Top 10 Reasons Carol Burnett is Awesome

Last week, Carol Burnett (who turns 80 this Friday) appeared on Larry King Now to promote her new book, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story. During the interview, Larry asked her how The Carol Burnett Show came to be. Check it out:

If she's not a trailblazer, I don't know who is. Here are the Top 10 Reasons Carol Burnett is Awesome:

10) No Frills Airline

Doing the Math on Women Screenwriters - NYTVF/Comedy Central Pilot Competition

The NYTVF/Comedy Central comedy pilot competition just announced its 25 finalists.  Once again the number of women's names on the list is bad enough to shock any fair-minded person.  Or maybe art is different from everyday life and more like sport where women have less writing "muscle tissue" than men.  That's the only explanation.  Women may be over half of the overall population, but we are apparently not so good with language and words, or we are simply not as funny as men.

Or, maybe, that yardstick being used by male and female judges is neither inches nor centimeters, but male-imeters.  I don't know.  But only two of the 25 were all-female in creation (and possibly a third, some names being gender neutral...).  It's a little better when you look at the overall numbers 10 out of the 50 names being female. These numbers are actually pretty high for the numbers we have been seeing coming out of contests recently, but it is depressing to even think about calling them good.

What we don't know is what percentage of the submissions were female.  Perhaps the finalist selections perfectly reflects the ratio of submissions in this contest.  However, that defense cuts two ways. If you use it as a defense of the lower numbers of women included here, then you must allow for it as offense when the number of women does not reflect the proportion of, say, Dramatist Guild or Directors Guild membership by gender.  And this does not even begin to touch on structural barriers that might make a female writer with a healthy sense of self-worth decide, after seeing the gender bias in the film industry, to take her ideas elsewhere.

IndieReign – Self-Distribution

I’m still one handed, so forgive me for typos. If this sentence makes no sense to you, read last week’s post. Let’s say you completed a film, played some festivals and now you’re ready to show it to the world. You can always post it on Youtube and Vimeo for free. And there it is, out there, for the world to see. But let’s say you’d like to make some money, charge a fee, because after all, your film cost money and time and art has value. Well, look no further and check out IndieReign. The site is easy to navigate, it’s a non-exclusive license, so you can always sell your film elsewhere, and, most important, it empowers you, the filmmaker. You control the price, you promote it, you keep the money.

*Do you have a helpful resource you’d like to promote? Do you know about a great resource to share with the Broads? Contact me to be a part of helpful resource Friday.

A Big World for Little Movies

Short films are the new black. Now that every person with a pulse has at least one viewing device within arm's reach at all times, there's a big appetite for little movies. Short films are being consumed at festivals, through pod casts, on the internet...they're everywhere. This is good news for short filmmakers. But with all this growth comes more choices. Which contests are right for you? Is a pod cast better? Should you post your short on YouTube or Vimeo? Or is it better to post it on your personal web page and use social networking to drive an audience to it? How do short film distributors figure in to today's landscape? And what about the festivals? What is a "festival" short? Is there a difference between a "Sundance Short" and a "Cannes Short"?  Is it better to shoot a single short film for festivals or develop and produce a webseries? Phew. Luckily all this and more will be discussed at an event called - It's a Big World for Little Movies: The Complete Guide to Short Film Content. It's happening at the EGYPTIAN THEATER, THURSDAY, APRIL 18th @ 7:30. 
Thomas Ethan Harris will moderate a panel of short-film business and programming leaders to talk about trends, current channels of distribution and the future of short-film exposure. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to http://tinyurl.com/dyenn9s

The Top 10 Excuses for Not Hiring a Woman Director (That I Imagine Executives Think...)

How do executives think? Who knows. 'Tis a mystery. But, with more women than men graduating film school these days, there has to be some reason why women are still such a minority in the world of feature film directors. The Top 10 Excuses for Not Hiring a Woman Director (That I Imagine Executives Think...):

10) We probably need extra insurance for her women things. Does our policy cover boobs?

9) Can women even have jobs?

8) Doesn't she have children to take care of? Who is taking care of her children?

7) How can the crew be expected to listen to her and look at her boobs?

6) You get what you pay for, and there's no way we can pay a woman as much as a man.

The Play's the Thing... Classes in Playwriting

I'm planning a series of playwriting class modules.  I come from the theater, and long before I started the Broad Humor Film Festival, I wrote, directed, produced, taught and won awards in theater. Broad Humor may be about screen writing and directing, but the root of those arts is in theater. Having read every Broad Humor screenplay submission for seven years now, I think there is a great deal that screenwriters can learn from playwriting. I want to share some of those insights and offer some tools. I'm planning on limiting class size to 6. Let me know if you want to take part.

So why plays and not screenplays?

For writers, plays are the best form to learn about creating character and conflict, and to understand the shape of both comedy and drama. Their scale keeps the focus on the human element of the story. A play is also complete in a way that a screenplay can never be. In a play script, the writer controls not just plot and dialogue but setting and the crucial element of time. The timing happens on the page, not in the cutting room.  The build of drama and the release of comedy remain in the writer’s hands.  This is why many film industry leaders prefer to read plays rather than spec screenplays as a way of measuring a writer’s skills.

Adventures in Brazil

Carol Costa, Julia Camara and Renata Hallada

Greetings from Brazil. My post is a day late and not going to be exactly what I had in mind. I came here to attend the premiere of my latest feature Open Road (titled Angie in Brazil) as I mentioned last week. I had great plans for this trip, multiple meetings about other projects, my crowdfunding campaign, time with family and friends, and attending all of the events related to the movie. Like they say, "if you want to make God laugh, make plans." I fell down the stairs at the movie theater in Rio, just as myself, the director and the producer were getting ready to introduce the film. An embarrassing tumble and a fractured arm left me now typing right handed (I'm left handed) on my iPad. So, the only helpful resource I have for you this week is some advice from an injured filmmaker:

1-Learn to go with the flow. I was forced to slow down severely, this may be a blessing as I was near exhaustion.

2-Trust the people around you and be ready to receive love and help. (This is still a challenge for me, but I wouldn't have gotten through a full night at the ER in a strange city without my mom and my friend and producing partner Ricardo Rihan.)