Paul Feig Teaming Up With Hollywood Leaders In New Initiative to Address Gender Inequality in Film
Sponsored and represented by high-ranking professionals across all genres and professions in film and television, a new supergroup aims to offer Hollywood all the tools it needs to overcome gender disparities, and comedy director Paul Feig is a big part of it. The Hollywood Reporter broke the exclusive story on the group, now called ReFrame, which has been in its top-secret fledgling stages for the last few years since its inception. Non-profit Women in Film president Cathy Schulman was struck in 2011 by how she was “repeating statistics that have essentially been flatlined since 1998” and brought in the executive director of the Sundance Institute Keri Putnam to research priorities and strategies in equalizing representation in film. The homework assignment blossomed into a two-day “top secret” summit that involved fifty-two influential executives and creatives willing to volunteer as senior-level ambassadors to hone a three-pronged mission. Now set to meet with all major six networks, Netflix and Hulu, the mission utilizes a “stamp system”, comparable to eco-friendly LEED certifications, but for companies inclusive of women and diversity, as well as the “Culture Change Toolkit”-a program to educate companies on unconscious hiring biases homogenizing pools of applicants. Then, ReFrame wants to invoke an aggressive protege sponsorship program that gives women the same opportunities as their male counterparts to learn on the job from being assigned movies slightly beyond your capacity and experience level.
Feig has directed some of the best comedies of the past ten years with Bridesmaids and Spy deserving status on any all time greatest comedies lists. Feig is also thought to be one of the best female directors in Hollywood, and his focus on working with great and talented women makes him an excellent choice to participate in ReFrame. He’s also dealt with gender bias head on when his decision to cast women in the Ghostbusters reboot met with heavy resistance.
ReFrame has the statistics to back up how underserved female directors are, how many fewer chances minorities are given than white counterparts and they’ve got a dynamic strategy that encourages economic and social motivations for companies to diversify instead of shaming. However, this initiative is mostly headed by white women and men if the Hollywood Reporter photoshoot is anything to go by. Michael De Luca, producer of this year’s Academy Awards, says “If you’re a studio executive and you request a list of directors or writers from an agency and it comes back 99 percent male, make that second phone call: ‘Hey, do you have any clients that are female?’” What about black and female? Or Latina and genderqueer? It would be a shame if this initiative like the American suffragette movement of the early 20th century settled on being a white-washed initiative that still left behind many, many groups.
Beyond that possible pitfall, ReFrame has meetings with a total of twenty-two studios and networks with all company heads present and a second wave of meetings to ensure they reach all financiers by the end of the year. Feig’s concern is a pushback from individuals who think they’re already doing enough, that, “everyone agrees with the cause and thinks, ‘We’re on that.’ But it’s about getting to that next level where you actually physically do it.”
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