[E.T. groaning]
REBECCA KEEGAN: Sometimes I think about the first movie I saw,
which was "E.T."
I was five.
I saw it in a drive-in with my parents.
And I was the same age as Drew Barrymore in the movie, just about.
And it was very exciting to me
to see a little girl who looked like me
who was at the center of the action.
And I was totally transported, loved the movie,
began to love movies.
As I got older, it was less and less likely
that someone who looked like me
was at the center of the action.
You know, as you become a teenager and a young woman,
the teenagers and young female characters,
it was suddenly about their appearance.
It was about what the men wanted from them.
How they impacted the men.
And that...
annoyed the crap out of me.
MATTHEW BELLONI: The way that a typical movie or TV show gets started
is there's a script, and there's something
that attracts the eye of a taste-maker.
Whether that is an executive at a film or TV company,
whether that is an agent who is influential and says,
you know what, my star client may wanna star in this.
There is some piece of material
that generates interest from someone that causes it
to go from the bottom of a stack
into development.
HELEN HUNT: There is nothing to replace...
brilliant writing.
You feel it more than you think it
or could quantify it, you feel it.
And so you just wanna be part of that.
REBECCA: Hollywood lives and dies by the stories it tells,
but historically the kinds of stories it's chosen to tell
have been very limited.
They have often reflected the power structure of the town itself.
Assertive men, submissive women.
Not a lot of room for gender or sexual diversity.
DIANA WILLIAMS: There was one project I was working on where I said
to the writer, I'm like, if I take out this character,
nothing changes in the script.
So, from a budget standpoint,
great, I was like, but it's actually your female co-lead.
I was like, so this is a problem,
that, if I take out the co-lead, nothing changes in the script.
That means you have not-- you have fallen down on the job.
You've not created a good character.
GABRIELLE CARTERIS: The portrayal historically
of women and men has been very classical.
In terms of, you know, the female, most roles,
um, and I've been the person who's played those--
the crier, the-- the victim, the person who needs help.
And the man is the savior, you know, my prince.
The prince will wake me up from my sleep.
ROBIN WRIGHT: I was always typecast,
in my 20s and 30s,
being the soulful,
understanding, um, sad wife.
- The kind of roles that you start chasing,
and you're hungry and you're thirsty for
are not really even there.
You've played the damsel in distress, and you did not like that experience.
So, you-- I'm sorry, I just don't wanna play that anymore.
But when I say no to that,
I'm basically saying no to a hundred of those scripts
that have been sent to me, and there is nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
- It's still not an equal world
for men and women.
And I-- I don't understand that.
I really don't.
REBECCA: There has been this assumption in Hollywood
that movies fronted by women
are going to be less successful.
That men won't be able to lose themselves
in a lead female character
the way women have become accustomed
to losing ourselves in a lead male character.
- Patriarchy does a very effective job
at silencing women.
And it's through representation.
There's been a full century of negative representation.
Of trans people being villains
and victims and...
uh...
just incidental to storylines.
I mean, we've always been around.
We have always been on-screen.
Yet, we are just gaining
the kind of tools of cultural production
to tell the stories that we wanna tell.
- If you're underrepresented, then all of a sudden
we have to do all of the-- we have to do
all of the bottom of the barrel stuff.
And I always wondered, all right, well,
if I'm gonna carry this kind of torch
because I'm the only, like, Latin person
who's not a stripper, who's not playing a drug dealer,
who's not out there doing the stereotypes,
then I'm gonna carry that sucker hard.
- Some people have the idea that, you know,
we wanna have these strong, empowered women characters.
And I mean, I'm all for that, that's cool.
But what we need more is
fully-lived human characters.
Complex women characters
having complicated relationships
and complicated transformations
within their own consciousness.
- When you just make them likeable,
because they're women,
that's not real.
That's what I find most offensive.
And that's what I find is persistent
in, like, it will not go away.
'Cause guys are not likeable.
A lot of 'em aren't.
And they can be fascinating characters.
DIANA: If we only show
one type of image,
that image goes out and feeds someone's bias.
It feeds whatever "-ism" they have.
Racism, sexism.
It feeds into it.
GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD: The negative images that they've put out
for decades...
that have absolutely weaponized our blackness
and-- and has been dangerous,
but equal to that is the invisibility.
Of us and certainly of black women.
ADELE LIM: When you talk about representation,
I don't think there is this Hollywood
racist Illuminati that's saying,
"We don't want the stories of women or people of color,"
but the way the system is set up,
if the shot-callers are, let's say, a white man,
the stories he is going to respond to will feature
a white male lead,
a white male story where he is the hero.
If you're a woman, or if you're a person of color,
all your life experience, when you are writing
for network television or... a major Hollywood movie
has to be pushed through this prism.
So, you have to translate your experience
and make it directly relevant to a white man.
But, with "Crazy Rich Asians," for the first time in my life,
I didn't have to do that.
I could just write the voices of my mother, my aunts,
and it was joyful, and it was... it was exhilarating.
ZACKARY: Today, people are coming to grips
with storytelling that
is more universal in its specificity.
Trans folks are, like,
living breathing examples
of the destruction of patriarchy.
Of, like, masculinity being transformed into something
and really revealing it as... malleable.
GINA: We need parity with male/female,
and we need parity with women of color,
and it's not a PC thing.
It makes the whole process better
to have different voices in the mix.
Different experiences.
It's just so obvious, and it makes you more money.
Everybody wants the opportunity
to see themselves reflected on-screen.
- You've gotten to the point where the script is ready,
uh, say you're a writer-director.
Now you need actors.
If you're set up with a company that's going to finance the film,
they wanna have a lot of say in which actors get cast.