From the NYT:
The Gender Gap in Screen Time
Cinemetrics Extracts Statistical Data From Movies
By KEVIN B. LEE FEB. 27, 2014
... Today the Cinemetrics website, run by Yuri Tsivian, a scholar at the University of Chicago, Daria Khitrova and Gunars Civjans, holds statistics on more than 14,000 films.
... One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes. (When you add in supporting categories, all competing actors averaged 59 minutes, while all competing actresses averaged 42 minutes.) Last year’s results were even more imbalanced: nominated male stars averaged 100 minutes on screen to the lead actresses’ 49 minutes.
I've always said that Best Actor is a much bigger award than Best Actress.
Actors have longer to perfect their crafts as leads in big pictures than do actresses (e.g., Best Actor last year was 55-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg's Lincoln versus 22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook.) While Judy Dench and Meryl Streep continue to get Best Actress nominations, the size of their movies drops as they age.
Most screenwriters and almost all top directors are male (e.g., Silver Linings Playbook was David O. Russell's quasi-autobiographical tale about his mental problems, so Bradley Cooper is the main character while Lawrence is cast as The Girl).
Mr. Bordwell said genre might help explain the gender gap. Male stars are typically the protagonists in action or goal-oriented narratives that require the viewer to follow the story through the lead’s experiences. Female stars are more typically cast in melodramas that require the lead to serve as a hub connecting different characters and subplots. ...
Mr. Cassidy [editor of American Hustle] wagered that there wasn’t much of a gap in the screen time between the two nominated leads of his film. But Christian Bale actually has 60 minutes of screen to Amy Adams’s 46 minutes, a significant difference even in an ensemble movie.
Is there really any doubt that Christian Bale's conman is the main character? American Hustle opens and closes with him. He's the character David O. Russell most identifies with. It's not exactly a secret that successful directors like Russell or Scorsese often see a lot of themselves in the flim-flam man main characters that attract them to projects like American Hustle or Wolf of Wall Street.
In general, as you go up the quality scale, the gender gap gets bigger. There are plenty of run-of-the-mill TV shows where actresses of a certain age solve crimes. There are huge audiences who buy a lot of heavily advertised products for those shows.
But when you get to major film auteurs, you get their obsessions. Martin Scorsese, for instance, thinks about guys, all the time. I doubt if he's thought about any of his five wives as much as he's thought about Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio. (Maybe one of those ex-wives, however, is slightly ahead of Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel for third place in the Scorsese Attention Sweepstakes.)
Posts
45 comments:
Men are more interesting than women, so more movies have male leads.
Martin Scorsese, for instance, thinks about guys, all the time. I doubt if he's thought about any of his five wives as much as he's thought about Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio.
Classic.
It seems that they excluded from their statistics a very important segment of the movie industry, one that has always put women front and center, one in which every actress is a star. Considering the sheer size of that segment of the industry, I'm going to guess that the overall stats would have skewed the other way if it was included in the study.
"In general, as you go up the quality scale, the gender gap gets bigger. But when you get to major film auteurs, you get their obsessions."
Not really true. Bergman was heavy on actresses. While Kurosawa was essentially a male-centered director, Mizoguchi and Imamura were big on women. Ozu was like half-and-half.
Godard said cinema is about guys filming women, and women were his muses. Truffaut made lots of movies about women. Rohmer and Chabrol too.
Max Ophuls was mad about women. EARRINGS OF MADAME DE is woman, woman, woman.
Woody Allen is big on women, and his muses have been Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, and other ho's.
Robert Altman was also big on women: Images, Three Women, Welcome to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean.
Age gap in cinema?
Old actors seem to get less time. Maybe Nebraska is an exception.
John Wayne had leading roles to the end of his life. Aging actors nowadays just fade.
Very OT:
One of the Right Sector guys talking to a state prosecutor in his (the prosecutor's) office.
It could be that both movies and men are violent. Or more broadly, storytelling often involves men "saving the day, and getting the girl." The men are the action takers in those stories. Whereas women can "get the guy" by looking good. The men are chasing and the women are selecting, and the chasing translates better to film.
Didn't Sharon Stone show us her gender gap in that movie with Michael Demsky?
One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes.
First World Problems.
It's nice to see these folks have their priorities straight.
Men are more interesting than women…
No to look at. And this is the movies, after all
"One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes."
Here's why that's a problem.
OK, I found an article in Ukrainian about that prosecutor incident. It happened today. The fat guy is the Right Sector chief for the western regions of Ukraine. According to the article, the tall, skinny guy in a suit is the prosecutor for the Rivno Region Andriy Targoniy.
It seems that the Right Sector guys wanted to inquire about a murder case.
The best actors, like the best people in any walk of life, are men. Inevitably the best actors get more screen time than the merely good ones.
"Men are more interesting than women…"
No to look at.
You're assuming the only reason to look at someone is sex. Which is basically the same as assuming that all movies are porn movies.
Someone should do the same study when it comes to modern TV shows. Grievance pieces dressed up as "science" often tell you more from what they don't say and won't say than what they do and will. My guess is that, with women dominating TV audiences by a large margin, not to mention being the target of most ads (how many car ads even involve men, except for trucks, these days?), there may be a gap in favor of female leads on TV. TV can't seem to get enough strong grrl characters, and the sexy badboy sorts they love. The women lap it up, too; if you do some digging for fan communities of shows like, say, Sherlock, Supernatural, or probably even Dr. Who, you'll see what I mean. Other examples abound. (Tumblr could be a starting place for those who dare to delve into the fangirl depths.) It's actually rather disquieting, the intense bonds female fans make with these fictional characters. 50 Shades of Grey, that immortal piece of high-brow literature, got its start as Twilight fan fiction, for example.
This sort of behavior would be (rightfully) deemed "creepy" and obsessive if men were involved in it... In fact, a case can be made that male fandoms for anime and manga, which can be quite obsessive and associated with hikikomori, are such equivalents. A crucial difference is that one is sourced from the mainstream and all over the TV, pushing you-go-grrlism and bringing in the advertising bucks, while the other is a more frowned-upon and judged subculture. But both tend to demonstrate a sort of perpetual adolescence and appeal to same.
Reg Caesar:"Didn't Sharon Stone show us her gender gap in that movie with Michael Demsky?"
Michael Douglas was born Michael Douglas; his dad changed his name before Michael's birth.
For that matter, Demsky is not Kirk Douglas's original surname. He was born Issur Danielovitch.
No to look at.
Not necessarily. More enjoyable to look at, granted, but interesting isn't quite the same thing.
There are a lot more movies which are heavy on the male screen presence than there ones which feature mainly women. There are more "Easy Riders" and "Heat"s and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"s and "Gladiator"s and so on than there are "Thelma and Louise"s. Because that is what the audience, of both men and women, wants to see.
Reality is conservative, as Thatcher reputedly observed.
It's easier for men to be defective but likable. Women chars, well, if they're perfect, there's no drama; if they have serious flaws, were in an area the audience doesn't want to go.
People go to movies to be entertained and divereted. No matter how well you made, say, Streetcar Named Desire, it's gonna be a dud at the movies. Least these days.
This is why chick flicks are a drag and they generally don't do well. This is why female chars only failing is that they are a bit klutzy and trip.
re: the Right Sector/prosecutor fruitful exchange of views.
That would be a hard thing to take, and a harder thing to live down.
Demsky is not Kirk Douglas's original surname. He was born Issur Danielovitch.
That depends on whether you go by Wikipedia, or CNN and IMDB.
"Danielovich" sounds like a patronymic, not a surname.
It's easier for men to be defective but likable... if [women characters] have serious flaws, we're in an area the audience doesn't want to go.
Maybe at the box office. Flawed women have done fine in the living room-- Imogene Coca, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence, Gilda Radner, Roseanne Barr, half the cast of Laugh In…
This is why chick flicks are a drag and they generally don't do well.
Today. It was a different story in the past. Quite different.
I watched the video of Muzychko at the prosecutor's office again. That article about it is probably wrong. That skinny guy probably wasn't the regional prosecutor himself, but an employee of his. In the video Muzychko complains that neither the prosecutor nor his deputy is to be found in the office.
They were speaking authentic Ukrainian there and I'm a Muscovite. I understood all of the profanity and the mentions of the hangman's noose the first time. But the complaint at the heart of the exchange - that the prosecutor wasn't there - escaped me until the second viewing.
Five wives?
Guess that's why Mike Judge called him (by way of Beavis & Butthead) "Martin Scores Easy"
I wonder what the ratio is on porn?
I wonder what the ratio is on porn? --Prof Woland
Porn isn't about ratios. Porn is about absolute numbers.
One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes.
Oh dear. Disquieting.
Reg Caesar:"That depends on whether you go by Wikipedia, or CNN and IMDB.
"Danielovich" sounds like a patronymic, not a surname."
Well, the WIKIPEDIA article offers this account of the evolution of Kirk's surname:
"Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch, a businessman.[4] His parents were Jewish immigrants from Chavusy, Mahilyow Voblast, in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), [5] and the family spoke Yiddish.[6][7] His father's brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas' family adopted in the United States."
In any event, "Michael Douglas" is Michael Douglas's birth name, so calling him "Michael Demsky" is factually incorrect.
Reg Caesar:"That depends on whether you go by Wikipedia, or CNN and IMDB.
"Danielovich" sounds like a patronymic, not a surname."
A quick google search reveals people with the surname "Danielovich" in the USA. One of them has the quite charming name Rocco David Danielovich. then there's Celine Catherine Danielovich, etc.
Actors get more screen time than actresses because men are active - and cinema is about action. If I recall correctly, the Tao Te Ching has an epigram that expresses this, and I think it goes: "The female overcomes the male with stillness." Cinema - you know, the MOTION picture - is about anything but stillness.
"All Things Considered" confronts the gender/racial/age gap in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences:
In fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continues to be an exclusive club that is 93 percent white, 76 percent male, with an average age of 63. . .
"I think people assumed the Academy was pretty homogeneous, and it turned out it was even more so than the worst assumptions," says journalist John Horn. He and a team of L.A. Times reporters tracked down and spoke with most of the roughly 6,000 members of the Academy.
"When we told the Academy that we had independently confirmed the identities of more than 5,100 voters, there was a gasp in the room," says Horn. "I think they were really embarrassed by the findings of the demographics. They knew they had a problem; they were aware that the image of the Academy was that it was a bunch of old white men. But when they were confronted with the hard data of how old, how white and how male the Academy was, they really had no place to hide."
Why are these old white men even here? Will no one rid us of them? At least the Academy named a sorta-black woman as its new president, that should help.
"Anonymous said...
Age gap in cinema?
Old actors seem to get less time. Maybe Nebraska is an exception.
John Wayne had leading roles to the end of his life. Aging actors nowadays just fade. "
Not really ;Eastwood made 'gran torino'at the age of 78 an age that Wayne never reached.
women are less interesting than men. i don't think it's any more complicated than that.
they are also not good character actors. not that all men are, they aren't. but very few women have that as an ability. most women are just cast to play a generic woman in most roles rather than play a character. sure, their character has a different name and dialogue every time, but they're still just playing a generic, time period appropriate woman.
this casting rule may be arbitrary - few scripts call for an interesting female main character where some serious out of personality acting is required of the actress - but i bet women wouldn't be able to do the harder, character acting very effectively on average, either. usually when they attempt this it falls flat. it's just the same good looking actress that you're using to seeing, but here she's putting on a bad fake accent, dressing up in different clothes, and acting like she knows how to ride a horse or drive a race car or whatever thing it is the script calls for that the actress really is not doing a convincing job of.
women are also not funny, so that rules out most comedy. nor are they credible action stars. although there is a modern attempt to make them into them.
if you deliberately tried to balance casting, screen time, pay, all that, between the genders, you'd end up with a lot of boring movies that not even many women went to see.
on a lexicographical note, shouldn't they both just be called actors? now that we're in the 'men and women are exactly the same' era, i mean. there's no difference between men and women, so just use actor for everybody.
"She's a good actor."
"She's not a good actor."
"I wish they would have gotten a better actor than her."
"She's the perfect actor for this role."
In fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continues to be an exclusive club that is 93 percent white, 76 percent male, with an average age of 63. . .
So the Academy is only 7% jewish or less. Who would have thought it?
It seems that the Right Sector guys wanted to inquire about a murder case.
Has the murder in question happened yet?
If you look at overall box office champs, they are overwhelmingly male. Doris Day is the biggest female box office star of all time. I don't believe these stats (the ones I'm using) adjust for inflation, and I think that's probably significant. TV, as Steve and others have pointed out, is all about women. Not just scripted dramas and reality TV, either--the Olympics have been famously scripted to appeal to women since 1992 or so.
I thought that TV was the explanation, but a look at the top box office stars from 1932-1970 http://www.reelclassics.com/Articles/General/quigleytop10-article.htm suggests otherwise. Women regularly had 40-50% of the top box office slots in the 30s, but starting from 1940 on, they rarely had more than 2 in any given year.
It couldn't have been longevity back in the 30s, so I'm not sure what explains it.
The male names have a much more straightforward relationship to talent or star power than the female box office champs do: Doris Day, Julia Roberts, Betty Grable, Shirley Temple. I yield to no one in my appreciation for Doris Day, but her films don't have the same staying power as Bette Davis, Kate Hepburn, or Ingrid Bergman. Of the four top names, only Roberts is the equivalent of the top male names.
I'm not sure what this all means over time. Certainly, since the 70s and the blockbuster, it's easier to explain the male dominance. But possibly the stories that age the best, that have the most general appeal, are not the stories that usually appeal to women in that moment.
Re: interestingness to look at, Ian Holm is one of my favourite actors. He is visually captivating without being aesthetically pleasing, even in his younger days. Attractive women are pleasurable to look at, but you can do this just as easily with a still picture as with a moving one. More easily in fact.
Other interesting-to-look-at actors include Gene Hackman (who had to give up on filmmaking because he got old and the phone stopped ringing), Ian McKellen, lately Christoph Waltz. In fact the more conventionally handsome a male lead is, the less interesting his roles and films, and the less his acting ability, tend to be.
Scandinavian TV Versus Jewish TV
That's the answer.
In Scandinavian TV women are equal to men, while in Jewish tv women are not.
One of them has the quite charming name Rocco David Danielovich. then there's Celine Catherine Danielovich, etc.
Something tells me the parents of Rocco and Céline might not be the most attentive stewards of Russia's onomastic traditions.
…calling him "Michael Demsky" is factually incorrect.
It was a joke. No, a sub-joke to another joke. Auschillen!
Say, did you know Kirk is the most important native of Amsterdam, and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge the most notable resident ever of both Antwerp and Philadelphia?
on a lexicographical note, shouldn't they both just be called actors? --Jody
No, dammit, no! The language is being deracinated enough without iStevers piling on. And too many starlets are already doing this
I hope you were just kidding. I mean, look at the fate of your own name, Jody.
"Hollywood has never been so miserable for women. Nowadays, Joan Crawford and Betty Davis wouldn't even have careers. Sometimes I just think that Hollywood directors cast women so the the audience won't think that the male protagonists are gay." - Pedro Almadovar, a woman's director if there ever was one.
I wonder if blacks are given screen time out of proportion to their percentage of the population. And if so, if it's disquieting.
As a viewer I never noticed the difference in the time women and men are on the screen. I don't think it is a big deal.
"No, dammit, no! The language is being deracinated enough without iStevers piling on. And too many starlets are already doing this
I hope you were just kidding. I mean, look at the fate of your own name, Jody."
I always think this jody is like one of those Greeks from ancient times who imagined male children being born out of men's calves in an entirely male world.
That Hollywood only seems to be casting actresses so we won't think the male stars are gay, seems about right.
There's got to be a reasons they're pushing gay marriage so they can write women out of the picture entirely.
Post a Comment