Effie Brown, Project Greenlight, NYFF Live panel "New Hollywood?"

With the sort of filmmaker I am (woman, poc, etc, etc) I follow the discussions and debates on the lack of diversity in the American film industry. In the last month or so things have really kicked up with the #damonsplaining diversity on Project Greenlight, and his more recent tone-deaf and hypocritical statements in saying that gay actors shouldn't out themselves. Matt Damon, I used to be a fan, but no more. And I'm not the only one.

While I'm no longer a Damon fan, Goddamn I am a newly-minted Effie Brown fan. I am so, so happy she is holding things down on Project Greenlight. Her presence as the ONLY poc in the room in those meetings, and usually also the only woman, shows in stark light the racism and sexism that's at play everyday in the industry. Every damn day. Project Greenlight has become so engrossing this season precisely because we're getting to see the real rubbish that happens behind the scenes. In how people don't respect Effie and try to circumvent her, do her job for her, that she knows how to do and is doing, in claiming that she has a temper, etc etc. Its rubbish, but Effie knows what's up, and she'll do her job and she'll also be the one who makes sure not everyone on set is white.

The contestant winner Jason Mann is just awful. Extremely entitled, clueless, who won't compromise on anything and who will play dirty to get what he wants, such as complaining to Matt and Ben about his producer and not getting to shoot on film. In episode 4, they are one week away from shooting, and they have no locations, and no cast. I haven't made a feature yet but even I know, that's a recipe for disaster. When I'm making a film, I wanna be as prepped as I can be, and that includes knowing my locations inside out, and getting my cast ready. You can't just throw in your actors at the last minute. Actors make your film. Without actors, you have no damn film. Put your cast together and spend time with them, making sure they know their characters. To me, when you're directing, you're directing the camera, and the actors. Directing the camera means working on everything that's in the frame, but you also gotta direct your actors, coz if they fall apart, so does the film.

So what does Jason do a week away from shooting? Ask again if he can shoot on film instead of digital. Forget making a shotlist, or even choosing a location for a shotlist, forget having a cast - nope, this brat wants to shoot on film. As if shooting on film, is going to make everything magical.

I'm not the only who dislikes Jason. Here's the AV Club:
"It’s a fascinating dilemma. Is The Leisure Class really going to look so much better on film that it’s going to be worth it for Jason to risk not getting the shots he needs? Shooting on video saves time anyway, so with two extra days to shoot he’d be much more likely to have the time to set up the shots he wants, light them to his specifications, and so on. In other words, there’s more to the “look” of a movie than simply the format it’s shot in. By choosing film, Jason isn’t necessarily making the choice that will result in a better-looking movie.

Unsurprisingly, though, he does choose film. Also unsurprisingly, Effie thinks he’s made the wrong choice, saying “he’s not interested in serving the film if he’s giving up more days.” That remains to be seen, but only if Jason actually chooses a location to shoot in. Again he sidesteps Effie, as well as location scout Alison, and goes out to look at a house found by the production designer, Cecil. It would have been interesting to see how this played out if Jason actually liked the house, but he doesn’t, so it just sort of fizzles out. Still, Jason is not doing a great job of creating an atmosphere of trust with his crew so far. Finally, he has to pick somewhere to shoot, so he settles on the Douglas Fairbanks house they could have chosen weeks earlier.

This gets to the heart of why, even for those of us inclined to side with the director over the suits, Jason is so hard to root for. It’s not just that he’s unproven and we basically have to take his talent on faith, but that he comes off as so ungrateful for all the concessions he has gotten, even saying at one point, “We’re already so compromised.” Think of one of the rare times Jason didn’t get his way, back on day one when he wanted to fire Pete Jones. Now he finds Pete so indispensable, he balks when Pete has to leave the project as scheduled because his contract is up. If he was wrong about Pete, maybe he’s wrong about other things, too, and maybe he should be a little more open to listening to the people who are more experienced. That’s not compromising your artistic integrity, it’s giving yourself a better chance to succeed. With the cameras about ready to roll, we’ll soon see if Jason’s stubbornness can survive an unforgiving feature film production schedule."

Because of Effie Brown I went today to the NYFF 53, NYFF Live "New Hollywood?" panel at the Lincoln Center. The presenter said this panel came about because of the recent eruption that #damonsplaining caused. There have been endless articles and panels about the lack of racial and gender diversity in the film industry, so I wondered, what am I going to get out of this one? But I went coz of Effie. I sat in the middle of the second row, because I wanted to be visible, and I got smiles from Effie Brown and Susan Lewis. :-D

I thought this blog post was just going to be notes I posted from the panel, but I'll just point out a few things that were said:
- The panelists said something I had been thinking, which is that the TV landscape today is much more inclusive than the film world. There are far more women/poc/queer characters on TV, both network and online, than in film, and behind the camera TV is more inclusive as well, think of the showrunners. I'm using the word inclusive rather than diverse, because "diverse" is played out and exasperating for many people. TV still has a ways to go of course but its much further along than film. One of the panelists remarked that film might become more like theatre, a rarefied art form for white people. Sigh.
- Social media is actually a gamechanger. Studios and major figures can't get away with their crap as much anymore, because they get called out on it. Recent examples are of course, the Damonsplaining, as well as  Aloha, and the James Bond author calling Idris Elba too "street" for the role.
- The international market might become a bigger play. Studios might try to get more foreign locations/actors/stories - on the flipside though its been long said that studios think only films with white male leads get tickets sold abroad. However, Fast and Furious 7 made over a billion $.
- A white guy who's made a little film will get hired to make a massive feature. It happens all the time. All the time. A woman? Practically never. Even a woman with a great track record. White guys get chances, the rest of us, don't.

Further comments on the panel are posted here by the Guardian. 

I'd like to zoom out though. Yeah, there aren't enough women in film here. The racism and sexism in the American film industry mirrors what we see in society at large. But I know there's more than one film industry. In the Arab world and in South Asia, there are many women writing and directing films, calling the shots. There's still not enough, but the numbers are better than here.

And the problem of not enough women behind the camera starts at a young age. Over this past summer I was an instructor at a summer youth filmmaking camp in Tribeca, consisting of middle-schoolers. The program I was involved in, had each kid write and direct their own film in one month. There were about 20 kids, split into 3 groups, I had seven kids in my group. Out of those 20 kids, there were 4 girls. 4, out of 20. These kids, were given an incredible opportunity at such a young age, to write and direct their own short film, with good equipment. To be artists, to be visionaries, writers, directors, filmmakers. And yet there's 4 girls and 16 boys. Why? Were other young girls discouraged from participating? And if so, why?

This gender discrepancy I saw in front of me, mirrors the industry at large, and it showed to me, how this gender bias starts at a young age, with all of us complicit.

The Filmmaker Says

Quotes from The Filmmaker Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom
- unfortunately there were probably about 3 women in this book, and maybe two people of colour...

"Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard."
George Lucas

"Life is a tragedy, when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."
Charlie Chaplin

"Making a movie was like vomiting. I really did not look forward to it, but after I did it, I felt better."
Warren Beatty

"The most painful thing is to think you will come to see the film and then forget it. It is also painful to hink that you see the film, remember it for a little while, and then forget it. So I try to keep you from forgetting. I try to present a human being that you are unable to forget."
Akira Kurosawa

"I don't mind the dance that you have to do in order to get something made - the hoops you have to jump through, the fake smiles you have to adopt. You just have to. No one is entitled to anything. You have to earn it."
Sam Mendes

"Most films reflect the world, and the world is violent and in a lot of trouble. It's not the other way around. The films don't make a peaceful world violent - the violent world made the films."
David Lynch

Girl In A Band

Excerpts from Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

Page 85
"These days, when I'm in New York, I wonder, What's this place all about, really? The answer is consumption and moneymaking. Wall Street drives the whole country, with the fashion industry as the icing. Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing. Creative ideas and personal ambition are no longer mutually exclusive. A friend recently described the work of an artist we both know as "corporate," and it wasn't a compliment. The Museum of Modern Art is like a giant midtown gift store."

Page 127

"I also felt limited as a singer. When the band first started, I went for a vocal approach that was rhythmic and spoken, but sometimes unleashed, because of all the different guitar tunings we used. When you listen to old R&B records, the women on them sang in a really fierce, kick-ass way. In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass. It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don't tend to last very long. They're jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That's why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that's its own form of girl power; saying no to female marketing!"

Page 132
"On a more personal level, "Shaking Hell" mirrors my struggle with my own identity and the anger I felt at who I was. Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. At the same time everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control. Years after I'd left L.A., I could still hear my crazy brother's voice in my ear, whispering, I'm going to tell all your friends that you cried.

Back then, and even now, I wonder, Am I "empowered"? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a "strong woman"? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death." 

Page 133, emphasis mine
"With "Shaking Hell," I was trying to push my inner self out, with an edge that matched who I had become in New York. I bleached my hair unevenly, then dyed it magenta. In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore. I was going for a punky look, without really feeling I owned it...Still, I've always believed - still do - that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside."

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and Kim Gordon

Over two nights I watched the groundbreaking and well-received documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Like countless others I'm a casual fan of Nirvana and own a copy of Nevermind. You grow up hearing about Kurt and what happened to him and what he did to himself. I've never read any of the books or seen any films about him though, until this one.

What's so great about Montage is its use of archival footage. The filmmaker had full authorization from Courtney and Frances and so he got access to everything-Kurt - his journals, drawings, paintings, recordings, home videos, etc etc. I read somewhere that 85% of this film is new, unseen footage. There are few actual talking-head interviews, and even so they're only with his close family and with Kris from Nirvana. Apparently Dave was interviewed but for some reason wasn't included in the final cut. I wonder what he had to say.

The film is disturbing at parts, mostly due to Kurt's own drawings, at least for me. The guy was seriously disturbed from a young age. I've had a fair amount of experience with mental health/illness, and it seems to me Kurt should have received serious therapy since at least his teenage years. The stuff that he was drawing, what he was writing, etc - the guy needed help but couldn't get it, because hey we know that poor people in this country have great access to healthcare, right?! And by the time Nirvana blew up and Kurt had money, he was already a heroin addict...still, if only someone had taken him to see someone. Maybe it would've been too little too late, and also, what's the point of doing all these what-ifs - still for me, from a mental health perspective, it was clear that Kurt needed professional help. Actually, maybe someone did try to get him to a mental health professional, what do we know after all.

Since most of the film consists of Kurt's own artistic outputs, its kind of like seeing things from his perspective, or as close as we can get to that. May he rest in peace inshallah.

Since watching the film I read about Kurt and Frances, and about Nirvana, and came upon videos of Nirvana being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year in 2014. It was at Barclays Center in Brooklyn and was open to the public - if only I had known! Dave, Kris, and Pat performed, and for Kurt's vocals they had 4 women singers. It was a pretty great nod to Kurt's feminism. Joan Jett and St Vincent I feel were good, but they also just kind of imitated Kurt's recorded vocals. Lorde did her own thing but I don't think it really worked.

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth though - wow, what a revelation. I LOVE THIS PERFORMANCE. I think its how Kurt would've done it and/or he would've definitely approved. Kim is badass and punk to the core here. I love it. I've been watching it on repeat.

I've included the full video of all 4 performances so that you can compare. Kim's starts around 15 minutes in.

The New Yorker did a piece on Kim and here's a bit about this mindblowing performance:

"The performances with Lorde, St. Vincent, and Jett had an odd, denatured quality that left both song and singer exposed, missing the viscera of the thing and, in effect, the point. For her number, though, Gordon chose “Aneurysm,” not a hit but a B-side, released on the 1992 compilation “Incesticide.” Wearing a black-and-white striped minidress of the sort she favored in the early nineties, Gordon seemed to pull the song from her guts and trap it in her throat, her body switching, bouncing, and lurching to get it free. “Love you so much it makes me sick,” she spat, “Uhhhhhh-huhhhh.” Not a singer, exactly, Gordon was perhaps the only hope for a song like “Aneurysm,” which in the absence of its author requires less a vocalist than a medium for translation.

In the final pages of “Girl in a Band,” Gordon’s sober, ruminative new memoir, she recalls that night. One of her first appearances following her split from her husband and former bandmate, Thurston Moore, for Gordon the performance became “a four-minute-long explosion of grief,” a purge involving both “the furious sadness” of Cobain’s death, twenty years earlier, and the recent end of her nearly thirty-year marriage, her band, and whomever she was inside of both. Afterward, Gordon reports with some pride, Michael Stipe told her that her singing was “the most punk-rock thing to ever happen, or that probably ever will happen, at this event.”

I've been listening to more Nirvana of course since watching Montage, but I'm also gonna read Kim's book and check out her tunes. Rock on Queen Kim! 

- Cross-posted on The Ashraf Obsession

Footie

Yesterday I tuned into the USA vs Belgium match a bit, then headed downtown. Near my meeting place there was a crowd watching the final minutes of the match and since I was early, I joined in for a bit. It was cool to watch the match like that, with the crowd oohing and aahing, following every moment. They were all rooting for the USA of course. I asked what the score was and was informed it was 2-1 to Belgium, in extra time.

It's interesting how popular the World Cup has become; my brother notes that it feels like Europe over here with the large crowds watching footie all around the country. I certainly noticed a lot of people watching the match, from the crowd outside, to the security guys inside, to the office workers. Later in the evening I went to a halal Chinese restaurant and the match was being replayed there. I remember a few World Cups ago it seemed like no one was paying attention and few cared that the USA was in it. Football, actual football, was just not big. Now its everywhere. While I still can’t bring myself for some reason to root for team USA, it's still pretty neat that football has gotten big here. And kudos for Team USA for getting through the group stage, whereas England fell apart, yet again, worse than before.

We know of course that football isn't called football here. As a 9 year old from the UK I was thoroughly confused by the term "soccer", not having any idea what it meant. It took a while for me to figure out that "soccer" meant football. These days, I notice a lot of ads here calling football "futbol", to differentiate it from American football, and also maybe to tap into the Latino audience. If here in America, we're going to call it either futbol or soccer, instead of just football, I prefer futbol over soccer.


Here are some thoughts from this article, from an England fan in NY on football's growing popularity:

"Meanwhile, the rest of the city was engaging with the World Cup like never before.

There is always interest, of course, thanks to the bubble of passionate (mainly Hispanic) soccer fans in and around New York. Flushing Meadows turns into Hackney Marshes every weekend.

Even our lovely, 50-something Guatemalan housekeeper does Panini swapsies with my five-year-old son. And the game of footie I organise every Friday night on the Lower East Side is made up of a brilliantly diverse group of British, Aussie, American, Dutch, Moroccan, German and Japanese players.

And yet, and yet... There's something happening outside that bubble, too. Last Sunday, Madison Square Park was heaving with flag-waving USA fans for the Portugal game.

Bars have been advertising the games "with sound", as if suddenly realising what they've been missing all these years. And people at work have started talking to me about football.

American people.

How infuriating that football - our football - has finally become a talking point at precisely the moment the USA has progressed further than England on the world's biggest stage.

All I can do is reluctantly accept my colleagues' condolences ("Sorry for your loss") and quickly change the subject by saying what a great World Cup it's been, and soccer's been the winner, and please leave me alone, and take off that ridiculous bandana will you?"