Monday, October 08, 2007

Warner Bros and Girls



It looks like Warner Bros doesn't like girls. They might just ban girls altogether from starring in their movies:

This comes to me from three different producers, so I know it's real: Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead". This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster's The Brave One (even though she's had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman's The Invasion (as if three different directors didn't have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently. "Can you imagine when Gloria Allred gets hold of this? It's going to be like World War III," one producer just told me. (I put in a call to Glo, who comments below.) Of course, Warner Bros has always been male-centric in its movies. But now the official policy as expressly articulated by Robinov is that a male has to be the lead of every pic made. I'm told he doesn't even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position (which now is apparently missionary at WB).

This might not be true, of course. But if it is, imagine what a recipe it gives us for solving all sorts of problems! Like the one about crime. Let's just make it illegal for men to go out and soon enough the streets out there will be safe at all times of the day.

I'm sure that you thought I was being tasteless in that paragraph, even though I was just suggesting that we apply the Robinov solution more generally. If it's good enough for a business firm it surely is good enough for a country run along the lines of a business firm. Right?

As I mentioned, perhaps this rumor turns out to be untrue. I sure hope so, because the consequences otherwise will not be pretty. I'm thinking of a general boycott of Warner Bros to begin with, and I would certainly work for such a boycott. Robinov should be happy, because he is not interested in any girly money.

Come to think of it, I haven't spent enough feminist column inches on the movie industry...