What its like to be a woman in Hollywood Naomi McDougall Jones
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
I’m going to begin today with a story
and end with a revolution.
(Laughter)
Are you ready?
Audience: Yes!
Naomi McDougall-Jones: Here’s the story.
All my life I wanted to be an actress.
From the time I was very small,
I could feel the magic of storytelling
and I wanted to be a part of it.
So, at the ripe age of 21,
I graduated from the American
Academy of Dramatic Arts
in New York City,
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,
and ready to take my rightful place
as the next Meryl Streep.
That’s my grandmother, not Meryl Streep.
(Laughter)
Now, it’s important for this story
that you understand
that I was raised by a raging feminist.
I mean, just to give you some idea:
when I was five or six years old
and obsessed with “The Sound of Music,”
and running around, singing,
“I am 16 going on 17,”
all day every day,
my mother sat me down
for a very serious conversation
and she said, “OK, look.
I’m not going to say
that you can’t sing that song,
but if you are going to sing that song,
I do need you to understand
the extremely problematic
gender construct that it reinforces.”
(Laughter)
So that’s where I come from.
So it just honestly never
even occurred to me
that I would be prevented
from doing anything in my life
because I’m a woman.
OK. So I graduate.
And I start auditioning
and I get work, slowly.
But I just start noticing
that the parts available for women
are terrible.
But, remember – I came here
to play smart, willful,
complicated, interesting
complex, confident
female characters, right?
Like Meryl.
And all of the sudden,
I am wrestling with 300 other
gorgeous, talented women
to play …
“[Female] No dialogue.
The character only needs
to stand on a balcony,
look forlorn, and walk back
inside the house.
Only partial nudity.”
(Laughter)
“[Sarah] Brian’s love interest.
Attractive, cute, and flirty,
she is the ideal girl and Brian’s prize
throughout the entire film.”
“[Mom] A proper Southern belle
who is making peace with the fact
that her only purpose in life
is to tend to her husband.”
“[Abby] Must be OK
with a tastefully shot gang rape,
along with performing 19th-century dance.”
(Laughter)
Those are actual casting notices.
And so I just mentioned this
to my agent one day,
I say, “I feel like I’m not really
going in for parts
that I’m actually excited about playing.
And he said, “Yeah. I don’t really know
what to do with you.
You’re too smart for the parts
that are being written
for women in their 20s,
and you’re not quite pretty enough
to be the hot one,
so I think you’ll work when you’re 35.”
(Laughter)
And I said, “Oh. That’s funny.
I always thought that when you were 35,
you were kind of, like,
over the hill as an actress,
that you were relegated to playing
20-year-olds' mothers.”
And he said, “Yeah –
(Laughter)
It’s just the way it is.”
So, maybe a year or so after this,
I’m having lunch
with an actress friend of mine,
and we’re talking about
how insane this is.
And we decide, you know what? No problem.
We’ll just make our own movie.
And I’ll write and then I’ll write it
about two complex female characters.
So we do.
We set out to make this movie,
and sort of accidentally, we end up hiring
an all-female production team:
the writer, directors, producers,
and it’s a film about two women.
And so pretty soon,
we’re sitting in the office
of a successful male producer,
and he goes, “OK, girls.
So, you do understand that at some point
you are going to have to hire
a male producer onboard, right?
Just so that people
will trust you with their money.”
Over and over again, people tell us,
“Yeah, but people don’t really
want to see films about women,
so maybe you should think about
making something else.
It’s just the way it is.”
So we make the movie, anyway.
We scrape together 80,000 dollars,
and we make it, and it does so well.
It gets into tons of festivals
and we win a lot of awards
and it’s big and exciting.
But these experiences I’ve had
just keep rubbing at me.
And so, I just start talking about them,
first, at Q and A’s after
screenings of the film,
and then I get invited to be on panels
and talk at conferences.
And the really amazing thing
is that, to begin with,
when I’m just talking to audiences
and other people, you know,
coming up in the film industry,
the universal reaction is,
“Oh my god! This is terrible.
What do we do about this?”
But the bigger panels I get on,
suddenly an Oscar nominee tells me,
“Look, I totally agree
with everything you’re saying.
You just need to be really careful
about where you say it.”
An Oscar-winning producer tells me
that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea
to play the woman card.
It’s just the way it is.
And I think this is how
sexism continues on in 2016, right?
For the most part, it happens casually –
unconsciously, even.
It happens because people
are just trying to get along
within an existing system.
It happens, maybe, out of a genuine desire
to teach a young woman
the way that the world “just is.”
The problem is that unless we do
something about it,
that is the way the world will always be.
So why should you care about this?
Right?
I mean, we’re facing some rather
significant problems in the world
just at present,
what does it really matter
if I can’t get a job,
or you’re stuck watching
“Transformer 17,” right?
(Laughter)
Well, let me put it to you this way:
the year “Jaws” came out,
Americans suddenly started listing
“sharks” among their top 10 major fears.
In 1995, BMW paid the James Bond franchise
three million dollars
to have James Bond switch
from driving an Aston Martin
to a BMW Z3.
That one move caused so many people
to go out and buy that car,
that BMW made 240 million dollars
in pre-sales alone.
The year that “Brave”
and “Hunger Games” came out,
female participation in archery
went up 105 percent.
(Laughter)
In fact, studies show
that the movies you watch
don’t just affect your hobbies,
they affect your career choices,
your emotions, your sense of identity,
your relationships, your mental health –
even your marital status.
So now, consider this:
if you have watched
mostly American movies in your lifetime,
95 percent of all the films
you have ever seen
were directed by men.
Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent
of all of the leading characters
that you have ever seen
were men.
And even if we just talk about
the last five years,
55 percent of the time
that you have seen a woman in a movie,
she was naked or scantily clad.
That affects you.
That affects all of us.
We actually can’t even imagine
how much it affects us,
because this is all we’ve ever had.
Stories – and movies
are just modern stories –
are not frivolous.
They’re actually the mechanism
through which we process
our experience of being alive.
They’re the way
that we understand the world
and our place in it.
They’re the way we develop empathy
for people who have experiences
different than our own.
And right now, all of that
is being funneled at us
through the prism of this one perspective.
It’s not that it’s a bad perspective,
but don’t we deserve to hear them all?
How would the world be different
if all of the stories were told?
So what do we do about this?
This may be the first time
a lot of you are hearing about this,
but a lot of us within the film industry
have spent years –
a lot of people,
a lot longer than I have –
giving speeches and doing panels
and writing articles
and doing studies,
and really just yelling at Hollywood
to do a better job about this.
I mean, we have really yelled at them.
And yet, Paramount and Fox
recently released their slates,
and of the 47 films that they will release
between now and 2018,
not a single one
will be directed by a woman.
So it is beginning to occur to me
that waiting for Hollywood
to grow a conscience
may not actually be a winning strategy.
In fact, it seems to me
that whenever there is a small,
ruling class of people
who have all of the money
and power and resources,
they’re not actually that excited
about giving it up.
And so you don’t get change by asking them
or even yelling at them.
You have to make that change happen
through a revolution.
Now, please don’t worry –
I promise you, here, now, today,
our body count will be very low.
(Laughter)
So, now before I get to my four-point
plan for the revolution –
yes, I have a four-point plan –
I have two pieces of very good
and important news for you.
Good news number one:
there are female filmmakers.
(Cheers and applause)
Yes! I know!
(Applause)
We exist!
We actually graduate from film schools
at the same rate that men
do – 50 percent.
So here we have our 50 women.
The problem is that as soon as you get
to the micro-budget film,
so even the very smallest films,
we’re already only directing 18 percent.
Then you get to slightly bigger films,
indies in the $1-5 million budget range,
and we go down to 12 percent.
So by the time you get
to the studio system,
we’re only directing
five percent of movies.
Now, I know some of you out there
will look at this
and secretly think to yourselves,
“Well, maybe women
just aren’t as good at directing movies.”
And that’s not a totally insane question.
I mean, we like to believe
the film industry is a meritocracy, right?
(Laughs)
(Laughter)
But look at this trajectory.
Either you have to accept
that women are actually
five percent as talented as men,
which I don’t,
or you have to accept
that there are serious systemic issues
preventing us from getting
from here to there.
But the good news is, we exist,
and there is a vast amount
of untapped potential over here.
Good news number two,
and this is really good news:
films by and about women make more money.
Yes! Yes! It’s true!
(Cheers and applause)
It’s true.
The Washington Post
recently released a study
showing that films that feature women
make 23 cents more on every dollar
than films that don’t.
Furthermore, my colleagues and I
commissioned a study
comparing 1,700 films
made over the last five years
and, looking at the average
returns on investment –
so, how much money does that movie make –
comparing if a man or a woman
filled each of the following roles:
director, producer,
screenwriter and lead actor.
And in every single category,
the return on investment is higher
if it’s a woman.
Fact: women buy 51 percent
of all movie tickets.
Films by and about women make more money.
And of course, at least
some portion of the male population
does also like women –
(Laughter)
so “women films” are not just for women.
And yet, Hollywood only targets
18 percent of all of their films
as “women films.”
So what you’re left with
is a giant underserved audience
and untapped profit potential.
So we exist, and we have stories to tell.
We have so many stories to tell.
And despite everything we’ve heard:
you want to see them.
The problem is, we’ve got this thing –
let’s call it “Hollywood” –
(Laughter)
no, no, I’m just kidding;
I’ve met some very nice
people in Hollywood –
Hollywood, preventing us
from getting to you.
So here is my four-point plan
for the revolution,
and everybody – man or woman,
in this room or anywhere in the world –
is going to get to help.
And this revolution is not just for women.
Anyone who has been disenfranchised,
anyone whose story has not been told,
the same principles apply,
and I really hope we can do
the revolution together.
My four-point plan.
Number one: watch movies.
Isn’t this a good revolution?
(Laughter)
OK, first I want to talk to anyone
who watches movies.
Who watches movies in here?
Great!
Will you pledge to watch one film
by a female filmmaker per month?
That’s it, just start there. Great!
If you need help finding them,
you can go to the website, moviesbyher.com
It’s an easily searchable database
of films by women.
And as you start watching all movies,
I just want you to pay attention
to the female characters.
How many of them are there?
What are they wearing?
Or not?
Do they get to do cool things,
or are they just there
to emotionally support the men?
I’m telling you, once you see this,
you’re not going to be able to unsee it.
And as you start noticing this,
it’s going to shift your viewing habits.
And this already sizable market
is going to continue to grow.
Step two: make movies.
So now I’m talking to all
the female filmmakers out there:
we need you to be very brave.
It will be harder for you to make movies.
In fact, there will be an entire industry
constantly telling you
that your stories don’t matter.
And we need you to make them, anyway.
That 18 percent in the micro-budget
range – that is on us to fix.
Don’t wait for permission.
Don’t wait for somebody to pick you,
because 95 percent says
they are not going to.
Crowd fund.
Write letters to eccentric relatives.
I know how hard it is,
but you have to make your movies –
now, today, features, not shorts.
There is an audience for them,
and they want and need to see them.
Three: invest in each other.
Fellow female filmmakers, I feel like
we need to stop wasting so much energy
on a system that does not want us.
We need to find our audience
and invest in cultivating them.
If we can figure out
how to make our movies
and deliver them
to the audiences that want them,
that’s it.
That’s the whole game.
And whatever they’re doing in the middle
is going to cease to be
quite so important.
Audiences, invest in us.
Help us make the movies
that you want to see.
If you can give a female filmmaker
25 dollars in a crowdfunding campaign,
great, do that.
If you can invest more seriously
and help us over that critical
million-dollar hurdle,
do that.
But invest in seeing
the other half of the story.
Four: disrupt through business.
So now I’m talking
to all of the businesspeople
and entrepreneurs.
This does not happen
very often in the world,
but right here we have a golden situation
in which you can enact
significant social change
while also making money.
Hollywood is a system ripe for disruption.
The old models of financing
and distribution are crumbling –
please come in and disrupt it.
I’ll give you an example.
Right now, with some incredible women,
I am launching the “The 51 Fund.”
It’s a venture capital fund
that will finance films written, directed
and produced by women
in that critical $1-5 million range.
We will give a significant number
of female filmmakers
the chance to make their movies
and we will deliver them
to the audiences who want them.
Good for equality, good for business.
But that’s only one example, we need more.
There is room for so many more.
So I say to you:
Hollywood is leaving money on the table.
Come pick it up.
(Applause)
Now, all of this may seem like a lot,
but it is actually so doable.
Entrenched systems don’t change
because you ask the people in charge,
they change because all of the people
who don’t have what they want
rise up and make that change happen.
And don’t you want to?
I want to see what the other
51 percent of the population has to say.
I want to watch movies
that teach me about people
who are different than I am.
I want to see women’s bodies on film
that aren’t perfect.
I want to give our little boys the chance
to empathize with female characters
so that they can become more whole men.
And I definitely want
to give a little girl
who may not have a real-life role model
the chance to watch movies
and see women doing everything
she dreams of achieving.
This is not about
making one industry better.
This is about making a better world.
Will you help?
The time for waiting is over.
The time for the revolution is now.
(Cheers and applause)