For a topical follow-up to last night’s review of Anthony Lane’s review of Sex and the City: The Movie, via Feminist Law Profs, see this story about a remake of The Women starring mostly over-40 actresses. Apparently, the all-male studio execs at Warner Brothers don’t want to release it. Surprise! It’s so much easier for them when the movies star only men, and women play subordinate roles that serve the male characters.
Maybe Warner Brothers should just make their own digital fembots with big boobies that won’t even need a screen credit, let alone millions of dollars and a cut of the box office! Real women, with their wrinkly faces, saggy imperfect bodies, and demands to be paid for their work are just too much of a hassle. (I bet every workplace in America would love to replace their women workers with fembots!)
Historiann 
It’s a sad state of affairs when a seventy-year old play seems “too radical” for a major film company.
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Indeed–Lane was probably on to something in reminiscing about the great women’s roles of the 1930s-1950s (“Funny Face” excepted, however.) But, I suppose that strong women’s roles and even overly feminist messages were less threatening back when job and pay discrimination was legal, and women were regularly not admitted to professional schools, etc.
I wonder to what extent the globalization of the movie industry has played a role in the masculinization of Hollywood. After all, action movies with lots of things blowing up are easy to (not) translate, and have proven their global box office value. Dialogue-heavy movies about characters and relationships are harder to translate, and moreover, won’t sell in large swaths of the world where modern Western women are held up as signs of decadence and cultural decay.
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I don’t know how much TV you watch, but some channel is doing a “top model over 35” reality show. She’s Got The Look at TV Land (home of nostalgia shows–is that weird or appropriate?). Warning re the link, sound will begin to play.
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It’s probably on cable, so I won’t get to see it. (Well, and my TV is small, nailed to a wall, in a basement with no cable, so I kind of forget about TV most weeks!) That’s OK–I think I wouldn’t be able to stop throwing up.
“Desperate Housewives” did a funny bit last year about models and age. Former model Gabby (Eva Longoria) went back to work at age 29 or 30, and the only assignments she got were 1) car shows, or 2) playing a fresher-faced model’s mother!
One of the things Historiann likes about being Historiann (instead of Modelann or Moviestarann) is that compared to other historians, she looks pretty good. (Kind of like the distinction between “Washington pretty” and “Hollywood pretty,” I know, but it’s a consolation!)
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