Intro for January 30, 2017

Dear Gossips,

The Atlantic published a piece the other day on The Hollywood List Everyone Wants To Be On: it’s the Black List, the annual “anonymous survey in which industry professionals name the scripts they liked the most that year”. The list was started in 2005 by Franklin Leonard and it’s become one way to convince studio executives that projects they wouldn’t ordinarily finance deserve a shot. A decade later, Franklin has turned the Black List into a kind of writing workshop, mentoring many who want to get into the business but simply don’t have the contacts or the resources to just move to Hollywood and start knocking on doors. Still, he concedes that “the industry is making a subset of all scripts that exist, based on a set of beliefs about what’s profitable. Many of the beliefs about what’s profitable are fundamentally racist and misogynist.”

There’s a prevailing fallacy in Hollywood that films led by women and/or featuring people of colour don’t make money. Hidden Figures just exceeded the $100 million mark at the box office. And, after winning Best Ensemble last night at the SAGs, the guild’s equivalent of Best Picture, there will be more. The recognition, then, works on several levels. First, it directly challenges the assumption that there is no audience for new stories, not just stories about white dudes triumphing over everything from the wilderness to Wall Street. Second, it honours the accomplishments of women who were largely left out of history books. Third, it will hopefully encourage more young women to get into STEM, despite what they may confront when they make that decision. Last year I read a report at the Harvard Business Review on the 5 Biases Pushing Women Out Of STEM. One of those biases is that women in STEM have to keep proving themselves over and over again while their male colleagues typically don’t have to verify or justify their answers. “Are you sure? Have you double-checked?” This is what Hollywood does too. Hidden Figures has been an undeniable success. But I promise you there are some who will call it a fluke, an exception, a one-off. That they need more examples, more evidence that people will go to the movies to see women and people of colour before they’re willing to make the investment.

Which is why it felt so good to see Hidden Figures end the night. Because a film about women AT WORK was celebrated. Will it challenge La La Land for Best Picture? Wellllll…La La Land took the Producers Guild Award for Best Picture on Saturday and is still the favourite. But the race did get a little more interesting.

We’ll be recapping SAG moments and fashion all day on the main page and on the LifeStyle page.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey