One of the most depressing passages in Tad Friend’s New Yorker piece (on female actresses and Hollywood comedies).
[Image: text reads, “Nicholas Stoller, the director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, says, ‘There’s a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likability for women stars. You need to make the actress completely adorable, or else she’ll be thought of as the straight man or the bummer—which is why I focus so carefully on trying to write fully fleshed-out roles for women in my movies.” To make a woman adorable, one successful female screenwriter says, ‘you have to defeat her at the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do—abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie.’”]
Did the quoted screenwriter choose anonymity? If so, she is clearly as brave as she is creative, given how her...
Oh barf. I mean, I get that every character has to be defeated at first. They can’t succeed at their first attempt—there...
ugh ugh ugh ugh.
Well here we have it. Wisdom for the ages. Lord knows I was never adorable until I was abandoned by one parent, abused...
OBVIOUSLY, this director must be sexist because he has a method for making female characters likable. It’s not like he’s...
I think he has it totally ass-backwards. You have to make her completely adorable to get greenlit. You then have to...