Satirizing Sarah

If you care about women's humor, as I do, Sarah Palin's arrival on the national political scene has been a boon. One of the Broads from this year's festival, Susan Deming, has made a musical McCain/Palin musical spoof, "I Picked a Girl," that very definitely hits the funny bone. Susan's "singing Sarah" is a hoot. Watch it here. Susan has been doing political parodies of Hillary as well, and all I can do is salute.

And she's not the only one. Other Palin spoofs are here and here to mention a couple.

More women's satire, that's what I want to see. Maybe we should do a political blog retrospective next year.

Tamar Halpern's "Your Name Here" August 16

A bunch of us broads caught a screening of Tamar Halpern's (BH 2007 Best Feature) sweet and fun feature, Your Name Here when it screened at Dances With Films.

I don't want to call Your Name Here a mockumentary because the word implies a certain attitude of superiority on the part of the filmmaker toward her subject. This is full of affection and the laughter is based in love. It follows two 14-year-old kids who play and write music and try to start a band in Silverlake. So much of the story rings so ridiculously true, in part because of how the two lead actors, who were 14 at the time, friends and musicians, improvised scenes speaking and acting the way 14-year-olds do. An adult could never write it so well. The film is a blast for adults and for kids.

Here' s the logline...

The story of two kids who want to start a band, Your Name Here is about to be endorsed by KidsFirst, an organization dedicated to quality children's programming. Shot in Silverlake, wholly improvised, and driven by original music written by the stars, Jordan and Michael, Your Name Here is a 'Once' for kids.

Trailer: www.tamarolandpictures.com, click Your Name Here
More clips, photos, and general shenanigans: www.myspace.com/yournamehereband
And of course, Your Name Here is now on Facebook

There's another screening here in LA on Aug 16th, Saturday, 4pm, Laemmle Grand Downtown, as part of the Downtown Film Fest. Don't miss it.

Broads Blogging Workshop

A bunch of broads came over and we went set up accounts to blog and twitter together as a way of building our profiles. It was exciting in the same way that the big BlogHer conference had been for me because the small number was more than compensated by the fact that these were my group of gals. So now, if you go to Twitter, you can read the twitter streams not only for me at twitter.com/BroadHumor, but for Donna Wheeler , Suzi Iselt, and Michelle Clay.

So if you didn't or couldn't come, here's what you need to do. Create a blog. If you're an absolute beginner, here's how to do it in simple steps.

Blogger can set you up in a few easy steps. Yes, you'll get frustrated when you get errors because your username or blog name are taken, or you didn't check a box, or you couldn't read the insanely difficult security question that keeps bots from creating blogs. But it's only three pages of that, and you're in. Write something and hit "PUBLISH POST" (SAVE NOW merely creates a draft - it won't show up on your blog). Click the "VIEW BLOG' button when it finishes publishing and bookmark the page so that tomorrow you won't wonder how to find your blog again. Next, go to the "dashboard" (the link is on the top right) and create your profile and save.

You're almost done. Next to your blog listing is a link to "settings." Clicking that will bring up a page where you can give a general description of the blog. Save it. Then go to the "comments" link and scroll down to control comments. For example, do you want to restrict comments to bloggers or let anyone comment? You have to change the setting to make commenting open to everyone. You should leave verification on so that you don't get spam comments. And you might want to have Blogger send you an email whenever you get a comment by putting your email in the box at the bottom. Click save and you're done.

If you're feeling brave, you can go to the "template" link and play with the layout of your page. Or you can just click over to your blog and admire it. Then send a Twitter post - called a "tweet" - that you are up and running.

The Invisible (wo)Man in Hollywood - The Female Screenwriter

Who knew the word 'writer' was a gendered noun like 'steward,' 'king,' and 'stallion.' Got this insight via a righteous rant called The Evolution of the "Male" Hollywood Writer by Melissa Silverstein of the Women & Hollywood blog.

We've talked a lot in the festival about this. The festival was started because of the comedy competition featured in the Writer's Guild magazine four years ago. Not one of the finalists was a woman. Since submissions were blind, many felt the contest was objective proof that women just don't write the stuff of movies. Many people, men and women, feel that women writers should stop whining and start writing better. Period.

After three years of reading scripts and watching films by women, I see the problem as one of fundamental worldview divergence. Bear with me as I take jump back in time to explain.

I remember the fuss a number of years back about the Kohlberg Scale which rated moral development in humans. Kohlberg happened to find men's moral development spread out along a nice sigma curve and women more or less clustered in the middle. At the time, the conclusions drawn suggested that while women as a group were more 'good,' they lacked the qualities to rise to moral greatness. Here we see the same pattern of thinking that dominates this business, where many of the movers and shakers regret the 'reality' that women's scripts, while not bad, are not quite good enough to warrant the money and effort that goes into a studio movie.

Kohlberg's Scale used a hierarchy of values derived from all male subjects. One research assistant at the time, Carol Gilligan, saw that when women were included, they struggled against the frame of responses written into the test. Later, her own research into the field suggested that women operated on a different scale, one based on maintaining a web or relationships rather than an ladder of individual attainment. On her scale, men came up mostly in the middle - the majority being neither terrible nor great.

Imagine two axes, like a plus sign (+). Viewed from the side, the vertical line shows its full length but the horizontal one appears as just a blob in the middle. Shift perspective and look down from the top, and suddenly the horizontal has a full range and the vertical is stuck at the middle.

My experience with the festival and reading all the scripts that come through illustrate this difference perfectly. I've been reading to find out what women write and not looking to see how well they fit in the Hollywood paradigm. In general, the scripts I get from women tend create a world into which they put a character or characters and then proceed to create the humor out of what the world elicits from its denizens. The end result is a shift in the "fittingness" of the people into the world. This is contrary to the entertainment biz wisdom of making a script about one character's journey, building the world around the character so as to maximize the humor/drama/suspense/you-name-the-genre, and shattering the world if need be to deliver the character to his destiny. This is very broad, but bear with me a bit more.

These women's scripts do not deliver the same monumental climax and a cigarette that the men's scripts do, hence their perceived weakness. And while there is nothing wrong with the way men climax, the world is poorer when women's climaxes are not also a part of the public narrative. From watching audiences male and female who are watching the films in our festival that have been made from women's stories. it turns out that the guys enjoy the multi-climax experience enthusiastically. It is not that the typical Hollywood structure is wrong; it has been polished and perfected for almost a hundred years. But it is a bit like a country with only one political party. It cannot help but degenerate. Room must be made for alternate narratives to be shown and polished so all films can benefit.

How do we do that? That is the question and challenge of the Broad Humor Film Festival, of this blog, and of my life.

Attacking the BlogHer Conference and Women's Writing

There have been several articles written attacking the BlogHer conference that I went to last weekend for being so...well... woman-centered. One guy complained that no guys were on any of the panels. And a woman today found the idea of lactation lounges and child care and Sesame Street being there as proof that women aren't worthy of being taken seriously. (Katherine Berry's "Sisters: The Path to Punditry Isn't Paved With Baby Powder") Her closing riposte was that the glass ceiling in blogging is merely a question of quality and not gender:

It’s not because you’re a female. It’s because you bore them.

I couln't help it. I posted a long comment on her article. I thought you might like to read it as it applies equally to the film biz and goes to the heart of why I started Broad Humor three and a half years ago.

Back in the 70's I remember that many women agreed with the cultural canon that women's writing was not "real" writing, being personal and so not universal. The arguments made here are the same ones I read thirty years ago.

Back then, some women, Aunt Hen-like (as opposed to Uncle Tom), did quite well, for girls, writing in the same vein as men. And a few Olympian talents shone through gender biases effortlessly. But what about the rest of us who are neither male-identified nor Nobel quality? Do we "stifle ourselves" as Archie Bunker was wont to shout?

When a whole segment of the population, passionate, educated and talented, finds its writing disparaged and denied a place at the publishing table because it carries no interest for the 49% of the population who happen to be male (a minority if you do the math) this lack impoverishes us all culturally. Book publishing has caught up with the reality of women's writing and is making a profit from it. But the blogosphere has no such incentive to change. Fellow bloggers will not profit from the success of subject matter they have no personal stake in. It would be the same as if the book publishing community let the authors decide who deserved to be included.

I find this need to attack what does not harm you puzzling. Men don't fear that one group of men acting foolishly will reflect badly on them. Why should you care how these women act unless you feel deep down that women are second class and you despise it.

Telling Your Future

Planning on finishing shooting your short by Labor Day? Got a festival you are going to enter come hell or high water? Now you can send yourself time capsule emails of encouragement or congratulations. Go to Future Me and tell yourself exactly what you will need to hear.

All the motivational gurus say you have to work as if you have already achieved the success you desire. By sending yourself the pat on the back here and now that will get delivered then and there, it might just do the trick.

Or just send a birthday note to yourself.

Social Marketing Blogroll

The Friday Traffic Report has put up a list of the top 142 blogs that help with social network marketing. If you want to learn about how to do this for your film or project, here is a resource to get ideas and advice.


http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/social-networking/top-142-social-marketing-blogs-on-the-web/