and the brief glimpses of Chris interacting with his beloved baby girls, who inspired the film in the first place. (Question: Where was his wife in all of this?)

I will give Chris major points for the segment in which he goes to India to see how the human hair used in weaves is obtained. The resulting footage was damning: Human beings in a third world country reduced to their body parts, which are then sold off so that comparatively rich women in the first world can use them as adornments. Ugh. Seeing those swaths of hair being sorted, laid out, combed through and spun into perfect bundles of shiny ebony silk made me sick to my stomach. I was also troubled by the meme/hypothesis Chris kept pushing about black male economic complicity - subsidization, really - of the weaves found on black womens' heads. Does Chris really think that the (considerable) expense of a weave or hairpiece is SOOOO out of reach to the average black woman that they so directly inform her choice(s) of mate and his accompanying earning power? Does Chris believe that weaves are what black women really care about when it comes to where they choose to spend their - or others' - money? What about ownership of a home? Secondary education? I found the whole line of questioning offensive, and the men he spoke to, even someone supposedly as intelligent as Al Sharpton, were more than happy to oblige him in it.

LATOYA:

Hmm. I liked the film a lot - if you watched Chris Rock's other movies, Good Hair flows with that aesthetic. The fact that Rock would have a question - that is broadly about the women's obsession with hair, and intersperse the fact finding with as many moments of comedy as he could just makes total sense.

I also really liked the one-on-one interviews, but you neglected to mention one of my favorites - Ice-T. And I enjoyed the hair show framing because it illuminated quite a few things. While I was annoyed at Rock's tired-ass "all look same" joke, the hair show showed (1) the magnitude of the hair business, (2) how few of the vendors are black owned, (3) how much of a mega-industry this is, and (4) how stylists become celebrities. (In my theater, a gleeful cheer ran through the crowd, when Derek J, of Real Housewives of Atlanta fame, came on the screen.) In addition, I felt like some of the inclusions were intentional. How did a white boy like Jason Griggers learn to do black hair - and consistently win marks for best hair styles? When he talked about having a teacher who kept after him to learn to work a Marcel Iron, it starts to become a clear contrast how "difficult" black hair is to work with. It really just needs a skilled hand.

I did feel like Rock stressed the wrong side of the economic equation. I felt like he was pressing for humor but that was a serious question - exactly how much money do we sacrifice in pursuit of this idealized hair? And, as`many women explained in the film, it's one of those rituals that you never stop.

DODAI:

Ice-T was my favorite too!

But I also agree that the focus was a little off. When Chris Rock spoke to a group of high school seniors — 5 or 6 girls with relaxed hair, and one young lady with a natural 'fro — my heart broke when her schoolmates said they couldn't see her getting a job with that hair, and that walking into a law office in a suit with an Afro was a "contradiction."

CONTRADICTION. Like suit=success and Afro=failure.

I wish Rock had followed that part up with an interview with Toni Morisson or Cornel West or Angela Davis (or Michaela Angela Davis) — someone BRILLIANT with natural hair. Or even Alek Wek! The women in the film who have natural hair — Traci Thoms; Sarah Jones — were eloquent and funny but I would have liked more voices saying that you can be successful in life without relaxing your hair or wearing a weave. I know Maya Angelou was in it, but I felt like there were SO MANY pretty women with straight hair or weaves and not enough of the alternative: Dreads, afros, natural curls, etc. On people with JOBS.

I thought the finances of hair were interesting, but there were times that I thought it was condescending — I mean seriously, women spend on hair AND makeup and TAMPONS and WAXING and a lot of stuff men don't spend on. So seeing men agog at the cost? Whatever. It didn't feel that effective. I agree with LaToya in that it is a serious question — - exactly how much money do we sacrifice in pursuit of this idealized hair — but might have been illustrated in a different and more powerful way — like what if he had followed a woman who quit her weave/relaxer habit? And talked to her before and after? And showed that it's not the end of her life — and her hair is not her life? It was funny and I did enjoy it, but I think the fact that it was from a man's perspective worked well when he spoke as a father and worked against him when he was just a critic/comedian making fun of the cash women spend on something they clearly feel they need to. I wish he would have explored the idea that maybe they *don't* need to.

LATOYA:

Oh, thanks for bringing that up.

Upon reflection, I actually felt Rock's treatment of natural hair dealt with the issue in a very realistic way. Out of 95 minutes, maybe 10 or so are spent discussing natural hair - and most of that is negative. But again, I feel like this is realistic. In progressive circles (particularly the blogosphere) you see so many articles and communities dedicated to the positive discussions and portrayals of natural hair, but I felt like that quick scene with the seniors was a lot more indicative of the attitudes about natural hair in the real world. "It's nice, BUT..."

I mean, these girls felt straight up comfortable saying "Well, I wouldn't hire you with a 'fro." But again, I feel like that's what many people are quietly thinking. Remember, I'm only two years into a transition - the world does treat me differently now, in many ways, than two years ago. While I'm cool hanging out with my curly/kinky/nappy tribe (who all came to watch the doc with me) we *all* knew what the one natural haired girl was going through.

On the flip side of that, I was really glad that Rock focused a lot on weaves. Because, again, we are literally adorning ourselves with someone else's hair because our hair has been deemed unworthy. There's even the ranking of the weaves with Tyra's bouncing segment,where human hair bounces and synthetic doesn't. So I felt like even though there wasn't much time spent on it, Rock did illuminate a lot of the negative attitudes about natural hair that go quietly (or not so quietly) hidden. I mean, that scene where he's trying to sell black hair to beauty supply stores was ridiculous, and over done, but it was all worth it for that one shot where there's the Asian employee and the black employee, and the black employee is talking about how "no one wants to look like that anymore" and how straight hair was the standard. And in the eyes of many, that's real - why would you embrace a natural when you have all these other options?

ANNA:

I'm surprised not to hear more from both of you about the segment(s) involving the manner in which human hair used in weaves is obtained. Again, I was really, really disturbed by it, and I wish that Chris had spoken to an Indian woman - or even the Indian man who travels around West L.A. selling the imported locks - as to her/his feelings on this factory-farming of human keratin. Chris seemed somewhat taken aback by the whole thing, initially, but he didn't work particularly hard to press any of the individuals in that particular "food chain" (the donors, the buyers, the sellers, the hairdressers, the clients) - as to the real and problematic issues inherent in any market that trafficks in human body parts for the benefit of the wealthy. I will say one thing: I did love the inadvertent admission by the Beverly Hills hairstylist who let it slip that actress Vivica A. Fox prefers Malaysian hair for her weaves - too bad Chris didn't get her on camera to comment.

LATOYA:

Vivica's going to be mad when she sees her hair secret is out! What if the movie drives up the price of Malaysian hair?

I guess I'm not surprised, so I'm not shocked. My mom sells lacefronts as a side business, and is the queen of weave. (Obviously, my afro - which she semi-lovingly calls an "ush" - doesn't go over too well.) Human hair has to come from some kind of human sacrifice - and, unlike with other obsessions, cutting hair doesn't require killing someone. Is it fucked up that temples are part of the grand laundering scheme? Completely. But the market is so huge, someone else will fill in the gap. Or, like one of the hair thieves explained, someone will just start chopping off ponytails in movie theaters.

And if you press people, do they really care? I mean, we've been talking about blood diamonds for years, yet we still see people flashing diamond engagement rings and DeBeers is still in business.

DODAI:

The scenes involving the human hair business in India weren't that disturbing to me, either. I thought they were interesting, but not distressing or surprising. Actually, I was under the impression that women sold their hair (and I think they do in some European countries) and the idea that one woman's sacrifice becomes another woman's $3000 glory was fascinating.

But I do wish there had been more of an overall philosophical/anthropological tone — weaves are popular now; conking was popular once upon a time; Marcel irons go in and out of fashion. Ancient Egyptians used elaborate wigs and Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire had huge updos with birds and feathers and ships in them. Even though the film was correct to focus on race, sometimes I wondered if there was too much "OH LOOK AT WHAT THOSE CRAZY BLACK PEOPLE DO" subtext when humans have been playing with their appearances for centuries.

LATOYA:

I agree some more context would have been beneficial, but I think that last piece gets at the heart of the doc: yes, hair is an extension of fashion. But why are so many women treating it as an absolute necessity?

ANNA:

Because, Latoya, as Maya Angelou said in the movie, hair is a woman's "glory".

LATOYA:

Yeah, glory and apparently ill-gotten gains.

Good Hair [IMDB]
Good Hair [Box Office Mojo]

Patrick Range McDonald writes that Bragman, openly gay himself, has helped numerous celebrities and pro athletes with the "tricky and, for decades, risky terrain" of coming out. He currently works with Chaz Bono, whose gender transition from female to male was recently reported on TMZ. He's brought out actor Mitchell Anderson and NBA player John Amaechi. But now, he says, it's time for someone really big. McDonald writes,

The publicist hasn't brought out an A-list, gay male actor - yet. But Bragman says that day is coming, and after the first superstar decides to reveal himself, a fundamental shift in American acceptance of gay leading men may not be far behind. He's currently working with a famous musician who's still closeted from the public, but who will come out next year. And the manager of one major movie star approached Bragman a year ago and asked about his client's possibly going public, but the actor still refuses to pull the trigger.

"I felt a little frustrated with that superstar," Bragman says in reflection, "because it had to be ‘handled.' "

Bragman's frustration aside, Hollywood remains "a surprisingly conservative entity." Stars mobilized for a "No on Prop. 8" campaign, but McDonald says "the big studios and their mostly male chiefs - and the scores of socially liberal men and women who play key roles as casting directors and agents - have together created a kind of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which places enormous pressure on gay, male actors to remain in the closet." Bragman is confident this can change — he even says, "coming out can be used as a marketing tool." And McDonald cites some hopeful statistics — 89% of Americans now believe that gay people should have equal job opportunities, and 72% say they would not change their opinion of an athlete if they found out he was gay.

Still, gay actors face some challenges. Foremost is the fear that, as McDonald writes, "audiences would be uncomfortable seeing a known gay actor like Cheyenne Jackson kissing or fondling Kate Winslet, and box-office earnings would nose-dive." Neil Patrick Harris is famously both out and doing well, but he says that for years, "I wasn't thought of in a sexual way, which is easy when you have big ears and are called Doogie all the time." If someone who was a sex symbol and a "superstar" to boot chose to come out, the response might be different. And the process would be even more complicated if said superstar also had a high-profile heterosexual cover relationship, as it's safe to assume at least a few do.

Then again, the fiction that no one — or almost no one — in Hollywood is gay can't last forever. It's already been much remarked-upon that while straight actors can "play gay" (like Sean Penn in Milk), only a very few gay actors are permitted to "play straight." Given that the entire film industry is based on audiences agreeing to believe for a few hours that someone very famous is actually someone else, this seems obviously ludicrous. And perhaps it's true that if one "superstar" — one with enough clout to get movies made regardless of sexual orientation — actually came out, everyone would have to confront the ridiculousness of Hollywood's straight-washing. Still, when the movie industry can campaign against Prop. 8 one day and enforce a "don't ask, don't tell" policy the next, it's no surprise that no one's clamoring to be the first.

LA Weekly Discusses Hollywood's Closet [Mediabistro]
The Secret Lives Of Queer Leading Men [LA Weekly]

Tad Friend hasn't always been kind to female subjects, but he's on relatively good behavior in his New Yorker profile of Finke, whose blog Deadline Hollywood Daily he calls "Hollywood's most dreaded news source." Friend calls Finke "a combination town crier and volcano god" who "portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves, elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight, downsize those underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization." While he does quote various expressions of her rage (i.e. an e-mail titled "WHY ARE YOU AND JOEL SILVER LYING?"), pretty much the worst thing he calls Finke is "intemperate." She's been called far worse.

Finke herself says Universal president Ron Meyer (now a "defender" of Finke) used to call her "that fucking cunt," which he not only doesn't deny but seems quite pleased to hear about from Friend. Continuing in the female-anatomy vein, producer Ray Stark told her, "Girlie, if you ever fuck me, I'm going to personally come over to your house and give you a hysterectomy." Even fictional characters have gotten into the act: an agent on Entourage recently said, "I'll fuck Nikki Finke before I let her affect my business decisions."

It's tempting to think that Finke comes in for all this harsh and disgusting vitriol because she's a woman in a man's world — and an outspoken woman at that. And certainly some have told Finke to be more ladylike. According to Friend, Variety's Peter Bart once wrote that Finke had attended "Miss Hewitt's Classes in New York, which taught upscale girls how to be warm and cuddly. I'd like her to take a warm-and-cuddly refresher course." But all the colorful disses aimed at Finke's reproductive organs may be as much a sign of membership in the boys' club as they are an attempt to boot her out of it. Friend writes,

In a curious way, Finke makes the entertainment industry feel better about itself. When she writes that "New Line was left holding its dick" or that if Jay Leno "starts whining like the pussy he is, tell him to man up and shut up," she reassures everyone that Hollywood really is as ballsy as its denizens would like to believe. Finke explains, "I talk to alpha males all day, and the women I talk to are alpha females, so I end up writing like a man, in the language they're comfortable with. I don't pretty it up."

Finke clearly sees herself not as the victim of misogyny but as a participant in masculine, tell-it-like-it-is discourse. For her, "writing like a man" can mean impugning the character of women who made her friends look bad. When the LA Times published domestic violence allegations Meyer's ex-girlfriend Cynthia Garvey had made against him, Finke wrote, "the newspaper chose not to publish that Garvey has accused four ex-boyfriends of domestic violence against her." Writing like a man also means never using an inoffensive word when an offensive one will do — in a post basically mocking The New Yorker for not being more critical of her or Hollywood, Finke makes sure to point out that Harvey Weinstein also called her a cunt (and not a "jerk," as the magazine eventually printed). Elsewhere in her thoroughly distasteful post, she wrote,

I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick, whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process.

And,

Warner Bros and Universal and DreamWorks and William Morris/Endeavor and Summit Entertainment execs and flacks and consultants also had their way with the mag. (They were even laughing about it. When I asked one PR person what it took to convince Tad to take out whole portions of the article, the response was, "I swallowed.")

And,

Now remember, readers: you, too, can make The New Yorker your buttboy. Just act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck.

Finke's obviously a full and willing participant in a Hollywood rhetoric of bitch-slapping, blowjobs, and butt-rape. It's a fundamentally homophobic rhetoric (Friend too documents Finke's fondness for the word "buttboy"), and one whose misogyny Finke employs as gleefully as anybody else. Friend writes that in Hollywood, "relationships are matters of dominance and submission." And apparently chronicling those relationships is a matter of representing those who have submitted in some way (by, for instance, using the word "cunt" just once) as women, gays, or rape victims. You know, losers.

Her detractors aside, Finke does appear to be a powerful Hollywood presence. She's become one in part through savvy and guile and relationship-building, and in part through what David Carr of the Times calls "a weaponized rhetoric designed to maim and ridicule." She seems to view this rhetoric as a symbol of her power — her "alpha" status — and her comfort with a big-dicks-versus-pussies writing style pioneered by misogynists, homophobes, and bullies shows that ultimately these qualities know no gender. Finke doesn't write "like a man," she just writes like an asshole.

Call Me [The New Yorker]
Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Darling Nikki: New Yorker Profile Sparks Profane Response [NYT]

How did you come up with Stupid Pet Tricks?

Oh, jeez. Well, we're talking about the 1300s. People were rioting in the streets and there was blood and the black plague and stuff. We were hanging out and trying to come up with things because we were gonna do a morning show. We actually came up with it on Dave's morning show, which was a live, daily thing. It took place at like 9 o'clock in the morning live in New York. We had to come up with stuff that you could do repeatedly because, as it was explained to me by Jimmy Breslin, who we met sort of around the same time, it's kind of the way it is with newspapers; you have to keep refilling things or else you're facing an infinity of blanks every single day all of which have to be created from scratch. So we were trying to find refillable categories.

When I was in college I had some friends who had a Great Dane, and we were broke and so forth, and when we would get together we would drink beer and we would put socks on the dog. And that would be hours and hours of laughter. Seems a little sad now. But it occurred to me that pretty much everybody I knew had at least one thing like that that they do with their dogs or other animals. So we gave that a try; we just ran an ad. And very briefly Chris Elliot was the doofus who had to go around and gather the data.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because he was a 19-year-old who was just giving tours at 30 Rock at the time. We were his first job.

He was Kenneth the Page.

He was, basically. He was always hilarious. You know, he was always just smart and funny the second you laid eyes on him. So in that sense he wasn't exactly Kenneth the Page. But yeah, he was in charge of Stupid Pet Tricks until he could weasel his way out of it.

And you had met Letterman at The Comedy Store.

Yeah. We were both doing standup. The way I always think of it is he was sort of a graduating senior and I was kind of an incoming freshman. I was green and he was one of the two or three big men on campus. And the big man on campus at that time was, or a pretty big man on campus now too, was Jay Leno. It was also where I met Jay's wife, who's become a good friend of mine, Mavis Leno. She was around with him at that same time. And Richard Lewis. And there were these certain people who were the big guys and Dave was one of them.

The way you sort of describe it in your bio is that you almost accidentally started writing comedy. Or you had been writing it in your apartment and then it just kind of got picked up.

I think that people pretty much play the hand they're dealt. And if you're born the prettiest girl on the block, you end up finding that that's a tool you can use. And at some point if you've got the ability to sling wit, you just start doing that early on and you get a response and you just stick with it. It's just an adjustment to tackling life that you sort of make very early. I mean, I can remember making jokes in first or second grade. So at some point I was doing that even when I was an art teacher.

I actually didn't intend to be a writer, because I had a mother who meant to be a writer and she was sort of a frustrated, serious person. So she was kind of pushing me in that direction and I never considered it for even one second and I went into art. I was teaching art and then somehow I switched over and was able to get work as a writer much more quickly than I was able to get another job as an art teacher.

So all the sort of backhanded training from Mom kind of worked I guess, even though I didn't really take any writing in college. But comedy was just sort of the voice I had. I knew how to write comedy more than I could've ever written anything else.

What was it like being a woman writing comedy in the ‘70s? It seems like it was a very male-dominated world.

It's really way less male now. It's way, way better for women now. And the ‘70s — actually, I was at the way tail end of the ‘70s. I'm still friendly with Elayne Boosler, and she and I are in — there's a comedy issue of the L.A. Weekly right now, comedy horror stories. I was reading her story, which was about her initial audition at The Tonight Show.

You know, she was huge at that time. The big issue at the time for women who were doing stand up was that all the precedents in female comedy were very self-deprecating. It was all, "My boobs are so flat. My husband thinks when he looks at me and I take off my clothes, he throws up. Everyone hates me." So she actually just sort of bypassed all that and started doing political humor and sort of observational stuff about people, and so forth, and that was really considered astonishing. Anyway, when I was reading her horror story in the L.A. Weekly, I had forgotten the word they used to use about her at the time – this was the derogatory term and I heard it used repeatedly about her and I'd forgotten completely about it, except for, it used to color the way I saw myself and make me nervous about what I could and couldn't do – they used to call her "threatening." You really don't hear that word used about women doing standup now, but they kept saying, "She's so threatening. She's too threatening." And you think, "Threatening? She's a woman standing on stage telling jokes." But it was such a sort of a delicate dance you were theoretically doing, that it was crazy, the idea that that would be threatening. And she couldn't actually get on The Tonight Show at the time because she was so threatening. Whereas somebody saying, "My boobs are so little that I take off my clothes my husband throws up," weren't threatening.

Right. Because it was sort of safely within the women's realm of comedy.

Well, that was the theoretically figured-out women's realm at the time. It's so much better now. There's a virtual ton of women now doing whatever they damn well please. It's still not as easy for a woman, I don't think, to get launched in the biggest possible way the way that it is a guy, but it's certainly not the same. I remember thinking when I was doing standup back in those days, I kept hearing that word "threatening," and I kept trying to figure out how to defang myself, and what did I need to be to be not threatening and yet… it was a lot of weird calculating going on for people that I don't think is necessary anymore. It's still not so easy to get in front of a group and get laughs. That's another dilemma entirely, but it's not so much about are you threatening. Look at Lisa Lampanelli for crying out loud. "Threatening" isn't really the issue anymore. Did that answer the question?

Yeah, it does. Do you have any sort of war stories about yourself-say, in the writers' room, for example?

I actually never have had any trouble hanging out or getting on with guys that way, I don't think, although I don't think it was a smart thing for me to put work and love together. I think that's a battlefield a lot of people can get killed on, and do. And I would say that was a mistake that I really would try not to make again, although I don't know if you can not make it. When it's there and it's compelling, then there it is.

What I love is funny people, whether it's hanging out with guys or women, if they're really funny, it's like another language you all speak. I'm not the sort who would get offended by, you know like that one woman who was suing the guys at Friends because they were making dick jokes. There's a lot of sex jokes going on in any big group of guys, probably more than a big group of women, but if they're funny at least, you know, to me…

But were they funny dick jokes?

Well that's really what it is. If it's a bunch of funny people making them, then they're funny, and if it's a bunch of people just making dick jokes and they're not very funny, then it's intolerable, then you just wanna just kill yourself. But it would be the case no matter what the topic. I'm mean, I'm not the biggest fan in the world of dick jokes, I'll just go right ahead and say that, but at least if it's really funny guys, then they're funny guys.

I was always working with guys on the Letterman show. A lot of them are still my friends. They were so hilarious and sweet, such really hilarious guys, and also I was in charge.

What's your relationship now with David Letterman?

I sort of don't have one at the moment. I mean, I was on his show a few times and it was a weird experience in all ways, but I haven't spoken to him in years. You know, he's married and has a kid. And I live with someone. I don't have an ongoing relationship [with Letterman]. I'm not the sort who really stays chummy with exes. In fact, that's why I'm not on Facebook. I don't really want everyone I ever met to just go ahead and friend me.

So talk about the inspiration for The Pyscho Ex Game, since we were just talking about exes.

The inspiration for that was that I met the man I wrote it with who now lives with me, by the by. Andy. And he had a musical that I went to see a bunch of times, which was remarkable. And he and I started e-mailing, and it was a very compelling e-mail relationship, and the reason it got so compelling is we started playing a game. When we were e-mailing, I barely knew him, so I was just sort doing defensive, jokey bantering with him, because that's what I do with people I don't know. And he made some kind of remark, and I made some sort of a challenge to him, about yeah, well, whatever happened to you, I can drink you under the table three times, that kind of a "yadda yadda yadda," because I get very brave when I'm being banter-y.

And we started playing the game of who'd had the more horrible previous love life for points. And it was really, really hilarious. It got really hilarious really fast. So then I thought, "Well, this is such a great idea for a book," because we were writing the stories so kind of specifically. But it really wasn't obvious how to make it into a book. Also, two people writing a book was hard enough, but we were also using all this disparate sort of information about all these various people, and so forth. And there was no way to really turn it into a book without really reconceiving it all together –I thought it would just be, "Oh, we'll just take these and we'll just make them a book." Making that into a book was, I would say, the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

The other thing that was nice about it is we were trading chapters back and forth and we were each allowed to just take whatever the other person and just move it on. I would get my chapter back from him and he would have moved it to some place that I never dreamt of in a million years, but I'd think, "Wow, that's so much better for the plot than the actual thing that I had written." So it kind of went like that. But it was, I still think, a very funny and interesting idea for a book.

Actually, the book was an evaluation of narcissistic personality disorder that I was learning about. It's kind of a narcissistic personality disorder bible in my opinion, because we had both been with a lot of people, having grown up in certain situations. I don't want to tip any details, but we'd both been with a lot of people who were extremely narcissistic. Which is a thing I know a lot about. I had a piece about that in Real Simple about it. It's up on my website. Real Simple asked me to write one of these things called a Life Lesson, and so every other life lesson was, you know, an amazing little homily Mom told me at the kitchen table and so forth, and I thought, well, my big life lesson was understanding what Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. I read like 20 books on it. So I explained it. And I had a very narcissistic mother, and therefore went on to meet a lot of very narcissistic people and think of them as family.

How can you know that you're in a relationship with someone who is narcissistic? What are the warning signs?

How can you know? You know, it really has to do… the "you" in this really has to be taken under consideration, because how can you know? Maybe you're the narcissist. I mean, I can't really just say who and what it is. But there's a great book I read that I always recommend to people called Why Is It Always About You? If you're in a relationship where everything you do seems to be the instigation for a fight and you didn't even think you were getting in [a fight], you don't know why you're fighting and you didn't really mean for it to be a fight, you didn't really know it was gonna be a fight, that's a pretty big indication: that you feel continuously attacked when all you were doing is sort of being banal.

That was my relationship with my mother. Pretty much everything I said created a fight, and I couldn't figure out how not to be in a fight with her. And then finally you find out that there's a category of person who's just looking for a fight. And it's generally a narcissist, because they are sitting on a wellspring of rage and humiliation that comes from when they were three and they're untreated, and usually narcissists are not the kind of people who go to therapy. They instead just look for targets for rage. And if you're raised by one, you pretty much already know what that dynamic is, and you're likely to fall back into it with many another person. Think of it as comfort.

I don't think I'm in a relationship with a narcissist.

Well, I bet you aren't then.

But I've probably dated them in the past.

Well, it sounds like you have a nice relationship with your mother, and that's usually an indication of whether you're going to fall into the trap.

People who have weird relationships with their moms—you can't make a blanket statement, but it's often a red flag.

It's a dilemma. In fact, I'm writing a new book, another collection of short pieces, and one of the pieces is called "In Praise of Crazy Moms." And I'm holding moms responsible for the invention of comedy by having produced people who have no choice but to defend themselves all the time. The funny ones cause comedy.

Can you talk a little bit more about the book and when it's coming out?

Well, I have been writing novels. I have a newish novel out now called Nose Down Eyes Up.

The talking dog?

Yes, the talking dogs. I love the talking dogs. It's written in the voice of a guy, and it was the first time I'd done that, which I had to do a lot of research for, because I'd gotten really comfortable writing my own voice, which I sort of came upon post-Letterman show by writing columns. And I was sort of happy to have stumbled upon my own voice after a lot of years of collaborating and becoming somebody else's voice. You find yourself sort of hungry for, who am I outside of this person?

But in this book I wrote in the voice actually of a guy who works for me, who I have spent almost as much time with as I have with Andy, but in a different kind way. He's my handyman, he works for me. But in order to write in the voice of a guy, I was very busy color-correcting it with all the men I know because I was very worried I would girl-ify it and make it wussy and so forth. So hopefully I didn't do that. The new book I'm writing is gonna be another collection of short pieces, which is actually the thing I like writing best. I like writing short, funny stuff. It's an area of comfort I have as far as writing goes, if there is an area of comfort in writing. As you may know yourself, it's just the hugest pain in the ass.

And the mother stuff is in one of the pieces?

Yeah, that's one of the pieces I'm working on, "In Praise of Crazy Mothers." I'm holding them responsible for the invention of standup comedy. I documented it. Lots and lots of standup comedians have crazy mothers. It's a big, big definition of crazy. It's not clinically incarcerated in a mental institution; it's just an impossible kind of a person. Difficult and hard to get along with and so forth. The red flags of which you were speaking.

Right. Another reason why not to date a standup comic.

Standup comics—very, very difficult group of human beings. They have an upside, but they're a difficult bunch.

Have you encountered a lot of age discrimination in Hollywood?

There's a lot. It's very much easier to get a job in the entertainment industry if you're between 25 and 35, I would say. And after that, everybody starts getting paranoid. Although, there are some really good examples of older people, you know, like the guy who did The Sopranos, who did well for themselves at ages where you're not supposed to be permitted to participate. But they were able to just have an opportunity and hit it out of the park. If you at that age and have an opportunity and don't hit it out of the park, I don't think you get another opportunity. It's very youth-oriented.

Is that partly why you started writing novels?

Yeah. You know, it was partly why. When I was working on the Letterman show, I had an opportunity to write a column. And I kind of got overwhelmed by how astonishing it was to be responsible for your own work fully. You don't get that much opportunity to do that when you write television. It is a massive collaboration and it has other things that really are going for it, like a giant paycheck and the fun of collaboration, and so forth. But there's not of that, "I did this and it's by me" kind of a feeling. And I started out in art and I kind of missed that. So when I started writing things by myself it like, wow, so that's what it's like when I do things by myself. A lot of people go into creative stuff thinking that they would like particular credit for something, and you can't really get it when you're in a massive collaboration. You can get it in other ways, but you know, the battles of directors trying to get a cut and having it taken away from them or writers being rewritten by 25 other writers are, you know, well documented. It's very hard to be the initial writer on something and make it through to the end as the writer still. It's more common that you get rewritten and they take it away from you. And for the artist, that's frustrating and crazy.

When I first started writing print, and especially publishing, and I would turn in something and I'd go, "Well, do you have notes for me?," I would expect them to say, "Well, ok, we want you to just throw out the beginning, and start here and add a black child," you know, whatever kind of crazy shit they come up with when you have notes given to you in the entertainment industry. But in publishing, they don't do that at all. The editor I had at Random House used to write "G.W.F." on certain sections of what I wrote, and that would mean "goes without saying." Like I was overstating the obvious. And I was doing that sort of not because I wanted to overstate the obvious but because when you do standup and write for television, there's no such thing as overstating the obvious, you're supposed to state it two and three ways in different ways in order to make sure that the stupidest person available understood that you said something.

I mean, that's certainly the training. And the idea that you could just say something smart and leave it alone and let the person ponder it was sort of beyond delightful. Because when you write print, it's not going anywhere, it's just sitting there. Of course, with TiVo now, it could just sit there too, you could play it back and play it back. There wasn't TiVo when I started doing that. So anyway I just thought that was amazing, that the editors I was working with in publishing were trying to make me sound more like myself and not like an entirely different person, which is what the tendency tends to be in Hollywood. There's layers of executives that you give you notes when you write TV and movies. The first layer and then the second layer and then the next layer, and you just have to deal with it somehow. Some people get in big acrimonious fights and some people just give in. And it's very obvious when you watch a movie and there's just mysterious things happening that a committee got involved. When I watch movies, I always think, "Well, this had to be a committee decision, you can't tell me anybody came up with that plot point on their own" in an early draft.

That sounds really annoying.

Well, it drives a lot of people crazy, from F. Scott Fitzgerald on, you know. And then there are those people that are the beacons that the rest of us think, "Why can't I get that?" Like, nobody's saying that to Judd Apatow. He fought his way through and somehow is a franchise of his own design now. You think, "Maybe that could happen to me." Or the guy that did The Sopranos. I don't think anybody was giving him notes that he had to pay any attention to. Or the people that do The Simpsons. From what I understand, they don't really get network notes. But that's not the case for the next show that comes on that's like The Simpsons. They will give them a million notes. But once you've got a really proven success, they back off. They don't want to mess with success. But really proven success is not an easy thing to just stumble into.

One of your scripts has been on the infuriating verge of being produced for the last 20 years.

I've got a piece in that L.A. Weekly I was talking about that's about that, that's about the 25 years of this one script. It started in 1986 and it went through countless rewrites and it went into "turn around" and "turn around" and "turn around." And it was at Paramount, and then it was at Lorimar, and then various principles who backed it died, and it had Nora Ephron attached to it for a while, and it just went on and on and on and on. And every time you get your hopes up it just crashes and burns again. I would tell you the story, but I wrote it.

Oh, here it is: "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: My Hollywood Horror Story."

That's it. Exactly. And I finally – it ends with me getting called by Fox who apparently has it is their basement now. It's not in development, but they tried to stop publication of my book Walking in Circles Before Lying Down because it was a talking dog movie and I wanted, at some point, it was like 24 years in and I thought, "You know, I haven't really written this talking dog thing and, I mean, no one's ever going to see this damn thing. I'm gonna use the premise of a talking dog and a girl and advice and stuff and redo it entirely so it has no conflict with the script just because it's still an area that I like and I'm gonna write it into a book, because I would like before I die to have certain things…" So I did that, and the book is doing really well; it just went into a 24th printing yesterday. But before it came out, Fox tried to stop publication of it, even though it's a different plot, it's a different girl, it's a different dog. It's a different everything. I wrote all different stuff. My joke that I make in that article is that William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and Richard III and nobody told him that they were the same play because they both had blood and talking kings in them.

But also it's like, they're not making the movie!

No. They're not making the movie and they have no plans to ever make the movie, because they thought it was a conflict with Marley and Me, even though Marley and Me is nothing like the movie that I wrote. But the movie's clearly never – if it were ever going to get made, it's when Nora was attached. And it didn't. And at that point the reason it didn't get made was is, we actually got to a table reading with Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry and Ed Norton and others reading, and Matthew Perry couldn't get through a whole sentence without starting over, was the astonishing thing to me. And I thought to myself actually, "How did they get him to do Friends? He obviously can't read. Did they give him line readings, or…?" And then about a day later he was put in rehab. Remember, there was a big mess with the rehab situation that was very all over the tabloids about a day after my reading, and I'm sure he doesn't still have that problem, and maybe he didn't have it before that. I caught him at the cusp of it. I honestly couldn't figure out how they were filming Friends the way that I was watching him at that point.

Couldn't they have gotten someone else?

Well, who knew? He didn't look weird. He looked like a regular person. I don't know what the substance issue was particularly, but it was being the top-notch actor that we know and love at that moment in time. I mean, he did go into rehab for a very long time right after that. Like I say, a day later. So I caught him at the worst of it. That was the last time I saw that movie on its way to being made. I actually thought there was a pretty good shot at that point.

When was all of that, the late ‘90s?

That was at the cusp of the new century. Because I remember writing a draft of it that said, "Me and my boy! All new for the 21st century." It was only 14 or 16 years into it at that point. Now we're a full 20-…well, we're going for the 21st year soon. But it's not in development so it's not really a real 21st year. So, fake. But I was happy I wrote Walking in Circles About Lying Down. I'm a big, big, big, big dog lover. I spend all my days surrounded by dogs staring at me, like I'm gonna do something good. They all are continuously let down by me, but I honestly felt like I had a lot to say about it, so I'm glad I wrote that book. And then I wrote a follow-up, which is Nose Down, Eyes Up.

So your dogs are kind of…

My muses. I feel like we're in a conversation all day.

I know. It's nice. I feel like I'm in a conversation all day with my dog.

Well, you are, actually. They're not saying anything about the war in Afghanistan or anything, but they have their things to say.

It's true. But maybe if I had four dogs, I'd be more inspired.

Well, it makes me really laugh. I find dogs hilarious. I love that we're sharing our living space and our mental space with a totally other species. I love that it's just another species. To me, it's sort of like having exchange students from Neptune. They share our furniture, but you wonder exactly how much they share of what we are sharing with them, what they comprehend, what they don't comprehend, what they think we're doing. To me, that's just amusing. It's kind of like talking to someone from another country. You know, that's what I like to write about. I just never understand what they think I'm doing. What do they think I do for a living, for instance? What do they think I'm doing while I'm sitting here, besides not giving them enough walks?

Right, exactly. Like, they're just waiting… — like you just exist to give them walks and feed them and then pick up their poop, and in between that, you know…

Yeah, I like writing about that. I just wrote a piece for this new book I'm writing where I'm explaining the idea of selfishness to them. Because it would be such a complete anathema, the idea that you could have a concept of selfishness. So I like the idea of trying to go back and forth of what I image the dogs would say to that concept. What inspired me is that in the morning, I still get the paper, because I still like to read the paper, and they stand on it. And they always stand on it, usually it's right before they decide that it's now or never for breakfast, they're just all standing on it, and they're ripping it and they're ruining it and I'm, "No! Get off! Get off!" So I was writing this whole piece where I explain that it's very selfish of them to ruin what I'm doing just because they're hungry, and the answers which are uncomprehending and also "huh?". Well, I don't want to try to paraphrase it, because I'm actually just only writing it now. That's what I like writing about, is just the idea that there'd be anything that they could comprehend, what it is they get about what we're all doing.

Oh, totally. I mean, I don't think they can comprehend their own existence, though, right?

I think they do comprehend. Well, I don't think they are worried about their mortality.

But they have survival instincts.

This is the second group of four that I've had. I had four other ones who just all died of old age, and they have four distinct personalities and they have a pack order. It's completely hilarious to watch them juggle all this stuff all day. These four – the last four I had reminded me of four people I met on an elevator who were now forced to hang out together – these four are just more like a pack. Some of them have shared interests. There are two ball fetchers. There's one – two of my dogs, I got from my vet when he was trying to place them because their dad went to prison for Ponzi schemes – so they came as a couple. I was gonna take just one but I'm glad I took them both because they're sort of like a married couple. He's always humping her and she's kind of like, you know, looking for a cigarette or something to read, and she just sort of puts up with him humping her. So they kind of sleep together, so they have a relationship. And she's one of the ball fetchers, so she has a relationship with the older dog in the pack, who insists on being the alpha even though the other three don't care. Every single day he takes I.D.'s from them and it's like he's going, "Alright, everybody, everybody remember. I'm in charge here!" And the other three are like, "Yeah, we know you're in charge, we don't care. Be in charge. We don't care who's in charge." So they all just really make me laugh. This is going on all day long. Luckily nobody else cares who's in charge, so that guy's not getting in a fight with the other three.

There you go.

And one of them has got that rescue dog personality of "Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me," which is, "No one's killing you! I don't know what happened to you before I met you, but I have never done anything to you, why are you acting like I'm going to kill you?"

Like, "Don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me."

Yeah. I wrote her into Nose Down, Eyes Up. She's one of the dogs in that. It's a funny thing to have a dog presume that you're a violent offender when you have done nothing but kiss her and give her treats for the whole six years you've had her. It's a good argument for what happens in early childhood, the way that it affects everybody.

Oh, totally. Yeah, I don't know what happened to my dog before I had her, but I'm sure it affects her personality.

It's the same as with human beings. The stuff that happens in early childhood, before you're three years old, you know, that's who you're dealing with when you're dealing with petulant adults, is somebody wasn't smart enough with their three-year-old. And who really knows how to get everything right with a three-year-old? So, you know, that's the history of violence and insanity in the world at large: mothers who can't really comprehend what they're doing to a three-year-old. And why would they be able to? Probably people not getting more sane anytime soon.

Probably. Is there anything else you're working on that you want to mention?

I've been making a bunch of short movies.

Oh, cool.

I just love doing that. I don't have a job doing that. But I got a really, really cool camera. I just upgraded my camera stuff. I learned how to edit on Final Cut. I taught art at U.S.C. for a year, and I was taking a lot of film classes while I was there because I could, because I was faculty. And I got really excited about the idea of making films—it was sort of the transition in between doing comedy and doing art. And in those days, you couldn't do all the stuff that… — you'd have to rent [equipment], get an editor, there used to have to be cameras that you'd have to change reels of tape in the cameras or film and get film processing and all this stuff that you can do it all just in your office now. I can't get over how completely great that is. Including color-correct it yourself in Final Cut. I love editing. As difficult as writing is is as much as I love editing. I think it's the most fun. I used to sit for hours and hours with editors when they were editing giving them timecodes and waiting for them to do all this stuff and it would just be the most endless waiting task to see something assembled.

Do you think you ever want to work in TV again?

Yeah, I would. You know, it was something that I believed in. I come up with stuff and try and sell it. And then I tried last year again and didn't succeed in selling something. My friend Laura Kightlinger and I were trying to come up with some ideas recently. It gets less easy all the time, since reality TV took over, you really have to get the right angle. With reality TV, it's harder to get that other stuff launched. I tried to get kind of a standard funny half-hour show and they looked at me like I had all the pieces in place and then it fell apart. That's the way that really tends to work a lot. So I keep writing books. One of the things I instantly liked about books is that they go forward. When you're writing other stuff, a lot of times you wind up with giant page counts and no one sees it, you know. You can have the end of a really a lucrative and very satisfying career without anyone having seen your work. I know people who have written dozens and dozens of screenplays that didn't get made. At least when you write print, it comes out. At least somebody sees it. Whether they like it or not, whether it does well or not, that's a separate problem entirely.

Presumably, if you get a book contract, you will have your book published, whereas you can get something optioned or get a screenplay deal and it will never see the light of day.

Yeah, and you can always – if you write the thing in print first, at some point maybe it can become a screenplay, but at least it also existed at some point if the screenplay never sees the light of day. The other stuff, it goes into this weird vortex of the unseen that… I should write something about that. All those creative things that are sitting in that giant vortex here in Los Angeles and in New York too that have never been seen.

It's a very big vortex. I suppose that's why it's a vortex.

It would be a scary vortex to enter by the way if you think about all the violence and the misconstrued comedy and the weird people.

Seriously.

I should write a graphic novel about it.

You should write a screenplay about the vortex of screenplays.

I know, I was just thinking that's a pretty good idea.

It'd be very meta. It'd be very Being John Malkovich

This whole business is getting weirder and weirder. Getting things on the air becomes stranger and stranger and stranger. It used to be that, like when they would just shoot a show like The Osbornes, they would fact-gather forever. They would shoot and shoot and shoot – I used to shoot a ton of what would be reality TV for the Letterman show, I would do all the remote pieces in addition to whatever else I was doing. And I would shoot hours and hours and hours and then put together a four-minute piece. I would just cull it down to the very best, most hilarious four minutes. And that was the kind of percentages that it took. That was what they did when they first started doing reality TV. It's like when they shoot a documentary, you shoot forever. And then you get the best stuff boiled down to an hour. Now they insist on doing an episode of a reality TV show in three, four days. And nothing really happens in three or four days necessarily. Also, they now just have to construct plots out of it. They just make stuff up. They give people lines. It really no longer is what it is, really reality TV, it really is just forcing a plot on people who aren't actors in their own home situation.

I would say that at some point that's gotta implode. That's the wrong direction to be going in with it. That's like a terrible sitcom. I can't imagine that it's going to be able to sustain at that level without some amount of reality being the core. The fascination was, these are real people doing stuff.

What do you think of the recent firings of Michaela Watkins and Casey Wilson from Saturday Night Live?
The workings of SNL have always been pretty mysterious to me. A lot of friends of mine have had a run through that system and emerged pretty frustrated. It seems to work for some people and not for others and I can't pretend to get it. I do know that it is incredibly painful to get fired, but also that Julia Sweeney, one of the most hilarious, most literate comedians I have ever known, emerged from SNL pretty much known only for Pat. Which was funny but if you ever saw "God Said Ha" or any of her other monologue work you know how much of Julia Sweeney never made it on to the SNL stage. So..I would tell those girls to just start writing a bunch of new material for themselves and keep on going. The rejection doesn't say anything much about their talent.

Merrill Markoe [Merrill Markoe]

For those of you not familiar with Ntozake Shange, this summary at enotes provides some clarification:

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is a choreopoem, a poem (really a series of 20 separate poems) choreographed to music. Although a printed text cannot convey the full impact of a performance of for colored girls..., Shange's stage directions provide a sense of the interrelationships among the performers and of their gestures and dance movements.

The play begins and ends with the lady in brown. The other six performers represent the colors of the rainbow: the ladies in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The various repercussions of "bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma" are explored through the words, gestures, dance, and music of the seven ladies, who improvise as they shift in and out of different roles. In the 1970s, when Ntozake Shange herself performed in for colored girls..., she continually revised and refined the poems and the movements in her search to express a female black identity. Improvisation is central to her celebration of the uniqueness of the black female body and language, and it participates in the play's theme of movement as a means to combat the stasis of the subjugation. In studying this play in its textual, static format one should, therefore, keep in mind the improvisational character of actual performance and realize that stasis is the opposite of what Shange wanted for this play. In fact, in her preface she announces to readers that while they listen, she herself is already "on the other side of the rainbow" with "other work to do." She has moved on, as she expects her readers to do as well.

It's a complex, nuanced piece, and seeing Tyler Perry getting a writing credit gives me serious pause.

Directing? Fine.

Producing? Cool.

But writing and adapting it? From someone who writes flat, two-dimensional woman characters in all of his work? Even under the best of circumstances, I would be skeptical of a black man tackling a project like this. To bring Shange's vision to light would take an understanding of why this work of art is so deeply intertwined with black women's articulation of their own struggles under racist, patriarchal oppression - something that unfortunately, many still deny to this day. Black women's voices are often lost in discussions of race (because all the blacks are men) and discussions of gender (because all women are white) and Ntozake Shange was beyond brave to put down all of these ideas and present them for public consumption even in the face of heavy criticism from black men when the play was released:

[T]his is the second round of a debate sparked in 1976 by the blockbuster success of Ntozake Shange's choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. It spread with the publication of Michelle Wallace's Black Macho and Myth of the Superwoman (1980). These two works were the subject of widespread and acrimonious debate from many sectors of the black community. Vernon Jarret of the Chicago Defender likened for colored girls to the pro-Ku Klux Klan film Birth of a Nation, and dismissed it as "a degrading treatment of the black male" and "a mockery of the black family." Perhaps the most controversial statement about Shange and Wallace, however, was an article by Robert Staples, "The Myth of the Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists," published in The Black Scholar in March/April 1979. Identified significantly as "the noted sociologist on black sex roles," Staples reflects in his essay a tendency in the current debate (as in most discussions of Afro-American literature) to read literature in terms that are overwhelmingly sociological.

Staples argues that Shange and Wallace were rewarded for "their diatribes against black men," charging for colored girls with whetting black women's "collective appetite for black male blood." He attributes their rage, which "happily married women" lack, to "pent up frustrations which need release." And he sympathizes with the black male need for power in the only two institutions left to black control: the church and the family. During the 1960s, Staples continues, "there was a general consensus - among men and women - that black men would hold the leadership positions in the movement." Because "black women held up their men for far too long, it was time for the men to take charge." But those like Shange and Wallace came under the powerful sway of the white feminist movement, he argues, they unleashed the anger that black women had always borne silently. For witnessing this anger, he concludes, they were promoted and rewarded by the white media.

This choreopoem is serious business, and it is not to be treated lightly, by those who do not live the story it tells.

Just as I had to put down Octavia Butler's Kindred, a book in which distinctively black pain poured off each page and took up residence in me that I dreamed the plot at night and woke up bathed in sweat, I've avoided fully engaging with Ntozake Shange's masterwork, absorbing it bit by bit instead, waiting for the day when I am strong enough to experience the whole. And what a masterful whole it is. The opening lines, spoken by Lady in Brown, let you know what you are in for:

i can't hear anythin
but maddening screams
& the soft strains of death
& you promised me
you promised me...
somebody/anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/struggle/hard times
sing her song of life
she's been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn't know the sound
of her own voice
her infinite beauty

When Joan Morgan penned When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, she begins her book describing the scene in New York surrounding the twentieth anniversary of Shange's play, and makes mentions of her own memories of the cheoropoem:

Few hissy fits can compare to the one I threw twenty years ago when my mom announced she was taking her husband and not her precocious woman-child to see Shange's play. I'd been transfixed by the poster since the first day it went up on our community center's wall. Afro-puffed and arms akimbo, I'd stare at it every day, struck by the poster-woman's sad, sad eyes and the eeriness of the title, scribbled in child-like graffiti across an imaginary tenement wall.

It didn't matter that I didn't know a damn thing about suicide. Death, yes - since departed colored girls are part of the ghetto's given - but none of them had left in ways as exotic as checking out on their own volition. But I reasoned that the play had something to do with being black, female, and surviving - and those were intuitive if not conscious concerns for any ten-year-old colored girl growing up in the South Bronx 'round 1975. [...]

My obsession with for colored girls... carried over well into adulthood, long after I snuck into the adult section of the public library, stole the book, and fell in love with words and images I didn't quite understand. It remained among my favorites as I grew older and sought balmy remedies for tempestuous emotions about black men, women, and myself. Seeing it performed was always cathartic and I never missed an opportunity - except for that first run on Broadway in 1975.

I've long since forgiven my mother, of course. In my pre-adolescent selfishness I failed to see that she too was a colored girl. The play held crucial parts of her - parts she needed to share with her husband and not her ten-year-old daughter.

Shange's work is a major representation of black female womanhood, and even those of us who cannot find ourselves in her stories can still feel the painful echoes. So I am unsure that someone who has not lived this experience can do it justice. Still, despite my hesitations, I am still pleased that for colored girls... will make it to a wider audience. Ntzokake Shange is reportedly pleased, and has been sharing the news according to this report from The Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder:

"I'm going to tell you a secret, but then you can tell everybody," Ntozake Shange announced at her April 23 appearance at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Center. "For colored girls is going to be [made into] a movie." Shange's appearance was part of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature's NOMMO African American Authors Series.

The audience in the center's Cowles Auditorium let out a cheer of surprise and joy at the news that Shange's "seminal work," as she called it in her own words, For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which was first performed on stage 35 years ago, is finally becoming a film. (An Emmy-nominated PBS television American Playhouse version of the play, which starred Shange, Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard, was broadcast in 1982 and is available on DVD.)

Furthermore, Shange confirmed that three African American actresses had "signed contracts" confirming that they would star in the upcoming film: Oscar winner Halle Berry, Oscar nominee Angela Bassett, and Grammy winning singer-turned-actor Jill Scott. The excited audience loudly gasped as Shange said each of the actresses' names.

I would love to see Jill Scott in this, but I am torn. And I'm torn in the same way I was when I heard that they were remaking A Raisin in the Sun with Sean Combs as Walter Younger. I want these works to be experienced and to reach those who wouldn't normally attend plays or read black literature.

But what are we sacrificing in the process?

Lionsgate Taps Tyler Perry for 'Rainbow' [Variety]
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf [enotes]
But Some Of Us Are Brave [Amazon]
Changing Our Own Words: Essays On Criticism, Theory, And Writing By Black women [Google Books]
Kindred [Amazon]
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem [Google Books]
When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost [Powell's]
Ntozake Shange Still Standing Up For "Colored Girls" [Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder]

Writes S.T. VanAirsdale,

They're the only kinds of movies it seems Hollywood isn't trying to improve...Click flicks do reliably well, too, but that's exactly their problem: they're too reliable, and they're always just chick flicks. When the system exploits the same perky stars with the same aspirational longing, sexual hang-ups, and heroic white knights in 100 minutes or less, the boilerplate doesn't incentivize anyone to watch. Hollywood will never get guys to follow the trailers for Couples Retreat as rabidly as they did for Terminator Salvation, but if a "rom-com" is good enough and smart enough, damnit, people will like it...but Hollywood doesn't have enough faith in women to offer them an opportunity to confront the question themselves.

Well, I can't pretend the trailer for Couples' Retreat inspired anything but nausea in this woman, or that I've ever been able to stomach that particular spelling of "damnit," but patronizing and laddish though the tone might be, the sad truth is that he's partially right: studios won't make rom-coms better as long as they think women will settle for mindless claptrap. And he's probably also right: if men started watching smart ones, we'd see less Ugly Truth.

Except, wait, he really likes The Ugly Truth. Because at least it's "way more honest in its treatment of relationships" than Funny People. (And Julie and Julia is "boring," albeit full of "girl power.") And herein, I guess, lies the central conflict: we may have very different ideas of what would constitute an improvement - and for that matter, demonstrate much "faith in women." Basically, he doesn't want chick flicks to be better, he wants them to be dick flicks - which are, by the way, equally formulaic. The difference is, when the formula's romance, it's inherently dull to him - "with its bright, compact idylls of open hearts, romantic love, and happy-ever-after" - not worth his time.

And the thing is, chick flicks can be good. Dirty Dancing, Some Kind of Wonderful, When Harry Met Sally, these are good movies that hew to the formula VanAirsdale may deplore, but feature characters and writing, and are better able to touch a lot of people than the most meticulously plotted, suspenseful drama. The difference is, they're honest. The Ugly Truth is lazy. Movies don't need, inherently, to reinvent the wheel: ask Jane Austen. Ask anyone who's ever read anything, for that matter. We may see a crappy movie for an easy entertainment fix, but we probably won't see it again. Make smart chick flicks and we'll justify the faith in us - and in the genre. And I'm guessing we won't even need to bring the guys.

Why It's Okay to Watch Chick Flicks [Esquire]

Burson made the original comment — about casting Hung — in Alex Witchel's NY Times Magazine profile of Anne Heche. She told Silverstein in a phone interview,

In terms of the quote: it is such a shame that I was either too tired to express myself correctly on the issue or part of my quote was left out because it is something that I think about a lot and I actually consider myself a warrior on front lines of this issue. It's something I am actively involved in on a daily basis in a way that most people are not. Nevertheless I do think that the part that I would have added or the part I hope I did add was that it is difficult to find an actress over 35 or over 40 who is funny and talented and is still working and has not quit the business.

Emphasis is Silverstein's. Burson continued,

In my personal experience I know five actresses off the top of my head if not 10 who are around the age of 40 who no longer go on auditions anymore because they are too fucking bummed out by how few roles there are.

Fair enough. But did Burson have to open her clarification with this?

I do think it's always hard to find pretty and funny. It's a difficult combo and it's something that's talked about in Hollywood. Blonde and funny. And that is definitely true with Anne. She's very funny and real and she's blonde and she's pretty. And this role happens to be for a beauty queen who needed to have serious emotional acting chops and at the same time was funny.

Maybe it wouldn't be "hard to find pretty and funny" if actresses weren't pigeonholed as one or the other, or if we thought of humor as sexy in women the way we do in men. Of course, it's not Burson's fault that Hollywood deals in simplistic gender stereotypes. But as someone who says "I feel so passionately about the issue" of creating compelling female characters over 35, she could certainly challenge these stereotypes a bit more.

Colette Burson Clarifies Remark From NY Times Magazine [Women & Hollywood]

Earlier: Anne Heche: A "Beautiful, Talented, Funny Woman Over 35"

Heche is 40, and seems very happy with a new relationship, new baby, and several new roles, including the ex-wife of a male prostitute in HBO's "Hung," and a star turn opposite Ashton Kutcher in the new movie Spread. Unfortunately, Spread sounds totally upsetting: Witchel says Anne Heche plays "a corporate lawyer in L.A., a savvy older woman who relishes the control of "keeping" Kutcher as her boy toy even as she frantically tries to appear his contemporary physically." Her efforts include vaginal rejuvenation surgery, which seems especially disturbing given that Heche was sexually abused by her father and got herpes from him while still in diapers. Heche sounds game — she says,

It's interesting when all of a sudden you're the older woman. I had to ask myself: ‘What am I not confident about? Why does this scare me?' As a theme in my life, I've always looked at how I can rid myself of shame, so I definitely saw this character as a way to get rid of shame about getting older. Did I understand that there was a person who wanted so desperately to feel loved that they would put themselves through almost any trial, hers ended up being surgery, to stay connected to her youth? Sure. So I had a lot of compassion for this woman.

Still, it's a little sad that Heche's comeback from mental illness (stemming from her abuse and her mother's unwillingness to acknowledge it) has arrived in the form of a role that requires her character to undergo plastic surgery "to remain appealing to younger men." It's even sadder that "Hung" co-creator Colette Burson says of Heche's role,

We auditioned a lot of people. It is incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35.

Witchel doesn't interrogate this statement, preferring to quip, "the hardest part may be getting them to admit they're over 35." And while she is sensitive in dealing with Heche's horrific childhood, her relationships with Ellen DeGeneres and ex-husband Coleman Laffoon, and her current family life, Witchel's description of Heche's looks verges on the bizarre. She writes,

her face had no discernible pores or oil glands. People have killed for less, but the urge never quite struck - maybe because she makes no distinctions between herself as a celebrity and the mere mortals she encounters in the course of a day.

It's certainly charitable of Witchel that she never wanted to kill her subject during their interview. But she could've gone a little farther and actually questioned the notion that Heche is part of some rare breed of talented over-35 women — and instead examined a system that reduces a woman with an incredibly complex and often painful life to an age and a lack of oil glands.

Anne Heche Is Playing It Normal Now [NYT]