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[light dramatic music]
[light music]
[static crackling]
- The basis of your thinking is determined
by the first images you see;
whose values are important and whose stories are important,
and that's what we're teaching little girls and little boys.
[light music]
- The power of what you see in childhood
really gets into the DNA
of what becomes possible for you growing up.
- Media has the power to educate,
to shape people's thoughts.
It also has an incredible power
when you get to see someone who's like you on screen.
- The images that all of us see
influence how we treat each other,
and how policy is formed, and how ideas are built.
- Filmmaking has told us no.
Women shouldn't be focused on or learned about;
their desires, their wants, their needs, their fears.
- We're not just shaping the perspectives in this country,
we're shaping perspectives around the world.
- We've had such a tiny slice
of what's evocative to the world on the screen.
[gun firing] [glass shattering]
- 80% of the media consumed worldwide
is created in the United States.
We are responsible for exporting
a pretty negative view of women.
- [Man] Pete, I told you, don't play sports with women.
- [Boy] You play ball like a girl.
- Most of television, most of film,
is men making stuff for other men.
- Women are virtually excluded
from the directing profession, we are disappeared.
- We have to all decide together that it's enough.
- The door has to be opened, we just want inclusion.
[thoughtful music]
[traffic passing]
- Remember the kids books in the 50s, See Dick, See Jane?
And I just felt like we see Dick all the time.
[audience laughing]
[audience applauding]
And I just wanted to see more Jane.
When I was a teen, my parents subscribed to Reader's Digest,
and I remember reading some article
about why feminists are ruining the world.
I didn't know what a feminist was, but I said,
whatever that is, I'm sure I don't wanna be that,
because they're ruining the world.
- Oh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?
- [Geena] I was obsessed with becoming a movie star.
I watched TV a lot.
- Hi, Ginger!
- Hi, Gilligan!
- [Geena] So I'm thinking, Ginger, movie star.
- I'm from Hollywood, I've been chased by the best.
- My first job, Lynn Stalmaster's office
called model agencies.
The character had to look good in their underwear.
I had been in Victoria's Secret catalogue.
Airbrushed, perfectly lit.
They were like, let's get her!
- Oh, I'm sorry!
- Okay, that's okay.
So the very first thing I shot
was in my underwear, with Dustin.
- I have to kiss Dr. Brewster.
- Oh, yeah, he kisses all the women on the show.
We call him the tongue.
- Movies and television have always driven me insane.
The misogyny is just so, it's almost unremarkable.
♪ Girls, girls, girls ♪
Back when I was doing music videos,
I just saw that women were absolutely inconsequential
as anything other than ornamentation.
I was learning to just shut up and get the job done.
Just driving home one night,
I just saw the whole thing in one flash.
And I had never written anything before.
- Of all the movies I did, Thelma & Louise
changed the course of my life.
- Well, darlin', look out, 'cause my hair is comin' down.
- All right.
- [Callie] All of us were - Smile.
- stunned the movie had the kind of impact that it did.
- You are disturbed!
- Yeah, I believe I am.
The reaction that it got from women,
[gun firing] it was completely different.
- You gonna apologize or what?
- They'd say things like,
my friend and I acted out your trip.
And I'd be like, what part?
[gun firing] [exploding]
- When they blow up that truck,
it's just like, oh, you get such a rush.
- There was something I think freeing
in every woman that watched it.
- It showed me like, wow, you can have power as a woman
and not have to be in completely of service
of submitting 1,000%.
- My husband wasn't sweet to me, look how I turned out.
- [Lesli] It's unusual seeing woman
- Shit!
- as complicated, able to make mistakes,
able to be funny and sexual, and troubled.
- I had been awakened to how women
are portrayed in the media.
I realized we give them so few opportunities
to feel inspired by the female characters.
- [Man] Pops it out of bounds.
- The next movie was A League Of Their Own.
Now it was girls coming up and saying,
I play sports because of that movie.
- I can't do that.
- Who can?
- A League Of Their Own was
a very influential movie for me as a kid.
It was one of the first movies that really affected me,
I watched it every day for a whole summer.
- I hadn't thought about the girls in the audience before.
I realized we need to make sure girls can see
female characters doing this.
We don't have enough real life role models.
- Okay, I gotta get tough with you guys!
- We all grew up where it was perfectly okay
to have TV shows that had no female characters.
[phone ringing]
- Call precinct, Jumana.
- If there is a female character,
they're usually the one with a group of males.
- [Chris] Whereas the male characters,
they might have four or five lead characters.
- We want something else!
- So that you could have the one who is this
and the one who is this,
and the funny one and the smart one.
- I'm the brains, you're the looks, Charlie's the wildcard,
and Frank is the muscle.
- [Charlie] Well, what's Dee?
- She's the useless chick.
- [Both] Oh!
- Yeah!
- Guys get to see themselves get to become a writer,
get to become an astronaut.
And women get to be the girlfriend that gets ditched.
- Is everything okay, baby?
- Mostly we're being saved.
- [Spiderman] You have a knack for getting in trouble.
- You have a knack for saving my life.
- The woman in the story has to be the most beautiful woman
so that the man is attracted to her.
- What's wrong, daddy?
- The reason we have much less complexity,
it very much reflects on
what's the point of view that you take to a film?
- How do you write women so well?
- I think of a man,
and I take away reason and accountability.
- White straight men who come from
a certain class background
have had their hands on the narrative
for as long as this country has been around.
- Our anger, our frustration, our rage is the thing
that stories have been told about
for generations and generations.
- All the way back into the 1800s,
you've had a type of American hero,
which I would say is the same as the American antihero.
- From now on, you stay out of this.
All of ya, I don't want you with me.
- It's the western myth extrapolated into any story.
There is one man, usually middle aged,
he's a veteran, retired gunslinger.
They need to pick up their guns again
[gun firing] [screaming]
to eliminate any challenge to their manhood.
[grunting]
This concept, it's inherently sexist.
[gun firing]
Because the women are in orbit around the men.
- [Woman] Oh it looks so good.
- As a writer, I've been in many situations
where a studio calls me and says,
we want you to do a couple days
of a pass on a movie with the female characters.
I'm like, guys, that's not how it works.
- Bringing a female writer
to punch up the girlfriend character, that isn't enough.
- I call that spackling, and I have come to realize
that my job is really just to show up
and spackle those cracks in.
- Early in my career, I would take the girlfriend role
and say, I'm gonna fuck this up
and turn this inside out like a leech on a barbed wire
and try and make something different out of it.
- Nine times out of 10, I'm gonna give you something
so multidimensional, because I know what I'm bringing in
is much deeper than the words they put on that page.
- Please, come on now.
What about Billy?
- I'm not taking him with me.
In Kramer vs. Kramer, I was representing a woman
who had left a child because she was undergoing
psychological problems.
The writer and the director and my costar
all were putting their heads to what would she say,
what would she say, what could she possibly say?
I anticipated this whole thing.
- Okay, look, I don't wanna get into this.
You're gonna have to do what you're gonna have to do,
and I'm gonna have to do what I'm gonna--
- All right, I'm very sorry about this.
We all went into our rooms.
Each of us wrote our version
of how she would defend this decision.
And it was easy for me to write that
because I could empathize.
I had to believe that it was the only thing I could do.
And that it was the best thing for him.
I was incapable of functioning in that home.
But where the story was located,
- How does it feel?
- was in the head and in the heart of its male protagonist.
And what she thought was, oh, we'll ask the actress.
- Imagine you're a woman in the theater and this movie,
that even though there are 50% of you occupy the world,
this movie's not made for you.
[suspenseful music]
One of the reasons I don't watch a lot of films of mine
is because you see yourself through the eyes
of the male camera operator,
and you see yourself through the eyes of the male director.
When I think I'm acting, it's really panning across my ass.
Weather advisory, if you're gonna go outside,
bring a paddle. [water dripping]
- I don't know what my life would have been like
if you guys hadn't moved here.
I came out to L.A. and I met a woman agent
who said to me, this business is about tits and ass,
which you have neither of.
[light music]
- Imagine, as a man, people really wanting
to look at your body when they see you,
and look at your clothes,
and look at your hair and your eyes.
Just the thought exercise of going through your whole life
knowing that the way your body is shaped matters more
to the world than what you're thinking about.
- We definitely internalize the representations of women
on screen when we're young girls.
It's important first and foremost
to have men see you in a certain way.
I definitely felt from a very young age
that you're being turned into an object,
as opposed to how do I look at the world,
what do you desire, what do you want?
That's the big mental shift
that I wish I had when I was a kid.
[light music]
- I created my own production company, Freckle Films,
and one thing I've realized that I'm eliminating
is the description of female characters.
- Dr. Jones, 35, bitchy,
she's pretty but she doesn't know it,
or she's slightly over the hill.
- When you are working with writers of a lesser ability,
the lesser intelligence, actually,
then they're gonna define women by their hair color.
- Here I go again, feisty, sexy, hot, hot tempered.
- We have been otherized by men,
really to be able to allow men
to give birth to their own subjectivity.
- It's a system and a structure
that has long stacked the odds against us,
so we've been written out of a lot of spaces.
- Growing up, I never saw anyone that represented me
or looked like me, or wow, I wanna be like her.
This is a day in the life for the people.
When I tried to get an agent,
they didn't know where to place me.
They're like, okay, you're Latina,
but you don't look Mexican.
And I'm not like, I'm not though.
- Give me my change, get the food!
After I did Baby Boy, every role I got was hood.
This girl, waa, waa, waa, waa, waa.
I'm a trained actress, and here I am
getting offered ghetto roles.
[laughing] Whatever, okay.
So I never judged it, but I wasn't gonna stereotype myself
and continue to take those roles.
And yes, I had to work, but I had to be strategic,
because I saw a bigger picture for myself.
[light music]
- 90% of the content that I would digest through media
puts me as a sidekick or as the girl next door
because of the color of my skin or my sex.
- I felt for a while that I had to fit myself
into some sort of conception
of what it meant to be a black woman,
instead of realizing that there is
so much diversity within that identity.
- If you don't drop these macho attitudes,
you are never gonna have anybody bringing you anything
anywhere, any place, anytime, ever.
- Cosby and The Jeffersons ♪ Movin' on up ♪
was the only ones where they was doin' all right in life.
♪ Good times ♪
Good Times, they sufferin'.
I don't wanna live that life.
What's Happening, they were strugglin'.
Dang, is it all bad?
[Dynasty theme song]
And then I remember watchin' Dynasty
and a black woman shows up, and it's Diahann Carroll.
- What do you want?
- It's the first time I see a black woman with money,
wearin' diamonds, she's havin' conversations
with white women like she not even black.
- Retract this or I'll cram it down your throat.
- Will ya?
- She slapped this white woman so hard.
And they was wrestling, and I was like, what?
And she didn't even go to jail.
[suspenseful music]
That's when I started thinkin', oh, I could be anything.
[laughing]
- The Joy Luck Club was the first time
I saw myself and my mother on screen.
- You don't know the power you have over me.
- It impacted me so deeply emotionally,
way beyond what the content of the film was.
- Four years old, I could cry myself to sleep.
- Seeing and experiencing for the first time
all that storytelling that I thought was mine, was not mine.
- It's devastating when a little girl
doesn't see herself on screen.
I've been one of those little girls looking for myself.
You start to believe that there is something wrong with you.
- It just sort of fucks with your psyche.
You're like, I think I exist,
why aren't I reflected back at what I see?
- There's also a shame that starts to come in.
I must not be worthy to be seen or I don't feel that way,
so what I'm feeling must be wrong.
- If we only show one perspective,
it means that we don't take seriously
every human being's right
to understand the world from their perspective.
If you imagine this as the mirror
and you reflect life from this perspective,
it will be really different if you put the mirror
from this angle instead.
[gasping]
- There is the need for more films
to come out of the voices of women and what they want,
and what they value, and what excites them,
and what terrifies them,
and makes them move through the world.
- There is a different way to look at stories about women
or stories from the point of view of a woman.
Our camera placement is different
because our gaze is different.
- You wanna try to imagine narratives
in which women don't need to be rescued,
to try to figure out how to tell new stories.
[crowd cheering]
- What more incredible, specific, passionate filmmaking
would we be getting if all of kinds of people were doing it?
- Like people with disabilities,
or people who are sexual minorities.
- Everybody has a nuanced experience,
whether that's a young black woman
who is dealing with being a part of generation Z,
being in a certain socioeconomic class,
or being alive in the 21st century
in which the culture that we're consuming
is such an amalgamation of other cultures.
[light dramatic music]
- Women have been paving this path,
pushing up against the status quo,
changing how we see ourselves
so that there's an expanded idea of what you can choose
and how you can have agency in your own life
so that your path is not laid out by the structure
that was put in place way before you got here.
- Imagine having the kind of protagonism as a woman.
- [Girl] I'm the princess.
[scoffing]
I'm the example. [apple crunching]
- When I had the opportunity to create Brave
and the character of Merida,
I purposely went for a princess
just so that I could throw the princess thing
on its head and not the typical.
[horse running]
- Get back, that's my mother!
[man grunting]
- Images are so powerful that it will impact real life.
In 2012, my archery coach noticed that when both Brave
and The Hunger Games came out,
suddenly the percentage of girls taking up archery
shot up 105%, higher than adult men.
[CSI theme song]
- After you saw CSI, after you saw
female forensic pathologists on screen,
you saw the field of forensic pathology
grow intensely, especially among women.
- She shot back.
I just kept seeing again and again girls who loved this show
and it made my heart sing.
And they are now half the workforce.
[light music]
- When half of the filmmakers
and the writers are allowed in,
our cultural life will change.
It won't until that happens.
- Since I was a little kid, for me,
immortality came from what you create.
When I saw Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away,
I thought, I can do that.
The passion caught hold of me in an absolutely complete way.
I wanted to be a director because I wanted to have a voice.
I had a great experience in film school.
There was about 50/50 male and female students.
And then within a year of having graduated,
I was shooting my first feature film in the UK.
[crowd cheering]
I came back to L.A. and was signed
with a huge agent, William Morris.
[cheering] - [Man] Absolutely Marvelous.
- I was tied to screenplays, I signed contracts,
I was in development on feature films, and then nothing.
I started watching my male peers
being celebrated and beloved filmmakers.
- 10 Oscar nominations.
- Yes. - You've had a great
[laughing]
- I didn't see that happening
for any of my women friends at all.
- I did 265 episodes of CSI alone.
I can count on one hand how many female directors we had.
- Out of 30 or 40 directors that I worked with,
I've probably worked with three female directors.
- Before Grey's, I didn't work with any female directors.
- I've worked with two female directors on features,
and one is myself. [chuckling]
- As an assistant director from '78 until 2006,
I don't think I ever worked with a woman director.
- We haven't been able to imagine women as artists
across the board, and in Hollywood,
that reflects in the writing and directing numbers.
[light music]
- From among the five gifted nominees tonight,
the winner could be, for the first time, a woman.
- Inclusion of women might change policy.
They might change what's called great.
- What does good mean?
Good means it resonates in the body of a man.
When people are saying, I like this,
they're saying, I see myself.
So men are gonna feel that way
when they see a myriad of male heroes.
Most of the people writing the checks are men.
Most of the people making distribution decisions are men,
and most of the reviewers are men.
[mystical music]
- I need to know that I can come
and hold onto where I come from.
- With Daughters Of The Dust, I didn't wanna tell
the same old story that's been told over and over again,
especially about African-American women and our legacy.
At the height of our distribution, we only had 13 prints.
Among the filmmakers coming out that decade,
I was pushed to the side.
The curators of culture decided that Daughters Of The Dust
did not fit their understanding
of what an African American film should be.
- [Man] In South Central L.A.,
it's tough to beat the streets.
- Because they pick and choose who they wanna focus on.
♪ New Jack City ♪
- This is big business.
- It's been shown, study after study,
that the male directed movies get bigger distribution,
get on more screens, more advertising dollars spent.
And then they get their second film easier,
and then they get their third one,
and their fourth one.
- I have to admit to being radically naive.
I said, well, I guess there's not
sexism in Hollywood because look at me.
Action!
[light music]
- One of the reasons I went to film school
was because of Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry.
That was such an incredibly powerful film.
[uplifting music]
- [Man] Hillary Swank in Boys Don't Cry.
[audience applauding]
- I wanna thank Kimberly Peirce
for her fierce tenacity and vision.
- Then I got the difficulty of getting the next project.
- Women directors are hitting up against this ceiling
at a point, at a critical point where they could jump from
smaller stuff to really big stuff.
- There's an assumption that men are gonna have
an authoritative approach and women won't have
the wherewithal and the stamina to push through.
- What we have is a culture that says
what directors should be is militant
and loud and aggressive,
but directing doesn't require a specific temperament,
it takes every single kind of person.
- [Man] After count, we'll go again right away.
- I've never seen a female camera operator.
We're touching them like, oh my god, you really exist.
Something's very wrong with that.
- I started when I was 14 and there would be 150 men on set
and I'd be the only woman.
No women sometimes in wardrobe,
in the art department, in anything.
- That's a lot of male energy.
I've had directors who have said
that I need to sit on their laps to get direction.
Who call me to the set and if I won't sit on their lap,
I was sent back to my trailer.
And I said, does Tom Hanks sit on your lap?
[light music]
- People in power for years have tried to divide and conquer
actresses in order to victimize
and manipulate and abuse them.
- To protect yourself on set is not an easy thing
because no one else is gonna come to your aid,
no one else is gonna defend you.
There is no recourse, there's no human resources department,
there's nobody there.
- Not everybody has the safety net to say,
hey, I can speak out about this and know
that I can still get work in the field that I love.
- There's often a lot of distance between us
because we're all navigating a very treacherous industry.
We don't learn to call each other
and lean upon each other and create community.
- A lot of my energy is spent on
when can I ask this question,
how am I going to ask for what I need in order to feel safe?
- Part of sexism and racism is like stay in your place,
stay in your lane, shut up, be happy with what you've got,
and so we're all siloed off.
And you don't tell people what your fears are
because then they know where your vulnerable spaces are.
- What happens to female directors
is they walk into a completely male environment,
and so they have to make those jokes,
and so they have to do that [sucking air]
little thing every morning, which means you cannot
truly operate from your own perspective
and see things through a different lens.
- She has to be [sucking air]
a gymnast and a diplomat and somebody's mother.
- I've seen female directors
treated really badly, really badly.
[fire crackling] [ominous music]
- When I was 15, I did Carrie.
That movie was directed by Kim Peirce,
who was my first female director.
But it was a massively male crew.
- I was being talked to and treated
and questioned constantly and differently.
- The biggest part of the movie
is when she gets her period for the first time in the shower
and she doesn't know it's her period
because she had never been taught that from her mother.
To have these conversations with men who were saying,
well, I don't think you should depict that way,
and I think you should depict it this way,
and Kim and I sitting there going, well, respectfully,
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
That was just the first time where I was ever like,
I guess men don't see us women equal in this industry.
[light music]
- When you have a huge success
and then your career doesn't go where it ought to go
and you see the men failing upward
and you're succeeding downward,
don't you think that everyday you wake up
and say this is my life, maybe this isn't good enough,
maybe I should go do something
where there aren't all these obstacles against me
because I'm a really talented creative human being
and I love working and you're stopping my right to work.
I may not have the energy
to do this every single day, to fight this fight.
- It is appalling in terms of how much women's work
and also women's roles and women's films
actually are contributing to the box office,
just sheerly on a commercial level.
[ominous music]
- Whenever the press announces: this changes everything,
I'm a little skeptical.
That was supposed to happen after Thelma & Louise came out.
- Things have changed, everything's changed.
- Thelma & Louise you went, that's it,
the whole industry's gonna change.
Oh my god, of course we're gonna make
all these female empowerment films.
- It didn't change anything.
♪ Ba ba ba ba ♪
- The First Wives Club beat the biggest action movie,
but Twilight series comes out, or Mean Girls, or Clueless,
- Uh, as if!
- So you go, well of course, this is the new paradigm.
- Even when I started directing,
there was this sense that it was getting better.
- Occasionally there's a bump,
but that's not systemic change.
- Frozen changes everything.
Hidden Figures, come on, it made so much money, and nothing.
- And then we go back, so I don't understand it.
- We need to look at the history
to see what kinds of things have continued
and thus been perpetuated without any thought.
- The contrast with what it was like for women
when movies were beginning is extraordinary.
[uplifting music]
- The silent era is full of women writing, directing,
producing, owning their own companies.
Film when it was born was not gender specific.
- They really promote the industry as a business
that's really wide open to ambitious pioneering women.
There were more women directing films
then is still the case.
- Lois Weber was one of
the three great directors of early Hollywood.
She was considered a peer
of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
By 1916, Lois Weber is Universal's highest paid director.
And when she forms her own independent production company
in 1917, she signs a deal with Paramount,
which is the most lucrative in the industry.
- The vast majority of the writers were female,
writing in ways that played into
the feminist sensibility of the period.
Women were entering the workforce
in greater numbers than every before.
- [Woman] No!
- [Man] Did he tell you that he loved you?
- [Woman] No, yes, of course he did.
- I want you to tell me exactly what happened.
- When sound technology arrives,
the industry is transformed.
- You had to shoot inside.
- [Man] Here are several of the big stages
to take of capacity production.
- [Woman] You're now going to have a system.
- Hollywood needs financial support to invest in technology,
to redo theaters, so banks invest heavily in Hollywood.
- Now you're linking yourself to a male moneyed hierarchy.
[light solemn music]
- The studios begin controlling the exhibition market.
They shut out a lot of women who had independent companies,
African-American filmmakers,
and they really consolidated power.
They stop hiring women as directors,
so women's voices are no longer valued.
[background chattering]
- As soon as the job becomes really important
and moneymaking, it suddenly becomes a man's job.
[horn blaring]
- The identity of a director as male,
or of a cinematographer as male,
doesn't get set until the unions really come in.
Unions fought very rigorously to keep women members out.
To be fair to them, what that often meant
was lower pay, lower respect.
- The work that so many women did was erased for decades.
The only woman directing for a major studio
in the 1930s is Dorothy Arzner.
The Director's Guild of America was formed in 1936.
- The DGA was founded by all men.
- [Woman] And Dorothy Arzner,
she's the only female director
in the DGA for well over a decade,
until Ida Lupino joins in the late 40s.
[rain falling]
- For us to accomplish gender equity in our storytelling,
we need to look at all of the various systemic mechanisms
that have been holding women back.
I started to do a great deal of research
into the history of workplace discrimination in Hollywood.
- Hollywood has never had a mechanism
to regulate discrimination, and Hollywood has actually
always tried to maintain self regulation.
- That really does open the door
for all kinds of discrimination.
- The Civil Rights Act of '64 had many parts.
The part that I was most involved with was Title VII.
[dramatic music]
That is the title that created
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The EEOC was created to look out for the rights of people
in the field of employment.
In 1969, we would send our investigators into the studios.
We found a pattern of practice of discrimination.
We referred to the Justice Department
to do an investigation.
Congress didn't take kindly to it.
- We've gotten to the point now
where either this punitive harassment is gonna stop
or I'm going to the highest authority
in this government to get somebody fired.
- The Nixon administration was ready to put the ax to me.
I beat them by resigning.
Nixon got his way, he got this loudmouth black boy out.
The whole issue of discrimination against women
was hurt by the permissiveness of federal government
allowing the movie industry
to do what that hell it wanted to do.
- There's a direct connection
between the number of women behind the scenes
and the number of people of color behind the scenes,
and how that translates into gender and race biases
on the big screen and little screen.
- We're sending really wrong messages,
not only to girls, but to boys as well.
- [Man] That was beautiful!
[puppets chattering]
- [Geena] When my daughter was about two,
I started watching little kid stuff with her.
- See, I'm thinking of becoming a doctor, Burt.
- Really? - Mm-hm.
- I immediately noticed there were far fewer characters
that were female than male.
- Really?
- I was stunned.
[screaming]
- What are you shrieking about?
- [Smurf] Whoa, take it down a notch, my blues brothers.
- I realized girls are being seriously shortchanged.
They're not doing half of
the interesting or important things.
- May I get you absolutely anything
in the world you could possibly want?
- [Geena] They don't have occupations.
- He loves me, I knew it!
- Or, they're not there at all.
We're saying that they are less valuable than men and boys.
- Why hello, ladies, you ready to lose?
- You pillow fight like a bunch of little girls.
- [Geena] We're teaching them that girls and women
don't take up half of the space in the world.
We're teaching boys that girls are less important.
- You wouldn't hit a woman.
- That's a woman?
- To see girls as second class citizens.
[screaming]
We're like, oh, how come Congress isn't half women?
CEOs and all this,
how are we gonna get more women on boards?
Progress for women stalls out between like 15 and 20%
in so many different sectors.
Could it be that we're training people
to see groups of people with only 17% women as normal?
Whenever I had a meeting in Hollywood, I'd say,
have you ever noticed how few female characters
there are in movies made for kids?
Every single person said, oh, no, no, no,
that's not true anymore, that's been fixed.
Nobody I talked to was seeing the problem that I was seeing.
So that's when I decided,
if I'm gonna change this, I need the data.
[light music]
- Geena commissioned one of the largest studies
on children's media that had ever been done.
- It took two years.
- It was the first study of its kind.
- It's amazing that she went and did that homework
and then served it all up,
and then it's irrefutable evidence.
- The data driven case of this has really take away
that question of is there a problem?
- You can't say, she's just being hysterical,
or god, she's just a bitch whining about this,
if you have numbers.
- [Geena] My scheme was to go
to the people creating the media.
I had no idea how they were gonna react.
- She came when I was an executive at Disney
and said in something like Finding Nemo,
they're all fish but most of them are men.
- He looks funny. [slapping effect]
Ow!
- It was a huge eye opener
and nobody had pointed it out before.
The work that she's done has had an enormous impact on me.
- Without further ado, please welcome
our commander in chief, Geena Davis.
[audience applauding]
- There's one area of inequality
that can be changed overnight, and that's on screen.
Data turns out to be the magic bullet in this case
because the bias is unconscious.
- The first time that I saw the numbers,
I have to say they were shocking,
and I'm someone who knows that we're not doing a great job.
Being passive on this issue is not good enough anymore.
At the script stage, I go through and look,
do I now have enough women?
You have to actively get to the place
where you put that as a part of your system.
- You have to instill the writing team,
the producers, everybody, with an awareness of it.
- The ratio of male to female characters in film
has been exactly the same since 1946.
We cannot wait around for change to happen
when all the evidence shows us
that we're going nowhere slowly.
[light music]
We thought if we could invent software
that could do the research for us,
it would be a huge benefit.
- Geena Davis came to Google with a proposal
to automate this kind of analysis.
- One of our first goals was to discern
screen and speaking time
almost humanly impossible with the naked eye.
- If you see a green box, it means it's figuring out
not only there's a face there, but it's a female.
- We can actually quantify the amount of screen time,
the amount of speaking time and get data at that level.
- It takes maybe a minute to process one film.
- I'm gonna share with you
just quick slides of what we found.
[ominous music]
- We have to be incredibly proactive and we have to realize
this is not happening naturally on its own.
- I read a lot about Geena Davis Institute
and finding out all the data
regarding how bad the gender equality is in Hollywood.
I was shocked and I also really wanted
to do something to change it.
We've been building up
this amazing art house cinema in Stockholm together.
We found out about the Bechdel-Wallace test.
[speaking in a foreign language]
- It's a very simple test to figure out
how women are treated on screen.
You need two named characters who are women.
They need to have a conversation,
and that conversation needs to be
about something that is not a man.
[speaking in a foreign language]
- I just came back to my cinema
and checked out how many of the films
that I do program that pass it.
Where we did it, no film passed.
And I was so embarrassed because we have this feeling
that you're actually good in something,
but then you, [grunting]
you're not.
[door dinging]
We decided after one year of research to do a logo
of the Bechdel-Wallace test.
A simple logo with an A saying approved.
- I look for pleasure in the details.
[bell dinging]
- He's sweet, isn't he? [buzzer sounding]
- Hey! - Zip it, Sinead.
[buzzer sounding]
- The point of the Bechdel test for me,
was always that it was a joke.
But if you actually investigate, you'll find that it's true.
- Half the movies fail it.
It's films that are still coming out to this day.
American Hustle, passed. [bell dinging]
There's one conversation that's about nail polish.
- The top coat, it's like perfumey,
but there's also something rotten.
- It's not perfect.
- My name is Shelly and I'm here to be your house mother.
[bell dinging]
[camera shuttering]
- One week after we launched A Rate,
I had 80 interviews from the whole world.
[light dramatic music]
Even though I was so unprepared,
I of course felt like I need to do this.
So this is what Geena Davis is saying,
if she can see it, she can be it.
Girls and boys, until they are five years old,
have the same kind of idea
what they will like to do when they grow up.
After five years old, it changed radically,
and the reason is film and TV.
[blowing]
- Isn't he amazing?
- Ah ha!
- There was a study that showed
now girls as young as six years old
have learned to self sexualize.
- [Woman] This is Paisley as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
- To view themselves through the male gaze at six years old.
- These are wet, could you blow on them for me?
[stammering]
- I think that entertainment culture's
promotion of the objectification of girls and women
literally leads women to hate their bodies.
- When I was 16, I show up to my trailer
for the first day of set, I'm getting dressed
and I see my bra there and I'm like,
oh, that's weird, it's a pushup bra.
In front of the pushup bra, I saw two chicken cutlets.
I had never seen a chicken cutlet, I was a kid.
And I asked the wardrobe girl and she's like,
oh, yeah, I was told to put these in your trailer.
One of the producers comes in
and I immediately was like, why is that here?
He or she looked at me and said, it was a studio note.
You're telling me that a group of people
looked at a 16 year old girl in the screen tests
and they said her breasts didn't look big enough?
It was the first time I really felt insecure.
I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like,
well, is it not right?
That's when I started to realize,
oh, I'm not just an actor, I'm viewed as an actress.
[background chattering]
[reflective music]
- A big part of why I wanted to change Hollywood
was because if my little girl dreamed of being a storyteller
in this world, I did not want the circumstances
that kept me from being able to achieve success
to keep her from being able to achieve success.
That was not okay with me.
What I really wanted to do was make sure
that all girls didn't have to face that.
[traffic passing]
- It's one thing to say out loud, I want parity,
it's another thing to then figure out day to day
what the costs of that are, what that actually means.
- Just by doing you will achieve something
that will push the limit,
but be prepared that that's what you're starting.
- I joined the Director's Guild in 1999.
I was called to an events meeting
for the Women's Steering Committee
and it was in those meetings
that I discovered it wasn't just me.
Melanie Wagor had this great idea for a summit
to try to figure out how to get more work
for women DGA members.
She said, well, we've been trying to get it going
for two years, it was not getting approved.
- That is a tiny little example
of how obstructionist our own guild was
in terms of us just trying to organize ourselves.
- It wasn't an officially sanctioned thing.
We had to fight really hard to have it.
It was a way of shining a light
and putting a mirror to them,
and I don't think they wanted to see what was there.
- I was invited to sit on a panel,
and here were these powerful women.
I was surprised at how powerless they felt.
- Our purpose as organizers was also to create a list
of women director members of the Director's Guild.
At the end of the afternoon,
an executive at the DGA said, could I please take your list
and bring it upstairs and copy it?
We never got it back.
They said, we've determined that this is our property.
That's unconscionable, that's gagging, that's red flagging.
[traffic passing]
- Instinctively I knew that something
was fundamentally really wrong on a legal level,
not just on a moral/ethical level.
And then somebody mentioned to me
that there had already been a legal action in the 1980s
by a group of six female directors.
[light upbeat music]
- The first time the six women of the DGA got together
was in '78 and '79, and was actually an event
run by, I think, my memory says Women In Film.
- Hi, nice to meet you, what do you do?
[chuckling] I'm an out of work director.
- It was really a tough conversation,
'cause in the entertainment industry,
the last thing you wanna do is say, I'm not working.
- Are you working? No.
Are you working? No.
- None of us were working.
- It was preposterous, It was preposterous.
- These were accomplished women.
- We had one Oscar, a Fulbright,
two AFI Filmmaker Grants, two Emmys,
and what we figured out we really needed was a penis.
- I remember getting up and saying we are all doomed
to stunted careers if we don't do something.
[light music]
- We needed to find out why.
One of the amazing resources we had was
the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Library.
Nell Cox and I were there weeks on end pulling magazines.
We studied a period between 1949 and 1979
with little pencil and paper chit sheets,
looking for the number of films per year
and looking for women's names.
- We started going back into DGA records,
which they were reluctant to fork over.
- We met almost every Saturday for a year.
We worked very, very hard at covering all the bases.
- What we came up with was this astonishing statistic
that between 1949 and 1979, one half of one percent
of all assignments went to women.
It's like, do you have a plate of cookies?
There were 100 cookies on the plate,
all the guys come and they take 99.5 cookies.
[cookie snapping]
And all the women directors in the guild
have to fight over that one half of a cookie.
- We've all had our eyes opened,
and once opened, you realize how shut they were.
- We went to the Director's Guild
to try to get them to do something about it.
[somber music]
- Did the men understand there was discrimination
in the entertainment industry?
Not really, there was a lot of resistance.
- All of the sudden we were holding up a mirror
to husbands and fathers and we were saying,
you want this for your daughter?
Maybe your daughters wanna be directors.
- Mel Brooks was on the national board.
He was the loose cannon, you never knew
what Mel Brooks was gonna come up with.
He got up from his seat, that was like the first
uh oh, uh oh, what is he going to do?
And he leaned on the table and he said,
you guys are nitpicking
and petty fogging the women into the shit house.
He started yelling, this is their time, this is their time!
[light music]
- The Director's Guild chose to have
voluntary cooperation, voluntary compliance.
Things like learn to be a better director classes,
coaching, oh, and to observe the director at a show.
I can't tell you how many of our women director members
observed, observed, observed, observed, observed.
By the time all this voluntary compliance
was another year, a year and a half.
By then we had the proof that it was just smoke and mirrors.
Executive director Mike Franklin
called a big giant meeting to review
and he invited all the same people, and nobody showed up.
Nobody from the studios, networks,
production companies came at all.
This was the first time those men were ever treated
with a slap in the face, they were treated like a woman,
and it was their first taste of it.
- Well, Michael Franklin got angry
and he said, we're suing them.
[typing] [light upbeat music]
- Law is very important to making change.
You can't change hearts and minds,
but there can be consequences.
And laws establish consequences for behavior,
and I think that's very important.
- There has never been any union that filed a lawsuit
against any studio, any network,
about an issue such as equal hiring equity.
- We came to the conclusion
that voluntary compliance was ridiculous.
People are not gonna take jobs away
from people they've hired.
- Title seven is the law of the land.
But unless there are specific mandates, compliance is fluid.
- We were assigned to the federal court
of Judge Pamela Rymer.
We thought, oh, well, a woman judge,
maybe she'll understand what it's like to be shut out.
She threw the case out.
- It's like the wind is knocked out of you.
She said the guild was not a proper litigant
because members of the guild discriminate themselves.
Directors discriminate when they don't hire women
and minority assistant directors.
Assistant directors discriminate
when they don't hire second assistant directors
who are women and minorities.
It was a legitimate turn down, we weren't prepared for it
and I was surprised by that.
[somber music]
- [Woman] I discovered this community four years ago
when I began an anthropological study
of aging in an ethnic group.
- [Lynne] I wanna get good at what I care about doing,
and that's what we've been deprived of.
- And the award goes to Number Our Days, Lynne Littman.
[audience applauding]
- Misogyny is an invisible sport.
It prevented us from creating careers.
It prevented us from creating bodies of work.
- [Woman] If we had won the case,
it would have been a mandate.
You have to hire a certain number of women
or you're breaking federal law.
The film industry dodged a bullet.
They got away with it.
- It was a terrible loss,
so much effort by these women directors,
but you really saw an incredibly radical shift
among female director hires in Hollywood
because of a legal action.
In the following 10 years, the numbers skyrocketed to 16%.
- But then, after 1995, no more progress.
- For the next 20 years, the number of women directors
was going to go in decline,
and women of color, off the map.
I realized that we were not gonna be able
to solve this problem from within.
We had to get this out of the DGA and into the world.
[keyboard clicking]
The most obvious solution that we could come up with
was to take this to the ACLU.
[somber music]
- The American Civil Liberties Union
works to protect people's constitutional rights
and defend the Bill of Rights
that's guaranteed to everyone in the United States.
- Watchdog groups like the ACLU,
all they're asking is that the law be respected.
We don't so much need to change the laws
as enforce the laws.
- [Maria] My friends were reluctant
to go outside the industry, they were worried.
- The film business is a who you know business.
You cannot go out there and start yelling,
because you'll never get hired again.
- Maria Giese is very brave.
She's on the frontline takin' the hits
and not making a lot of friends, I suppose.
- [Maria] The whole thing is about fear,
and the one thing you cannot do
if you're trying to make change is respond to fear.
- She has the passion and the energy that I remember.
- I was full-time on this.
For me to be able to get the point across to the ACLU,
it was essential to be able to define this
as a national problem, a global problem,
a civil rights problem.
Hollywood is our storytelling machine.
- I've been appointed to defend Tom Robinson.
- It creates, in large part, our cultural narrative
and informs the voice of our very civilization.
- These three words written larger then the rest,
we the people, they must apply to everyone,
[whip cracking] or they mean nothing.
- [Maria] We American people rely
on our entertainment industry largely
for it to communicate our stories.
- All right, let's go to work.
- [Maria] And to represent us to each other
and to the rest of the world.
- That's correct.
- And women's creative input is not making it
into our nation's storytelling, into our cultural narrative.
- Maria reached out to Melissa Goodman
because Melissa's expertise is in gender issues.
- There are federal laws that very clearly and specifically
prohibit sex discrimination in employment.
California has their own set of very strong and protective
gender discrimination laws as well.
- Over the course of the next six weeks,
I met in their offices and I told my story.
- If there are nearly zero members of a protected group
in a workplace, something is keeping them out.
- I think if you were Starbucks and 93% of your employees
were male, that would be a problem.
- Unless it can be justified as necessary
to the functioning of these companies,
it's illegal under Title Seven.
That's the story that I think gets us places.
[light somber music]
- We strongly believe and the data strongly suggests
that bias behind the camera in Hollywood
is directly related to all the other discrimination
and bias that we fight at the ACLU
in all other facets of life, it's all connected.
- Over the next several months,
my colleagues gathered stories from around 50 women.
- I had been in conversation with the ACLU
and was letting them know about some of my experiences.
- In an industry like film and television
where the process for hiring is a spiderweb,
all of these organizations play a different role
in navigating the process
for making film and making television.
- The networks blame the showrunners.
The showrunners blame the agencies and the studios.
The studios are blamin' the showrunners and the networks.
So they all have a safe zone in which they can say,
I'm not racist or sexist.
- What it results in is a wild irrationality
in who gets to make TV and movies.
- People would say the biggest problem is
women never make it on agency lists to the studios.
- You call all the major agencies and say
we need 12 directors for this order, who do you have?
Most of them are men.
- If the list that we get are all men on the list,
we are overloaded with a lot of work,
and sometimes we don't look beyond our lists.
- When I reached out to agencies to send me other writers,
they said, we don't have any.
And someone actually said, I understand,
you're covering your ass for some reason,
we're gonna send you some more white men.
- [Man] They actually said white men?
- Yes.
- If a woman is paid less than a man,
an agent is going to make more money
pushing a male writer or a male director.
- Starting out as an agent,
I was encouraged to spend most of my time
representing male clients because it was the view
that male clients made more money.
- If you can't get in the door to be even on the list
of people considered, you're clearly never gonna get a job.
[woman screaming]
- The movies that we make are huge,
and we don't wanna have people making these movies and fail.
So you wanna make sure that they have
some sort of experience to get it done.
- It's hard to say, well, this woman
who made a five million dollar horror movie,
let's give her a 150 million dollar action movie.
Well, you have to let people do it
so that they have experience to change the pool.
- None of our directors before they came to us
had made a 100 million dollar movie.
None of our male directors.
[somber music]
- The idea that we have a lack of qualified women,
all of that is bullshit.
We have a lack of people who are comfortable hiring people
who exist outside of their comfort zone.
- There's plenty of us.
You could hire women for every feature film
in this country and you would not run out of women to hire.
- Our job is to help and demand the studios and producers
and networks and streamers make decisions
that favor gender equality.
- You just hire women, it's not that hard.
It's not that hard, I have not had a hard time doing it,
so I don't understand why that's difficult.
[light music]
- We came to the conclusion
that it was a really serious civil rights problem
that deserved the attention of the EEOC,
which is the agency tasked with enforcing Title Seven.
- When I saw that letter, I was shocked.
It was like, wow, that's incredible.
[somber music]
- On October 6th, I received one of the first letters
from the EEOC asking to interview me.
This meant the investigation was on.
- The EEOC says they're gonna investigate Hollywood.
This is a massive accomplishment for us.
- I went down to the EEOC and did,
I believe it was about four hours worth of interviews,
and so did many other people too.
- In terms of outcomes, the EEOC is always focused
on a variety of remedies.
That could range from instituting certain percentages
of women considered and hired for jobs.
They can impose reporting requirements.
Here are the number of women we considered,
we are the number of women we hired, here's why.
- I would hope it would be a wake up call.
We're all of us doing something really wrong and it's time.
- Every form of pressure is important.
If it comes from a need to settle a lawsuit,
it will happen faster then if it comes from,
gee, this is something we should do,
but we don't have to do it.
- I think the EEOC thing is great,
because you either gotta shame people legally
and say you may get sued if you don't do this,
or you just have to shame them publicly
and go like, hey everybody, look,
look what they haven't been doing, this is ridiculous.
- As it stands right now, if you are a person
with hiring power and you are not actively, actively
trying to hire more women, you are part of the problem.
- I'll be interested in seeing in this very documentary
how many men in positions of power
will sit here and explain why they don't hire women.
It's an easy question.
- At the same time, I started noticing
the scripts are really bad for women in Hollywood.
I decided I was gonna go on a tour of all the studios
and meet with every studio head and say,
what are you developing for me, for other women?
And they literally looked at me blank, they had nothing.
One studio said, we think we might have one movie
where we can flip the gender from a guy to a women.
And I thought, what?
This is crazy.
I felt like I could either admire that problem
or do something about it.
- You sound like a feminist.
- I am.
- That's excellent, that's fantastic, I love feminists.
- So I put up my own money and I had two employees
and just started developing these projects
with smart, articulate, capable women.
It's actually kind of annoying
that you look like that and you're smart.
- Reese has a very vital production company
and they're creating female centric stories
that are really successful.
- Big Little Lies. [audience applauding]
- It's time for our business to wake up
and realize that it's good economics
as well as the right thing to do.
- People in senior leadership
can really change an organization.
Having a specific plan in their talent strategy
about diversity and inclusion and being very persistent
to make sure that you're getting access
to the best pool of talent that you can.
- When I was president of entertainment at ABC,
it was just after Sex And The City
was announced to be going away.
- Stop, really, you're gonna make me cry.
- That became a real trigger.
We need to find the next show for women.
- I may be dead, but I'm still pretty.
- I would watch TV and the women
on network television all felt cute.
- [Both] I'm sexy, I'm cute.
- It's so girly and stupid.
- [Shonda] They all felt like somebody's fantasy
of what a woman would be.
- God, look at her.
- I was like, I don't really wanna watch these shows.
What I wanted to watch was a show
about competitive women who loved their jobs,
who are happy to stand up to the guys and be big dogs.
- We were rolling some ideas around
and the idea of doing an medical show came up,
and so we started talking about
what a medical show would look like
if it was coming from Shonda's brain.
[typing]
- She wrote Grey's Anatomy.
The way that she wanted to do it
with the diversity of the cast
and the diversity of the points of view,
it was totally unique.
- Betsy and I were brought into a room
full of older white men.
- Pilot screenings were dominantly male.
- This one gentlemen said, the pilot is appalling,
you have this women who the night before
her first day in her new job goes out,
gets drunk, picks up a guy, sleeps with him,
and then goes into work, who would ever do that?
And I remember looking at him and saying,
well actually, I did it.
- It was fascinating watching them
trying to shape Meredith Grey
into one of their fantasy girls who's perfect and wholesome.
We just didn't do it.
- [Man] Dr. Grey, you need to tell us what you wanna do.
- All the parts that I had been auditioning for
were the girlfriend or the wife,
so I did notice immediately that,
oh, I get to be the lead role, I get to be a doctor,
I get to have opinions, I get to be smart.
- Shonda was able to make half of her cast not white.
- Everyone, listen up, please.
- I was very lucky because Grey's Anatomy was developed
under the network presidency of Susan Lyne.
She had to fight really hard
to get them to put it on the air.
- When I called to say we were gonna green light it,
the male executive on the other end of the line
literally hung up on me.
[light music]
- Because of the show's success,
what Shonda has done with that power has been remarkable.
- Moments like this give every woman an opportunity
to decide what kind of person she wants to be.
- She created Scandal, where the lead character
is an African-American woman.
Later on, she was also able to hire
a African-American lead actress
who is older and who has darker skin.
These are all building blocks
to being able to show ourselves fully.
- When you have diverse creators making diverse content,
you get representations of experience
that you never would have gotten otherwise.
That scene with Viola Davis
taking off her wig was revolutionary.
We often, as black women, have to put on this armor
when we enter the world.
- It was like she took
the weight off of our shoulders in public.
[somber music]
That moment represented black women
comin' out of these shadows of I have to look like this.
- Shonda Rhimes is the
most powerful showrunner in Hollywood.
People look at her and say, isn't the problem solved?
[keyboard clicking]
- I was following the EEOC case very closely.
The women who brought that suit and who documented
all those exclusions and abuses are heroic.
I began digging around and I wanted to see
what I could find out about directors in the world of TV.
All the data was there, but it wasn't all that easy
to see the numbers by network.
I don't like math, but even a non-math person like me
can add up a row of zeroes.
I constructed a chart for every network,
and there were four categories:
white men, white women, men of color, women of color.
And the network with the worst track record...
was FX.
- I was very disappointed.
I thought of myself as an enlightened person.
I would have described myself as a feminist.
So I started to inquire much more deeply
into the kinds of unique challenges
faced by women, by African-Americans,
by people who are not gender normative.
We gotta put our finger on the scale
and try to do something to change the situation.
- People will hire the same type of people every time
if you don't have that meeting to tell them not to.
[light upbeat music] [keyboard clicking]
- I wrote a letter to all the showrunners of our shows
asking them to help us do better,
but also telling them that we would provide them
with all the resources necessary to make that successful.
- In July, their staff approached me and said,
we've gone from 89% white men directing our shows to 49%.
And I just said, no you didn't.
- I had this unconscious bias that we would have to
be making sacrifices to hire people with less experience.
- They don't care that I'm black.
- [John] And maybe that the talent wouldn't be there.
- I just think that they just don't like me.
- Oh, they care plenty.
- And I'm here to say it's there.
[light dramatic music]
- There's nothing funny here!
- [John] The minute we open our door and we say,
come express it here, - Welcome.
- the work got better.
- Hello, Daddy.
- Feud is so, so good.
You directed an episode of it.
- I did, it'll be on [audience applauding]
- It's one of the best things
that's ever happened in my professional career.
Anyone who then told me,
or told any other journalist in the future, it's too hard,
no, it's not, look at what FX did.
- It can only be done if
the CEO is totally invested in this.
It doesn't work if it's just lip service.
- Progress will happen when men take a stand.
It's the chivalry of the 21st century.
- I'm doing a better job
for having changed the way I think about this.
I'm doing a better job of funneling
the most talented people into this business,
and I think that makes people uncomfortable.
I've been increasingly open as I've gotten older
to seeing my white, male, heterosexual identity
as an unearned advantage in the world.
I think it's difficult sometimes for men to see that
because I think they feel like it diminishes
the nature of their achievement or their life,
but I just think it's a fact.
- When you try to move from where we are
towards something which looks more nearly like equality,
there are people who are doing quite nicely now
who feel like something is being taken away from them.
I have a friend, he came back from a job interview
that hadn't particularly gone well
and we were having coffee and he said,
all they're looking for is black women.
And I said, did they tell you that?
And he said, no, but everybody knows that.
And then I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know whether I should get up and leave the table,
whether I should pull the statistics up on my telephone.
But it's simply not true.
- We're hearing a lot of people saying,
when we fact in gender we're not selecting for excellence.
And I find that it's the other way around.
We are factoring in gender, the male gender,
and that is what is constraining
the selection of excellence.
- The countervailing forces against change must be enormous.
They're enormous, they're powerful, and they're silent.
- As women, we are not allowed to be angry.
Our anger is not appropriate.
- I can point to the change.
I can point to when the forest went up in fire.
- [Trump] I moved on her like a bitch, and she was married.
She is a disgusting pig, right?
When you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything, grab 'em by the pussy.
- [Man] The 45th president of the United States.
- It is truly, unequivocally, a breaking point for women.
- Oh my god, this was the gasoline on the spark
that awakened the country.
[Quiet by MILCK]
- In the last couple of decades, a majority of women felt
that there was nothing more to fight for.
Now we see that there's a lot to fight for.
♪ Shut up and smile ♪
♪ Don't spread your legs ♪
Oh my god. [background chattering]
- People didn't just get discouraged
and say, wow, that sucks.
Right there on inauguration day going,
we're here and we're not going away!
♪ But no one knows me ♪
♪ No one ever will ♪
♪ If don't say something if I just lie still ♪
♪ But I'll beat that monster ♪
♪ Scare them all away ♪
- Older women that have been through these battles
are gratified to see it revived and it feels right.
♪ I can't keep quiet ♪
♪ No, no, no ♪
♪ I can't keep quiet ♪
- I want to thank our new president.
You just started the revolution.
[crowd cheering]
- Women's right are human rights.
- [Crowd] Women's rights are human rights.
[crowd cheering]
- All of a sudden, the dam broke open.
♪ I can't keep quiet ♪
- I could never have envisioned something
that would change the world.
I was tryin' to change my community.
♪ Oh, I'm breaking quiet ♪
♪ Let it out, let it out, let it out now ♪
♪ Must be someone who understands ♪
♪ Let it out, let it out, let it out now ♪
- [Woman] New York Times reporting
- [Man] A growing community of women speaking out
- [Woman] Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed
- [Woman] Including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd
- Hollywood has built itself on that casting couch
and on keeping people silent.
- When it's one, you can say she's crazy
and ruin her career, and when it's 100, it's undeniable.
- Guilty, guilty, guilty.
- Sexual harassment and abuse
are a symptom of employment discrimination.
They expose the way that business works in Hollywood.
- [Man] The me too movement is morphing into Time's Up.
- [Man] The movement has raised over $16 million
to help victims of workplace harassment.
- It's action, and that was what really pulled me in.
♪ Let it out, let it out, let it out now ♪
- We have to create momentum based on this moment.
You can't just say, well, we won't sexually harass the women
but we're not gonna give them bigger roles
and more to say and more important things to do.
- In order for true systemic change to happen,
it has to be inclusive, everyone has to come along with it.
And change needs to happen immediately.
[light upbeat music]
- We need more female content.
We need more female filmmakers
and better roles for actresses.
And at a certain point, some people have to take some risks
or everything just stays the same, right?
[exploding]
- This is no man's land, Diana.
This is not something you can cross, it's not possible.
[somber music]
- This was the make it or break it moment.
It's a moment of confidence and decision of what you can do.
It's not about the wall of people
that you're going up against.
She's just going to go across
and be the one that makes a difference.
I've seen a ton of women really go up
in the face of things and take things head on.
- If you grew up free from unconscious gender bias,
I think it would have an enormous impact.
It could change our culture, it could change the world.
- To be able to have authentic representation,
we really need 50/50 on screen, behind the scenes.
It's the responsibility
of industry executives to obey the law.
[light dramatic music]
- She's takin' all the fire, let's go.
- We as consumers lose sight of the power that we do have.
- When audiences decide I'm not gonna see movies
where women are belittled and I'm not gonna let my daughter
see movies like that, things are gonna change.
[grunting] [metal crashing]
- It's your daughters, it's your granddaughters,
it's your children, it's your stories, it's your job.
[uplifting music]
- If I could go back and talk to my teenage self,
I would say, actually, you'll learn a feminist
is exactly what you wanna be and people will come to realize
that what's good for women is good for everybody.
[Side by Side by Andra Day]
♪ Infiltrate, trouble make, innovate, detonate ♪
♪ This changes everything ♪
♪ What you expect of me ♪
♪ Keep it sweet ♪
♪ Keep it low ♪
♪ Sugar don't rock the boat ♪
♪ Why are you uncomfortable with beautiful ♪
♪ I can see you afraid ♪
♪ Tell me what of ♪
♪ Stuck in a rut ♪
♪ Only because you clipping my wings ♪
♪ Holding me down ♪
♪ Caging me in ♪
♪ And locking me out ♪
♪ Scared of the tears ♪
♪ Sweat or the blood ♪
♪ Standing on me to hold yourself up ♪
♪ Only a few feet off the ground ♪
♪ But why hover when you could fly ♪
♪ What will guide you ♪
♪ With no stars in the sky ♪
♪ Your flag, half mast, ♪
♪ Let these old habits die ♪
♪ Used to saving you just to be crucified ♪
♪ But you just half a man ♪
♪ Until we side by side ♪
♪ Stalemate, elevate, equal parts, co-create ♪
♪ How you gon know the way ♪
♪ With only half the truth? ♪
♪ But it's alright ♪
♪ We gon' be great ♪
♪ Fear just gets in the way ♪
♪ Don't think, participate ♪
♪ Saying I got a bad attitude ♪
♪ According to what ♪
♪ According to who? ♪
♪ Word of advice, I'm being polite ♪
♪ And I'm only nice 'cause that's what I like ♪
♪ Talk like I'm not ♪
♪ A part of the plan ♪
♪ Stay in my place but that's where I am ♪
♪ God don't just speak to man ♪
♪ Why hover when you could fly ♪
♪ What will guide you ♪
♪ With no stars in the sky ♪
♪ Your flag, half mast, ♪
♪ Let these old habits die ♪
♪ Used to saving you just to be crucified ♪
♪ But you just half a man ♪
♪ Until we side by side ♪
♪ Why hover when you ♪
♪ Could fly ♪
♪ I will guide you ♪
♪ We can talk of all the stars in the sky ♪
♪ Your flag, half mast, ♪
♪ Let these old habits die ♪
♪ Used to saving you just to be crucified ♪
♪ But you just half a man ♪
♪ Until we side by side ♪
♪ Used to being crucified ♪
♪ We taking so much fire ♪
♪ Until we side by side ♪
[light music]