Does Hollywood have a "White Male Director" problem?

Adam Quigley's rebuttal is extremely misguided. Has he considered that if female directors were given the chance to helm big-budget projects, maybe they'd be successful?

I couldn't read Lexi Alexander's initial blog post, but that rebuttal is ridiculous. He gets hung up on her analogy, of all things, and wastes a lot of time playing a dubious numbers game to try and show just how inaccurate of an analogy it is. No real challenge to the argument itself. Just the analogy. Pages and pages of crap to "prove" that her analogy is wrong. Why on Earth would he do something so dumb?

Because he thinks she's being overly emotional.

*sigh*

I don't have an opinion of his opinion because his opinion is stupid. If you want me to take you seriously, you don't start off talking about how it's okay to dismiss what women and minorities have to say because they're being overly emotional. That's like the very definition of sexist bullshit.

No it's not.

As I said, I couldn't read her blog post. It wouldn't load for some reason.

But, he clearly says,

He then accuses her of the same thing and provides a ton of shoddy evidence to support his argument. And I say his evidence is shoddy because he qualifies it by saying that the numbers are basically bullshit and everything is based on perception anyway. So, if that's the case, why bring out the numbers in the first place? Because that makes his argument sound less emotional than hers, even though it isn't.

Last edited by Cotterpin Doozer (2014-06-07 00:04:00)

To be fair, the soccer analogy isn't a great one because it ignores the social pressures that discourage the other girls from playing with the boys.  Alexander's essay has some flaws but the overall point is fairly incontrovertible.   Quigley acknowledges and then ignores the actual issue to the detriment of the position he claims to support. 

Of course Hollywood has a white male director problem.

Comparing a (presumably) less-successful female director's track record with the track records of successful male directors is an "apples and oranges" argument, even without raising the topic of gender.  There are directors who have success, there are those that don't.   It's a rough business and if talent were the only factor it might make some kind of sense.  But there's also dumb luck and timing and favoritism and backstabbing and everything else that can affect the success of a particular film, and thus the careers of the people who made it.   

However... Alexander wasn't talking about track records when she named those specific names.  Plenty of male directors have gotten their shot, but had career-killing flops and have never been heard from again.  And there are female directors who have had quite nice careers.  But Alexander was talking about how often men get a turn at bat vs. how often women do.    Men are more successful than women as directors overall because men get more chances to direct than women do.  (Ditto for white vs non-white directors, while we're at it.)

This isn't some specific illness in the movie biz, of course - most of human endeavor in the Western world is dominated by white men.   That is not to say it isn't a problem in showbiz, or that it can't be fixed, or shouldn't be pointed out.  It may seem more odd in showbiz where we're supposed to be all enlightened and stuff... but that's us down here in the trenches creating stuff.  Business decisions at the top are made by the same kind of people who make decisions at Chrysler and Bank of America - mostly white guys.

Look, whether or not women are treated fairly in the movie business isn't up for debate. They aren't. Saying that studios allow them opportunities "every so often" as if that's acceptable is...not okay. The idea that Hollywood is purely egalitarian and that male directors just happen to be more talented than female directors is absurd. Just look at this recent Ant-Man debacle. Was a single woman up for that project? Nope. You know how many times a female-directed film has been nominated for Best Picture? SIX. And two of those were from the same woman, Kathryn Bigelow. Do you really think that the reason for this drought of female-directed blockbusters is because none of them have ever made successful indie films? Come the fuck on. Denying that this is a problem or brushing it aside as, "Well, women just don't try hard enough!" is sexist, and that shouldn't need to be said.

Hollywood is, despite occasional claims to the contrary, risk-averse. This means going with tried-and-tested. And 99% of the time, this means white male directors. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. I don't really see this as something that can be debated with ambiguity.

The thing worth discussing, I think, is how exactly to achieve an actual equality of opportunity. I remember somebody (half-certain it was Geena Davis) saying that if you look at a crowd scene, it's only about 20% female. There's nothing stopping us from having it be 50/50 (and, sidenote, shouldn't this be easier to do, considering women generally get paid less than men anyway?). This is non-speaking, relatively passive work, and we can't even get that right. Pretty disheartening. So having fairer proportions of male/female directors isn't going to be easy to do.

I'm sure that this is a top-down (white males at the top make most of the decisions) and bottom-up (less women pursue directing, maybe?) problem, though.

About that last point. A question, for those of you who went to film school: roughly what was the female/male ratio?

Disclaimer: if you dislike the tone of a post I make, re-read it in a North/East London accent until it sounds sufficiently playful