Seven Stereotypes About Women Screenwriters

I expend a fair amount of blog energy on how things are tougher for women screenwriters, and the studies that back me up.

And I thought it would be fun to compile stereotypes about women screenwriters that can get in our way.

They’re below. (Feel free to help me get to ten, folks.)

More recently however I’ve been rethinking how I feel about all this. More of that in a separate post….Promise.

Adorable funny gals, clockwise from top: Morgan Murphy, Leslye Headland, Maggie Carey, Lauren Anne Miller, Kay Cannon

 

For now:

The Stereotypes

1. They apologize before they pitch. (“This is just an idea I had…just my first draft…something that needs work…”)
2. They’re cute and spunky.
3. They write  romantic comedies or dramas.
4. They’re bad investments cause they’ll give up on writing when they start a family.
5. They are less fun to hang with than their male counterparts.
6. They aren’t in touch with the market and what sells.
7. They write “soft” stories and suck at structure.

How many of these are you? How many did I miss?

The Bravest Person in The Room

Nora Ephron (1941-2012), Thanks and Goodbye (Photo credit: k-ideas)

Nora Ephron died last June and it hit me in a way that I didn’t imagine it would. It is true that I love rom-coms and write them and hate that they have morphed into treacly formulaic tropes about career women and rough at the edges men, unendingly played in my nightmares by Katherine Heigel and Gerald Butler. But there are plenty of talented writers who write iconic films in my wheelhouse who if they died I’d say, well that’s a shame and move on.

Perhaps how I felt about Nora had to do with briefly meeting her at a New York Women In Film and TV event where she was the consummate storyteller and made everyone in the room feel like she was personally connecting with them. (I believe Tom Hanks when he says that he only took on “Lucky Guy” on Broadway to get a chance to hang out with her. She was that cool in her quintessential New York black turtleneck.)

Nora offered up lots of advice that night, replete with her trademark wit and pithiness but the advice that resonates the most with me had nothing to do with writing characters or dialogue. What resonates with me was the advice she gave to those who want to direct  that as a director you always have to be “the bravest person in the room”. She urged us to armor up and over-prepare (storyboards! shotlists! lookbooks!), advice which I’m taking to heart as a producer on the Bollywood-set project.

As it stands, the entertainment business operates out of a position of fear: fear of greenlighting the wrong pic, fear of choosing the wrong script, fear of pissing off the wrong powerful exec. It is so much easier and safer to do nothing and risk nothing and never be wrong. That, however, is not how movies get made. And while Nora was specifically addressing directing, she could just have easily have been talking about writing or producing.

To write, you have to be the bravest person in the room: to not be afraid of writing something awful after you’ve written something good…to not be afraid of writing something controversial if it’s what you want to tackle…to not be afraid of being misunderstood. To produce, you’ve got to be the bravest person in the room: to commit to a project that could be a flop, to take money from investors that they may lose, to run headlong in pursuit of talent and distributors even when you could be cruising for a bruising. In short, making art is an act of courage. Art is bigger than fear.

I have no trouble imagining that Nora Ephron, who the studios didn’t want to direct “This is My Life” and who refused to be pigeonholed, was often the bravest in the room. Even that night at that little New York Women in Film forum where she was ostensibly promoting “Julie and Julia.” Nora, who kept her leukemia a secret to all but her closest friends, saving us the long goodbye and going out on her own terms in the end.