A Film by MICHAEL LANDON, JR.
Monthly Archives: February 2014
Female Dialog Slighted in Movies
Out of the hundreds of major motion pictures that release each year, few depict female conversations with other women. In society women tend to talk with other women often, but in feature films it’s hard to find. That is unless they are talking about men.
In 1985 the Bechdel Test was created to benchmark movies concerning the female gender. For a movie to pass, it must contain one scene in which two or more named female characters have a conversation about anything besides men. Two women tossing out one liners does not pass the test, as it must be a conversation with back and forth dialog.
Alison Bechdel created the test after reviewing over 2,500 films and realizing that none of them passed her simple test. Most high profile films all fail the test like The Social Network, the original Star Wars trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar and The Avengers to name a few.
This test was not created to point out films that are anti-women or to beef up the feminist movement, but just to bring awareness to the public about how gender is presented in film.
I quickly reviewed my Tried & True screenplay and was happy to find six scenes with a woman talking to another woman, but was shocked to find that all of the scenes except for one had the women talking about the male lead character or another man. And, the one scene that included a woman-to-woman conversation without any discussion about men was cut from the story to sharpen the focus on the male lead. My screenplay failed the Bechdel Test.
After reviewing many of my other screenplays, I was relieved to know that 80% of them passed the Bechdel Test, but wondered how those films will do at the box office compared to the 20% that failed the test. Hollywood has conducted surveys over several decades and learned that women will watch both a male and female lead, but men are prone to watch only male leads.
Therefore, to create a box office hit the lead must be male, which will further shift the story focus to develop the male character, most likely cutting or omitting those women-to-women scenes. The end result may be a stronger story about the man, but over all, it will be less realistic.
The question that comes to mind is whether or not our shorter attention spans would allow for expanded dialog, which could help facilitate a woman-to-woman conversation. My curiosity stems from men-to-men conversations being extremely short and men-to-women conversations being greatly truncated as well. It’s only the woman-to-woman conversation that explores greater depth of topic, a variety of perspectives and potential rabbit trails of extraneous information. None of which will be given screen time in an action or adventure film.
There is certainly no right or wrong about how much any given character needs to speak with other characters of the same gender, but the Bechdel Test does bring a fresh perspective to the screenplay editing process. After all, I’d like my dramas to be as close to reality as possible.
Copyright © 2014 by CJ Powers
$20MM in Free Publicity Wasted
Over the past few weeks the movie Alone Yet Not Alone received an estimated $20MM worth of free national publicity based on its Oscar® controversy. The film was nominated for Best Song, but shortly after the announcement, it was rescinded. The controversy was magnified due to the film being of the faith-based genre.
It was the perfect set up for a David (Small Christian Film Company) and Goliath (Hollywood) battle, where audiences love to support the underdog. It was also the ideal setting for taking advantage of the high visibility by cashing in on new commercial opportunities.
Unfortunately, the filmmaker only cashed in on the song jumping into the top 100 iTunes downloads. In Billboard’s list of Hot Christian Songs, Alone Yet Not Alone reached #19 and in the subcategory of Christian Streaming Songs it rose to #7. This suggests it received a moderate success level with a limited audience in comparison to songs from major motion pictures. Disney’s Frozen soundtrack stayed #1 on Billboards 200 list for three weeks straight.
The real money for filmmakers is not in an ancillary product, even one that is worthy of a temporary Oscar® nomination. To fully take advantage of the free press, the filmmaker needed to immediately release the DVD and Blu-Ray with a national distributor during all the hype. Instead, the filmmaker decided to four-wall the theatrical rerelease this summer on June 13th, 3-4 months after the publicity is stone cold.
Filmmaker chat sites around the world buzzed with wonder about why the filmmaker didn’t immediately scrap the film’s rerelease and quickly manufacture thousands of DVDs and Blu-Rays to take advantage of the largest visibility that a film of its kind would ever see. They questioned why the filmmaker didn’t at least move up the limited rerelease to theaters into the free publicity window.
Speculation aside, the filmmaker plans to rerelease the film through Seatzy, a four-walling company that many independents use when their film is not picked up by a distributor or they think they can make more money going it alone. According to Seatzy at the time this article, the film was only guaranteed to show in nine theaters, which means its rerelease is just as small as its original release – although there are still several months of presales yet to unfold.
What surprised me is that independent filmmakers are typically more nimble than large studios, yet the filmmaker stayed his course. Historically studios are less flexible, but have rapidly released videos within two weeks when controversy hits. The only drawback for studios is that without preplanning they are only able to manufacture 150,000 videos per week and can’t keep up with the demand created by controversy.
Based on the filmmaker’s choices surrounding the free publicity, it looks like the investors who put up the $7MM budget will not see a return on their money. Internet buzz anticipates that the film will bring in less than $2MM after all markets are exploited. But again, this is speculation as the filmmaker’s P&A budget is unknown.
The lesson learned is having multiple marketing plans in place before a film is released. Plan B being implemented when a film develops controversy that produces millions in free publicity. Football coaches know exactly what to do in all situations of a game based on their preplanning and its time producers do the same to avoid squandering such and incredible gift of free press.
CJ's Corner 