WASHINGTON — The night before Jane Fonda was arrested here again last week, a member of her social media team asked whether she would consider writing a letter from jail. “With what?” Fonda replied. “I’ll be without my phone.” She paused a beat, “Or adult diapers.” Also, Fonda continued, musing out loud, it was one thing for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to write a letter from jail. But her? The plan was nixed.
Sam Smith, the British crooner with a voice often described as heaven sent, announced in September that “my pronouns are they/them.” Days later, the Brit Awards, which had nominated Smith for top male artist earlier in the year, said the categories would be reconsidered for 2021.
At a recent conference outside Los Angeles, a national women’s rights lawyer stood before a select group of Hollywood heavyweights to issue a demand and a plea. With a woman’s right to choose in jeopardy, the lawyer, Fatima Goss Graves, said, more abortions should be portrayed in narratives on screen. “The stories on abortion do not match our reality,” she said.
They see themselves in Rue when she coughs and flushes the toilet so her mom won’t hear her rummaging through the medicine cabinet for Xanax. They see themselves when Rue cops clean urine from a high school friend to pass a drug test.
Streaming giant Netflix has become the first major Hollywood studio to publicly weigh in on Georgia’s restrictive abortion law, with Ted Sarandos, its chief content officer, saying the company would “rethink our entire investment in Georgia” should the law go into effect.
Time did not soften this Thompsonian resolve, or so it seemed. This year, after learning that John Lasseter, who lost his top job at Pixar and Disney for unwanted touching, was named head of the studio producing a film she was working on, Thompson publicly quit and flamed the studio, and Lasseter, in a scathing open letter.
When filmmakers Joe Carnahan and his best friend, Ben Hernandez Bray, began showing around their script for a new superhero movie in early 2017, they said, studio honchos and moneymen lavished it with praise. The movie, “El Chicano,” offered an origin story with a fresh take: a Mexican-American cop who lost a brother to gang violence adopts the mantle of a masked avenger to take on a cartel.
A recent report hardly painted a rosy picture of the gender balance in Hollywood: Just 4% of the top 1,200 movies from the past 12 years had been directed by women. Deep in the report, another jarring figure leapt out at me. Looking at the most lucrative films from 2016 to 2018, researchers found that just four of the 276 key grips working on those films were women.
“Captain Marvel” had not even been released yet — its opening day was a month away — but that did not stop negative remarks from piling up against the film and Larson.
One audience reviewer deemed the movie “a complete disaster.” Another was “tired of all this SJW nonsense,” using the abbreviation for “social justice warrior,” a pejorative term for progressives. Yet another groused that Brie Larson, the movie’s star, “says I shouldn’t see the movie anyway.”
Lisa Borders, chief executive of Time’s Up, the Hollywood-led organization fighting workplace sexual harassment, abruptly resigned from her position earlier this week because of sexual misconduct allegations made against her 36-year-old son. The resignation was announced Monday, but at the time only a family issue was cited as the reason.
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