Kathryn Bigelow: I refuse to stop making movies.

“If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.” -Kathryn Bigelow

If someone made a movie about Kathryn Bigelow's career, it contains all the elements for a success story. A comeback story, if you will.

Her first film, Loveless, a biker movie set in the 1950s starring Willem Defoe, introduced Bigelow and her highly stylized approach to the independent film scene.

In 1997, Near Dark, a vampire Western by Bigelow was released and quickly disappeared into video stores. However, the movie gained a cult following for its dynamic cinematic style.

Already questions arose about a female director's place in the action movie world. During filming for Blue Steel, Bigelow said: "There's nothing, culturally or socially, that would limit women to the more ephemeral, sensitive subjects or men to hardware films.” The director said she wanted to “push the limits” of her subject, whether it be vampires or a police case.

Although Blue Steel had bigger names than her last two pictures—Jaime Lee Curtis was the lead—it was still unsuccessful at the box office.

Point Break (1991) was Bigelow's most financially successful film, making over $100 million at the box office. It featured Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze as bank robbing surfers.

Bigelow's 1995 picture Strange Days, starred Ralph Fiennes in a futuristic version of Los Angeles, and was written and produced by Bigelow's ex-husband, director James Cameron. It was a commercial and critical flop, but much of the blame was placed on Cameron for its failure.

Bigelow's next release in 2002, K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, was yet another box office flop.

Although her stylistic choices as a director were admired, the typical Hollywood studio action movie was not doing Bigelow any favors.

After an eight year absence, Bigelow found her footing again and came back with a high tension film with political and philosophical weight, The Hurt Locker. Set during the Iraq War, it explores the work and lives of Army bomb squad technicians.

During an interview with The A.V. Club, Bigelow was asked about the seven year gap between pictures. “I became familiar with Mark Boal's journalism....These things take time, is all I'm trying to say. I think what people don't realize is how long these things can take in development. I've always developed all my own pieces, and they're time consumers,” Bigelow said.

The Hurt Locker was based off Mark Boal's reporting during his time on an embed with a bomb squad in Baghdad. The film, which featured unknown actors and had a documentary, 'day in the life' style, was nominated for many awards, including nine Academy Awards.

Bigelow, nominated for Best Director, was ironically up against her ex-husband James Cameron, for his work on his self-proclaimed labor of love, Avatar.

On March 7, 2010, Bigelow became the first female director to win an Academy Award. The Hurt Locker also won Best Picture and Boal was awarded for Best Screenplay.

Bigelow grew up in Northern California, where she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. While there, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum's independent study program. While in New York, Bigelow apprenticed with artists Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.

She earned a master's degree from Columbia University, studying film theory and criticism. Bigelow continued to work with avant garde and conceptual artists after earning her degree and in 1978, began work on a short film, The Set-Up.

In typical Bigelow style, The Set-Up, was a film commentating on the violence in film. The Set-Up portrays two men fighting, as voice overs deconstruct the violent images. Bigelow asked her actors to punch and hit each other during the film's all-night shoot. Director Milos Forman, teaching at Columbia at the time, liked the short, and Bigelow used it as part of her application to Columbia's MFA film program, where she studied screenwriting and directing.

Bigelow was not stymied by tepid box office reception for her early films or any possible reluctance by Hollywood to have a woman direct high-paced films, but she prefers to work outside of the studio system.

With Hurt Locker, Bigelow wanted to film in the Middle East and she knew this would garner her a lot of no's in terms of securing financing from a studio. “I also wanted to retain complete creative control, I wanted final cut, and I wanted the opportunity to cast breakout, emerging talent,” Bigelow said.

The team of Bigelow and Boal seems to fit Bigelow's desire to use film to comment on society. “If you hold up a mirror to society and you don't like what you see, you can't fault the mirror. The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It's not that I condone violence. I don't. It's an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and I think that is always valuable.” Bigelow said these words in regard to her movie Strange Days and the social and racial tensions in Los Angeles after the riots in the 1990s, but the same could easily apply to the contents of Hurt Locker.

Even though Bigelow's Hurt Locker success gave her the cache to do whatever film she wanted, she chose to team with Boal again for her next project. “Once you embark on a project that is both topical and relevant, I suppose it sets a new bar,” Bigelow said.

Bigelow claims she's a delivery system for Mark [Boal]'s content and their latest idea was to make a movie about the failed capture of Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora in late 2001. But even after Hurt Locker's success, Bigelow and Boal couldn't sell the pitch to a studio. Backed by an independent investor, Boal and Bigelow continued to work on the project, after shopping it around Hollywood.

On May 1, 2011, Bigelow and Boal watched as President Obama informed the nation of Bin Laden's death at the hands of a Navy SEALS team in Pakistan. The news turned out to be both good and bad for the Tora Bora project. The day after the news, Sony's Amy Pascal, remembering their pitch from months earlier, called up Bigelow and asked if she was still doing a movie about Bin Laden. Sony agreed to distribute the picture before even really knowing what the picture was.

But writing a movie about the failed capture of Bin Laden seemed silly after his killing. Not wanting to scrap the entire script, Bigelow and Boal talked about trying to frame both events in one movie, but ultimately decided to drop the Tora Bora incident altogether.

Boal still faced a mountain of a task to get through in order to even begin piecing together a new script. He researched the events almost contemporaneously, uncovering information on the SEALS mission and about how the CIA finally, after four years of almost no news, tracked down Bin Laden. Although there is some contention about whether the CIA allowed Boal and Bigelow access to classified files in order to research the movie, researching the script was only the beginning.

And Bigelow seems to have a penchant for never taking the easy way. Like with Hurt Locker, Bigelow wanted to cast mostly unknown actors (Jessica Chastain was not an Oscar nominee when she was cast.) “If you are dealing with characters who are meant to be true to life, I want it to be an original experience for the audience. I don't want them thinking about a past performance of the actor,” Bigelow said during an interview on Charlie Rose.

Again, shooting took place in the Middle East, in Jordan and India, and the forty minute action sequence that ends the movie was the biggest object of all. Bigelow described the process: how the actors playing the SEALS team had to learn how special forces operate and how she had to work with the crew to figure out the logistics of shooting. The raid took place on a moonless night and Bigelow wanted to recreate it as well as use the night vision lenses the real SEALS would have used. “And we built the compound [where Bin Laden was killed] from the ground up,” Bigelow added.

Just as putting the film together wasn't a simple process, Zero Dark Thirty's plot is not simple to describe. Boal and Bigelow say it's really three stories in one: 1) How the CIA found someone to lead them to Bin Laden, 2) How they made the decision to go in, and 3) How they actually killed Bin Laden.

The story revolves around Jessica Chastain's character, Maya, a CIA operative who followed a lead—one of many—that eventually leads to bin Laden.

Many assume the fact the main character is female is a creative choice made by Bigelow and Boal, but in Boal's research, he found a female CIA agent was the one who worked on this particular lead over a period of many years.

“It wouldn't have mattered to me if the main character was a man or woman,” Bigelow said. “I want to tell the story.” In a recent New York magazine Vulture interview, Bigelow recounted a story about a screening of the film in New York. “This woman came out of the theater, and she was crying and shaking, and she came up to me and said, ‘It wasn’t a woman, though, was it?’ And I said, ‘No, it was!’”

Upon its release, there was criticism from politicians and critics alike saying the film supported the use of torture to gain intelligence information.

Both have tried to address the accusations, but Bigelow might have said it best in a recent acceptance speech after winning Best Director at the New York Film Critics Circle. "I thankfully want to say that I'm standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhumane practices," Bigelow said. "No author could ever write about them, and no filmmaker could ever delve into the knotty subjects of our time."

On Thursday, January 10, when the Academy Award nominations were announced, Bigelow was not nominated for Best Director. Zero Dark Thirty garnered nominations for Chastain, Boal's screenplay, and Best Picture.

Maybe the lack of a nomination for Bigelow this year will simply lead to another great comeback story when she makes her next picture.

When asked if the next film she's going to make will be easier than filming in 130 degree heat or Jordanian prisons, Bigelow confesses she often promises herself the next film will be easier. “Oh, I say it all the time,” she said. “All the time. I just don't mean it.”

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Sources: Harris, Mark. Inside Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow's Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty 

Rose, Charlie. Zero Dark Thirty - Interview with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal 

Taylor, Clarke. Cult Favorite Kathryn Bigelow 

Tobias, Scott. The AV Club: Kathryn Bigelow 

The arts...

Everyone's been talking about Marvin Hamlisch today. I've read memories of meeting him, stories about when and where people saw their first production of A Chorus Line. That's what I love about the arts. If you connect with the material, the performances, it will be etched on your heart. I love to hear people's stories and memories of when they saw a show and what they remember about it. Some people will claim it changed their life. And I believe that, that art, the arts, can change lives. It may not be a huge, life-altering change, but even in the tiniest of ways. You are opening your heart and mind to this idea, this show, this moment. I think that's amazing.

Formative People (Or How I Fell in Love with New York)

After saying I didn't want to read a bunch of remembrances of Nora Ephron, I went and wrote one of my own.

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The odd thing for me about Nora Ephron's passing was the timing. I'd just read her essay collection, I Remember Nothing last week, where a frequent topic of discussion is old age and death. While I was reading, I thought, “Oh, Nora, you're going to live to a very old age.” She was one of those women I could imagine working until she was ninety.

After admiring Nora and her work for most of my lifespan, I'd finally gotten the opportunity to see her in person at BAM's screening of This Is My Life, the first movie she wrote AND directed (at fifty). I remember being so overwhelmed at seeing her in person. It was a reaction unlike any I've had to other famous people I've seen or met in person. I think some of it was nostalgia bubbling up, because her movies were such an integral part of my formative years, but mostly, it was the realization of how important her work was to me, and how much she inspired me, perhaps moreso than any other person other than my family.

I am not an overly emotional person, I don't usually get upset about things, but I cry at the drop of a hat when it comes to TV and movies. When I was twelve, I remember renting You've Got Mail (on VHS) and watching it with my mom. I cried at the end. There's a happy ending and I was crying. I think it's because it was the first time I remember wanting something so much. I wanted to live in that world. I wanted to live in New York, in a little apartment on the Upper West Side, and work in a bookstore or write children's books.

I have now watched Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally too many times to count. When I went to see Julie & Julia at the AMC theater near Lincoln Center, nearly two weeks after it came out, the theater was packed. There was no where to sit. So I sat on the floor. It was worth it. Throughout the film, I laughed and cried and recognized pieces of myself in the characters.

I don't remember when I found out that Nora Ephron was a journalist, but it doesn't really matter, because it was just another way this wonderful woman mirrored what I wanted out of life. I started out wanting to be a journalist. "A gymnast." "A journalist." "Right, that's what I said."

When I was twenty-four, I moved to New York and I adore it. Sometimes it's hard to find the magic of Nora Ephron's New York when you live in the day-to-day grind of the city, but it's there. She always found it, wrote about it, and captured it on film. When the city is giving me a hard time, I like to take walks to clear my head, and usually there will be a moment, often more than one, that makes me smile and remember why I love this city so much. Or as I have found myself doing lately, I read her words about the city and remember the possibility. New York has so much possibility. You never know what's going to happen.

Last night, I came home, had a very indulgent dinner—I think Nora would have appreciated it—and watched When Harry Met Sally. It made me realize how many places in New York I still want to visit. Yesterday was a very overcast, breezy New York day, but last night, as I sat in my living room, the windows were open and I let the sounds from the street travel into the apartment.

I'm devastated we will never have another new Nora Ephron film or book to cherish, but I am happy to still have her words and movies to discover. I'm ashamed to admit I have never seen Heartburn and I know I will read and re-read her books and essays for years to come.

Mostly, I will think of her in those moments when New York is magical.

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Her essays from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/nora-ephron-1941-2012.html

Jan Maxwell: I played a monstrous woman. And I was in heaven.

Author's Note: Back in October, there was an entry about Jan Maxwell, a theater actress, written mostly in first person as the blog writer's 'discovery' of her. As a theater nerd, I love hearing when other people first saw other actors and actresses. But for Ms. Maxwell, I wanted to come back and write a more complete entry about her career.

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Jan Maxwell jokes that she 'found religion' in order to make it to New York.

Having grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, she attended community theater performances with her father, but wanted to see work produced in New York, so when she saw a campus ministries flier posted at her university about a trip to New York for fifty dollars, she jumped at the chance.

Her self-education in the New York theater scene drew her back east a few years later. One class away from graduating, Maxwell took the money her parents gave her for enrollment and used it move instead. According to her American Theatre Wing Downstage Center interview, Maxwell said: “I came out here blind.” She stayed with a friend, bought Backstage, and went to auditions. For a girl from North Dakota, she says the culture shock was very intense.

Maxwell was an understudy in the Broadway musical, City of Angels, and she eventually took over dual roles of Alaura and Carla, which were originated by Dee Hoty. She was also part of the American cast that replaced the original Irish cast in Dancing at Lughnasa. And in 1997, she played Kristine, the best friend of Janet McTeer's Nora in A Doll's House.

But as with most actresses featured on this blog, her career didn't really take off until she was in her 40s. She received her first Tony Award nomination (Best Featured Actress in a Musical) for her role of Baroness Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This role seemed to allow her a lot of creative input, as she came up with a couple comic moments for her character that weren't in the original script. In one scene, the Baroness is polishing a gun, and Maxwell had the idea for it to go off and accidentally kill someone, after which she declared, “Oopsy daisy.”

The characters she embodies are often darker: the Baroness in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a child trafficker in Coram Boy (which earned her a second Tony nod), even Kath in Entertaining Mr. Sloane is hardly an easy character to empathize with, but Maxwell enjoys the challenge and seems to delight in it. “I enjoy being the salt in all that sugar,” she stated in her Downstage Center interview.

Even in plays not as well received by the critics, Maxwell is often praised. In Sixteen Wounded, a short-lived production (Maxwell jokingly refers to it as 'Sixteen Performaces'), in which she played Sonya, a Russian prostitute, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley credited her performance with: “an inkling of complexity in her character....But it's an idea that registers fully only when Ms. Maxwell is around” (The New York Times, April 16, 2004).

In 2010, she became only the fourth actor to receive two Tony nominations in the same season. One for Best Actress in a Play for her role as Julie Cavendish in The Royal Family and another as Best Featured Actress in a Play for Maria in Lend Me a Tenor.

Maxwell often speaks of how great an experience The Royal Family was. Rosemary Harris, who played the role of Julie in the 1975 version, moved up to the family matriarch role as Fanny in the 2009 version. Maxwell stepped into the role of Julie, but says Harris never told her how the role should be done and let Maxwell make it her own.

“I think for me, one out of ten theatrical experiences is fulfilling,” Maxwell said.

Even if that's the case, Maxwell looks as if she's enjoying herself on stage, especially in her most recent role as Phyllis Rogers Stone in Stephen Sondheim's Follies.

Although Maxwell jokes about her musical ability: “If they want someone with a five note range who is more of an actress, they call me”, if Follies earns Maxwell a fifth Tony nomination for her performance, she will be the second woman (after Angela Lansbury) to have been nominated in all four of the Tony actor categories.

Regardless of whether this milestone occurs or not, it sounds like Maxwell will be on the stage for a long time to come.  

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Source: American Theatre Wing Downstage Center podcast (Jan Maxwell, November 2008)

Anjelica Huston: Age is not enviable in America.

"Age is not enviable in America. It's not applauded all that strongly. You have to take it all with a grain of salt."

 -Anjelica Huston

Let's try and ignore the fact that Anjelica Huston comes from a film family dynasty. Although, her family history and childhood are two of the things that make her seem so enigmatic and worldly.

With her father, John Huston being an actor and director, and her mother, Enrica Soma, a ballerina, Huston spent most of her childhood living in England and Ireland. She returned to the United States when she was a teenager, soon after her mother died in a car accident. At 5'10'', Huston took up modeling for a few years.

Marie Clare (1973)

In the early 1980s, she began to seriously study acting, and in 1985, her father cast her as Maerose, the daughter of a Mafia don in Prizzi's Honor. Huston played opposite Jack Nicholson, her boyfriend at the time. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role (her father and grandfather have Oscars as well.)

Huston worked steadily in the 1980s and early 90s, earning another Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress, for her role as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters. Other notable parts were in Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone and her father's adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead.

Never one to take commercial parts, Huston hooked up with another director, Wes Anderson, in the early 2000s and has been an essential part of his ensemble films, including The Royal Tenenbaums (playing matriarch Etheline Tenenbaum), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited.

More recently, Huston has made the transition from film to television, appearing as the Broadway producer Eileen Rand in NBC's new series, Smash.

At the start of the series, Eileen is going through a tumultuous divorce. Having high hopes for anything Huston is in, it was a bit disappointing to watch her throw her martinis into the face of her ex-husband for the first couple episodes. It seemed Eileen was going to be stuck in the 'sassy older lady that the audience sees too little of' box, but it seems that's starting to change.

Eileen seems to be a strong and well-known producer in this televised version of Broadway, but we see as her storyline unravels that her relationship with her husband was the prime source of her monetary connections—both in her personal and professional life. It's an interesting take on a 'career woman' character. Over the past couple episodes, Eileen has started to come into her own, managing to find money (or at least interest) in the musical she is producing, based on Marilyn Monroe's life, as well as step out of her husband's shadow and move into a new apartment on the Lower East Side.

She's also taken to spending time at a local watering hole which is quite different from her usual table at Sardi's. Eileen also seems to have caught the eye of the bartender, Nick (All My Children's Thorsten Kaye). Meryl Streep's daughter, Grace Gummer, even showed up in the last episode, to portray Eileen's wayward daughter.

With those two promising additions to her character, it will be interesting to see where Eileen Rand lands by season's end. Hopefully sipping martinis and celebrating her new found independence and success.  

There is no golden palace.

Author's Note: I don't use this blog to talk about theatre (although I should) and this post doesn't focus on women in the theatre specifically, but it's my blog, and this is important enough to me to write about. 

The lucky thing about living in New York is the amount of amazing performances that can be seen on stage, not just on Broadway, but off-Broadway and even off off-Broadway, in experimental or lab theaters. Now. Here. This., which is currently having a developmental lab production at the Vineyard Theatre, is a prime example.

The production was written by Susan Blackwell and Hunter Bell and involves the rest of the [title of show] gang, Jeff Bowen and Heidi Blickenstaff. And if you don’t know what [title of show] is, Wikipedia that shit.

Now. Here. This. is still in the process of being developed and the performances at the Vineyard are part of the process, allowing rewriting and tweaking to occur. Most of the show is off-book, but there are parts that are not--which did not detract from the performances.

The premise of the show is about living in the intersection of…well, Susan Blackwell can say it in a more concise way: “There was this monk, Thomas Merton, who said that if you can get to the intersection of Now: this moment in time; Here: exactly where you are; This: exactly what you’re doing—if you can get to the intersection of those three things, then there’s nothing to fear and you can really appreciate your life.”

The “theatri-concert” is comprised of stories from each of the cast members, as well as mutual embarrassing stories (“hot moments”), stories about trying to fit in, and stories about conquering fears. And the stories do not mean listening to monologues for 90 minutes, but are often told through song.

To me, theatre and the theatre community is about acceptance. NHT certainly touches upon how all of the characters (and really, the actors are playing themselves much like they did in [tos]) struggle with acceptance: acceptance from their family, their peers, and ultimately, acceptance of themselves.

NHT is also about—much like [tos] was—conquering fear and allowing yourself to pursue what you really love. Slaying vampires. Realizing that you don’t need Gloria Vanderbilt jeans or an Izod polo shirt to fit in or be who you think you should be. You don’t need a golden palace to create great works. All of those ideas tie together in a way: you have to accept yourself for who you are in order to conquer your fears and create what you want to create or to do what you love.

It sounds simple when it’s written down, but it is easy to forget. There are always concerns and worries and your mind’s own vampires standing in the way of the Now. Here. This.

Don't say the c word. (Chick flick)

As much as I write about ladies I love--and I haven't even touched on a quarter of the amazing actresses out there--they could easily all be placed on an endangered species list.

We live in a male-centered entertainment world. Women will go see bromances (can we start calling them dick flicks?) or the countless action and superhero movies that Hollywood grinds out every year, yet men will not go see anything that is labeled "female" in the slightest.

Thus, as a recent Salon article mentioned, a grassroots campaign began to convince the studios that women's points of view are still worthy of being explored and yes, can be funny. Bridesmaids seems to be the golden ticket. (Although its marketing still leaves something to be desired. I recently had to correct a female friend of mine that it was not in fact, a Judd Apatow movie, but written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.)

It is well worth our time and money. Bridesmaids is not only funny, but gets the friendships and everyday ups and downs right.

First of all, Kristen Wiig's quirky awkwardness is almost more familiar to me than Liz Lemon. She carries herself with a slight slouch which any shy, tall girl possesses. Annie's mannerisms when she is forced into an social situation she's not entirely comfortable in remind me of numerous friends. Annie's ability to look down on herself because she's lost her job and is living at home is so familiar to me as I struggle to figure out my career path. She doesn't see herself worthy of a good relationship with a nice guy, which I've seen so many of my friends (and possibly myself) do. And feeling like you're losing your best friend? I think there have been moments in most people's lives where they can relate to that.

The Judd Apatow-ing of the movie--basically the addition of a food poisoning scene in a bridal salon--may have been a little extreme, but the rest of the comedy felt pitch perfect.

You don't see these movies anymore. Baby Mama is the last funny movie I can think of that featured two women as the leads. I think it's interesting that both of these films are about events that are female-centric (being a bridesmaid, having a child), but I don't think that should prevent males from finding them funny.

Don't let these movies become extinct.

From Salon:

Yes we can … buy tickets to a Kristen Wiig movie in an effort to persuade Hollywood that multidimensional women exist, spend money and deserve to be represented on film.

What's motivating this campaign is simple: Hollywood studios do not make comedies for or about women anymore. Yes, they used to. As recently as a few decades ago, when comedy stars like Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn stalked through theaters alongside supporting players like Teri Garr, Carol Kane and Madeline Kahn, bringing us movies that were sometimes sublime and sometimes disposable, but which had women at their heart. Think "Private Benjamin," "9 to 5," "Outrageous Fortune," "Down and Out in Beverly Hills"…


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Salon: Seeing Bridesmaids is a social responsibility

NY Times: Can Kristen Wiig turn on the charm?