July 22. A new report by the Executive Director, Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University

The following are among the study's findings:

*Men write the overwhelming majority of film reviews in the nation's top newspapers. In Fall 2007, men penned 70% and women 30% of all reviews.
*Of the newspapers featuring film reviews, 47% had no reviews written by women critics, writers or freelancers. In contrast, only 12% had no reviews written by men critics, writers or freelancers.
*Films with women filmmakers (directors and writers) and films with female protagonists and ensemble casts comprise a larger proportion of films reviewed by women than men. Thus, the under-representation of women film critics, writers and freelancers may cause films featuring females or with women filmmakers to receive less coverage.

The bottom line is that film criticism in this country's newspapers remains a largely male enterprise, echoing the heavy male dominance behind the scenes and on screen in the film industry. Following is the executive summary of the report.
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Individually we can recycle bags, capture the sun’s energy, mount windmill’s and buy responsible cars – and we do. Individuals in the entertainment industry tune in early, do the research, spend the money and speak out.

But collectively, our industry - as in the industry it takes to create our product – has been a major polluter everyplace we go.

Consider the main polluter we use, that which we can’t do without. Consider how much fuel we use. Generators, night shoots, “distant locations”, trucks per shoot, idling trucks, moving cranes, moving everything, people, wardrobe, grip equipment, out to the set and back, move locations, fly crews, use helicopters.More >

Does a male idea of what is sexy really rule? Last November, Maxim magazine, a men’s publication known for its artful covers of buxom women just barely covered, posted their on-line list of the unsexiest women. The list, which a Maxim representative said was a tongue cheek response to an Esquire magazine poll, listed “Sex In the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker as the unsexiest woman alive.

What I am talking about is a complete change in professional orientation. Changing careers. Making new goals. Finding out how to achieve them. And I don’t mean going from a buyer to a seller, (although that one was a real eye-opener) or from catching to pitching, or from actively producing to teaching producing, or from making films to assessing films or enabling films. I’m talking out of one entire field into a new one.

In 2004, when a television producer told me, “Sexual harassment is still going on,” I believed her even though by then the chorus of public opinion, not known for its track record, had pronounced harassment all but gone. Bald eagles were ‘all but gone’ but they’re still here. I’m glad about the eagles.

Is harassment gone or not? I began researching. On a call to the Screen Actors Guild, imagine my surprise when I heard on the telephone menu, "If this is an emergency regarding personal on-the-set safety or sexual harassment, press one."

Bingo. I began to interview people working in film and television. Is sexual harassment still here? Is it different? What can women and men do about it? I learned a lot.

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Excerpt: Living in Los Angeles, you quickly become jaded by celebrity sightings.
Kathy Bates shops at The Grove; Meg Ryan carts her new Asian baby down The Promenade; Nicole Richie pretends to eat at Café Med.
Big fucking deal. I've never had a hankering for the Big Star Moments anyway. Truth be told,the only “celebrity” I ever wanted to meet was John Spencer. He walked like my father, sounded like aged whiskey, and I admired the hell out of him since I was 10 and my parents let me stay up late to watch L.A. Law. He died before I got the guts to ask a friend to pull some strings for a lunch, so I just said fuck it all. You can keep your Nicole Kidmans and Tom Hanks. Give me the B-Celebs, the hey-weren't-you-on-that's, the will-they-ever- amount-to's,the where-are-they now's?!
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Viral videos fly around the internet at top speed, generally finding a home on YouTube, SuperDeluxe (superdeluxe.com), Viral Video Chart (viralvideochart.com), MySpace the list goes on and on. Brandon Burkhart and his partner Randall Mills are out there sorting through the videos and lending them a dash of dignity, pre-YouTube, and giving an audience a great evening in the process.
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Throughout the month of February networks will be airing programming in honor of Black History Month. Some may find the change refreshing since the on-going writers strike has created a dearth of content on our favorite programs. The good news is, there are some interesting shows with historically African American themes and they’re not just for adults anymore. HBO is featuring two animated specials titled “Sweet Blackberry presents: The journey of Henry Box Brown, and Garrett’s Gift”.
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Parts of this article first appeared in the September Issue of Written By...
Shortly before the Writers Guild of America went on strike, I moderated a seminar at the American Film Institute for an audience of aspiring screenwriters. One guest speaker happened to be an Oscar winning writer who went to great pains to elaborate on the finer points of his craft. Describing one particularly difficult “negotiation” in which a director prevailed in forcing the revision of an important scene, this gifted and self-effacing artist struggled to explain how he could be overruled on the content of his own original script...

“Nothing grows where a film crew goes.” This past year, while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, I decided it was time to see if this was true.

Quotes from the women Mollie interviewed struck deep chords in her audiences as she went on the road with the book tours for her book -Women Who Run the Show. Gathering the striking quotes in one place, Mollie reports on what she herself learned from the women she interviewed.

Mollie's book, Women Who Run the Show: How A Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood is the account of the Hollywood workplace from the 1970s to 2000 which she drew from interviews of more than 125 women, and some men, in virtually every segment of the entertainment business. This article is the untold story - what happened after it was published, after the readers asked: What surprised you when you were writing it? What surprised you about people's reactions to it? What did you learn from the women you interviewed?"

Lynne Littman remembers "rocking back and forth" with her collaborator, anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff, when they made the documentary, NUMBER OUR DAYS. The film documented a community of elderly East European Jews living by the Pacific Ocean in Venice, California. It won the Academy Award for Short Documentary in 1976.