The Provincetown Women’s Media Summit: A Conference with Hints of Soft Porn

The Provincetown Women’s Media Summit: A Conference with Hints of Soft Porn
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The Merkinstock 9 (select Summit participants, Dunes of the Provincelands, Cape Cod, Massachusetts)

The Merkinstock 9 (select Summit participants, Dunes of the Provincelands, Cape Cod, Massachusetts)

Photo Credit: Melinda Fox. Used with permission.

I honestly didn’t get it. I felt like I did when I accidentally auditioned for soft porn. Okay, let me explain.

When I first started acting, I submitted my headshot and resume for a film audition and was told by the casting director to watch Sirens ahead of time in order to understand the degree of nudity expected of the role. I’m not particularly open to being nude on camera for any reason – let alone such that theaters full of people can see me on screen in my birthday suit … for eternity should they wish – but I watched Hugh Grant and Elle Macpherson spin a decent enough yarn, and I thought, “Well, maybe.” Plus the work was paid, and I’d been courted mostly by copy and credit theatrical gigs.

At the audition itself, I was asked for a couple of monologues and read various sides (i.e., acted script) with the director of photography recording the entirety. Afterward, the DP and casting director (the latter of whom was later revealed as the production’s director as well) seemed simply over the moon with my performance. I was so confused.

Sure, my acting skills are strong, and I show up on time and off-book and take direction well. However, this degree of appreciation was unusual, not only because it was a veritable deluge but also because it seemed genuine. I was used to the commercial world’s “Kathleen, you’re on fire!” that rarely led to a booking, that phony networking language that tries to keep all bridges sans flame, the insincerity sometimes linked to a casting couch, like when I lost the lead in a pilot because I wouldn’t join the writer/director in his hot tub. This praise was not that. It was unfamiliar in its generosity. I soon found out why. I had watched the wrong Sirens.

What I was supposed to have screened was a Skinemax-type spectacle of lesbian romance. Lesbian I can do; soft porn I cannot. My acting had been so “amazing” because my degree of talent is, as I understand it, rarely seen in soft porn auditions.

What does soft porn have to do with the Provincetown Women’s Media Summit?

More than a walk by the Merkinbog (that’s another article). I was in the company of a number of directors and DPs (and other creative talent including producers), and I was treated spectacularly well, so well, I was a bit bewildered. From my intelligence to my ideas to my voice to even my posture, the visionaries participating in the Summit showered me with compliments and made me feel like a complete, full, and worthy human being. I wondered, “Is this what privileged folk feel like all the time? Well no wonder they‘re scared of losing it.”

Outside of soft porn auditions – a soft porn audition – my usual experience in the industry is one of disregard and dismissal. Questions are discouraged, sexual harassment is meant to be tolerated…. The DP of a film I was in that went to Sundance pretended he was giving me legitimate direction about where I should stand on set and how I should stand in the natural light until one of the leads grabbed me and said, “He can see through your skirt.” A few DP and production assistant giggles; I was thereafter underpaid for my contracted work.

Amy Pietz publicly speaks of an extra who was dismissed from set after an A-lister shoved his hand down the front of her pants. Most makeup artists tell stories of being physically assaulted by celebrities in their chairs, groped, and otherwise sexualized. But with knowing you might be fired because someone else commits a battery upon your person and that employment is dependent upon networks, complaints are few. Speak up and be blacklisted.

A result of this distasteful environment: over 85% of theatrical film writers are male; theatrical film directors trend around 95% male; and creators of broadcast, cable, and digital scripted shows are almost 80% male. Males also index well above their population in key positions at dominant talent agencies.

At the Women’s Media Summit, attendees discussed all of it. Over 100 highly accomplished changemakers worked together to strategize remedies for the inexorable zero that plagues the entertainment industry when it comes to hiring women, especially those marginalized by other identities (race, disability, age, etc.).

They presented strategies that called forth intersectionality and recognized that within the terribly misogynist statistics, the numbers are even worse for some. Women graduate from film school in proportion with the general population, however only 4% of all directors across the 1,000 top-grossing films during the past decade were female – a ratio of 24 males to every one female director – with only three of those films directed by Black women, three by Asian women, and one by a Latina, with no Native American (or disabled) women represented. As the latest Bunche Center Hollywood Diversity Report notes, ”Minority female directors continue to be the film industry’s most underemployed professionals.”

Instead of ignoring this fact and arguing for interventions that only benefit 31% of the U.S. population (White women), Summit attendees pushed for a true embrace of the 50%, acknowledging that without specific efforts on behalf of women with multiple demographic oppressions, the default would exclude them.

Consumers ordinarily have no idea why these numbers matter if they know about them at all. They don’t understand how the images we mainline corrupt our view of each other – how images corrupt how others see them – let alone how any production makes it to the big or small screen. Outside of industry professionals, many believe the movies and TV shows we watch are the only ones that might have ever existed, scripts for which they imagine stand alone, not packaged with names already attached to act or direct the final projects.

Instead, for example, when Mario and Melvin Van Peebles pitched Panther – a story of the Black Panthers – the studio they were dealing with suggested a role for someone like Tom Cruise to lead the film. When the Van Peebles refused, the studio refused to back them. When Danny Glover pitched his script about Toussaint L’Ouverture, producers asked for “White heroes” and not getting them, denied Glover funding. A producer loved Larissa Fasthorse’s script that took place on a reservation but didn’t love the depiction of the reservation; he rejected the project inviting her to pitch another tale that had horses and teepees (because his son believed so fully in that narrative). This producer didn’t want, you know, realism.

Black Actors are directed how to act more Black. Women directors are told to their faces, “We need a man to direct this.” The discrimination is deep and widespread. The result is that we consumers are fed a steady stream of heroes that aren’t like us or real life … but we start to believe those waters actually reflect real life. In Apollo 13, the characters were much more emotional than the actual astronauts. After so many films repeating the same idea, do most people now think a person can behave excitably and still get such a serious job done? Does the flood of inane Southerners on big and small screens shape how stupid the country, nay the world thinks folks from the American South are? (a resounding and exasperated “yes” can be heard billowing to the North). We already know much about entertainment media’s influence on our perceptions of race, age, sexual orientation, and physical ability et al.. The under-examined discrimination that happens in Hollywood is actually pivotal to consumers’ very lives … but the mask it wears is just too appealing for most to look underneath.

Women’s Media Summit participants converged on Provincetown, Massachusetts to solve part of this gargantuan problem … and still took the time to sincerely praise each other’s contributions, including mine even as I served on a panel alongside Summit catalyst and all-around outstanding activist, director, and person Maria Giese. Over one rainy but glorious weekend, additional panels that were at times overwhelming with their wealth of insight and information, and breakout groups that pitched extraordinary strategies to bring intersectional gender parity to entertainment industry employment, painted a more hopeful landscape.

Perhaps the future will represent all of us. If these exceptional people are at the helm, that future seems very bright indeed. After my group’s presentation, as people commended my slide design, you might understand why the Summit reminded me of my very limited jaunt into soft porn. I felt something, a value, this society does not grace me with in my day-to-day.

And isn’t that the point?

SOURCES

Antonia, Kathleen. Knowing What It’s Cut With: An Addict’s Guide to Entertainment. Cultural Weekly (18 May 2016).

Giese, Maria. Guest Post: A Summary of the Inaugural Women’s Media Summit. Women and Hollywood blog (10 April 2017).

Hunt, Darnell et al. 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report: Setting the Record Straight. Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at UCLA (February 2017).

Tarr, Kathleen. Getting Played: who’s playing you?! What The … Productions (2010).

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