Lady Business: Sigourney Weaver’s legacy, and my trip to Bentonville

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventieth issue, published May 30, 2019.
 

Casting Choices

I recently spent a couple of days in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart -- and for five years now, home of Geena Davis’s Bentonville Film Festival (sponsored, of course, by Wal-Mart).
 
The film festival is an explicitly and actively inclusive event: Davis, who co-founded a nonprofit 15 years ago, has made it her “life’s mission” to advocate for and collect data on diversity in film, she told me last year. She and her team visibly worked to reflect that mission in the festival they organized: 86 percent of the festival’s films were made by women, and 62 percent by filmmakers of color, LGBTQ+, or different abilities.
 
Which is not, uh, the norm: Women directed just 4 percent of the top 100 grossing movies of 2018, and wrote just 15 percent of them. That’s even though we make up more than half of the moviegoing public … and even though, according to the Geena Davis Institute, movies that have female leads or nonwhite leads tend to earn more money than those starring white guys.
 
Anyway, it was a delightful few days that involved meeting a few movie stars, many impressive filmmakers, and moderating a panel on film financing with five smart, accomplished speakers:
 

 
One of my favorite parts of the festival was the opening night party, anchored by a playful event with Davis and several other actors (including GLOW’s Sydelle Noel, Orange Is the New Black’s Jackie Cruz, and Ozark’s Jordan Spiro). These women then spent an hour re-enacting scenes from film classics and blockbusters -- Jaws, Dumb and Dumber, one of the Avengers installments -- that had originally been written and performed by men.
 
It was silly and fun, with script pages flying everywhere and a local male volunteer playing the nameless eye candy ogled by the City Slickers. It was also more than a little pointed. The Avengers scene, especially, trolled Marvel rightfully hard. (Sure, Captain Marvel exists now! But you can still find plenty of scenes in the franchise with five dudes on screen and no women.)
 
“That was the first time I was the lead in anything,” admitted Cruz at one point. Spiro, who did get to lead a gentle TBS sitcom ten years ago and who’s now directed her first feature, said that -- now that she's in her early 40s -- most of the roles she gets offered these days have descriptions like: “Wife. Attractive, but after a beer ... and stands by her husband, even though she knows she shouldn’t.”
 
The point being, of course, that male roles usually aren’t defined by their attractiveness level or marital status -- and that when you let women play these more generous roles, the stories you tell are inevitably more interesting. Which is a lesson going back at least to 1979, when Sigourney Weaver got to play the Alien hero originally intended to be male.
 
Hollywood has made some isolated spurts of effort to replicate this kind of cross-gender casting recently (not to mention the whole Ghostbusters affair). And Weaver’s Ripley was invoked several times during the festival, as an example of what can happen when filmmakers (and their financial backers) allow themselves to think more broadly about what stories are relevant to what audiences.
 
And Noelle, a former professional athlete who plays a stuntwoman-turned-wrestler on GLOW, told the opening-night audience that she still asks her agents to submit her for male leads. As she laughed: “I can be tougher than a lot of the men out there anyway.”
 

Lady Bits

--“There can be ‘good’ cultural appropriation and ‘bad.’ The difference often has to do with power dynamics and the lens through which other cultures are presented.” Jasmin Malik Chua on authenticity, appropriation, and who gets to cook Asian food.
 
--Yes, I am very late to this, but oh so satisfied to learn that there’s a name (and a fix!) for that weird soap-opera effect on televisions: “Motion smoothing.”
 
--Most surreal cinematic moment of my Arkansas trip: Running on a hotel-gym treadmill under Virginie Barre’s “Fat Bat” sculpture:
 

--Lady Business will be on vacation next week. See you on June 13!
 
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