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Author:
Judith James
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Judith is the editor-in-chief of TRACTION and a film, stage and television producer who is in a film partnership with Richard Dreyfuss at Dreyfuss/James Productions and a theater partnership with Camille Cosby.
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Judith James is a film, stage and television producer who is in a film partnership with Richard Dreyfuss at Dreyfuss/James Productions.
Originally a New York theatrical producer of 11 award winning plays, her first television production was the Emmy winning "IN HER OWN WORDS" for KCET and American Playhouse and the Mark Taper Forum .
Her film credits include an executive producer of QUIZ SHOW, a producer of MR. HOLLAND?S OPUS, producer of TRIGGER HAPPY starring Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, and movies for HBO, TNT, ABC and CBS. In addition she has served as consulting producer on Mr. Dreyfuss? films.
In a theatrical partnership with Camille Cosby, Judith also produced the Broadway play of HAVING OUR SAY; The Delany Sisters? First 100 Years by Emily Mann, subsequent tours and the movie version, directed by Lynne Littman, for CBS, starring Ruby Dee and Diahann Carroll. HAVING OUR SAY received the coveted Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.
In January 2006, she wrapped principal photography on the thriller, THE FOREST, which she produced in India in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is by writer/director Ashvin Kumar, an Academy Award nominee for a short film last year.
She is presently developing a Broadway musical on Pearl Bailey RAW PEARL with Bill and Camille Cosby and, with Viva Productions, readying the independent film, DAYS OF FEAR to star Woody Harrelson to shoot in South Africa.
In January 2005, Ms. James was instrumental in securing and constructing for WOMEN IN FILM an alliance with General Motors under which GM has supported a myriad of WIF programs and events for 3 years ending 2007.
She is the editor-in-chief of TRACTION.
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ISSUE #5
Two subjects today: why you may not know about the terrific, glorious Women In Film Foundation’s Film Finishing Fund, and THERE WILL BE BLOOD.
Note please that this week’s feature interview, PROCESS: CYNTHIA WADE, is with the director of a wonderful film finished with a grant from the WIF Foundation’s Film Finishing Fund.
The fund is a great opportunity for women filmmakers .if women know about it. It’s existence and it’s “call for entries” are increasingly impacted by a major confusion about the internet. Newspaper/magazine editors, not only hoping to placate endless requests for ‘space’, but also hoping, out of ignorance, that ‘online’ means something, shuttle all notices of the fund’s activities onto their ‘online” sites.
It might just be that there are two groups of readers for any news or trade paper – their online readers and their hard copy readers, roughly breaking into: those who want the headlines and those who want the story, information, interesting notices, stuff they didn’t know about. We browse through the newspaper/magazine in our hands, with our coffee, on the subway, etc. Things catch our eye. But browsing on the internet, at least so far, is confined entirely to research. A filmmaker could go on google and search for “film finishing funds”, if they even knew to look, if they even knew the ‘keywords’. “Keywords” rule online. So, if you live in Cleveland and if you didn’t know that such a fund was available, or that such a category existed, set up for women to apply, you would not have been reached this year. Not anymore. If you don’t know what you are looking for, “online” sucks.
A simple fact of modern life.
Secondly, please note the review of THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Why, you may ask, do we feature a review about as male a movie as THERE WILL BE BLOOD, reviewed by a Man?
Well, because it is such a male movie and no movie could match the maleness of Hollywood marketing better. (The mind-set that gave us the concept that the highest weekend gross equals the best movie?)
Peter is saying what needs to be said: “calm down”. THERE WILL BE BLOOD gives Daniel Day-Lewis a character in which he is glorious and a director who completely supports him.
And I can proudly say I was one of 5 people who gave Paul Thomas Anderson $750 to do his first ‘short’. He was and is becoming a breathtaking filmmaker.
But Best Picture?
Let’s have a womens’ pov here…Doesn’t someone need to say that the criteria by which “Best” is determined can NOT be, is NOT, the same criteria as a “Best” that is packaged, marketed and financed to overcome the reasonable observation (that it isn’t Best).
Let’s have, if we must, a Best Male Picture category…. For instance the first LETHAL WEAPON with Danny Glover and Mel Gibson was without a doubt absolutely the Best Male picture up to then. A friend of mine and I were so thrilled by it as women that we burst out onto the sidewalk giving into pow-pows and leaps of exuberant power. We can certainly appreciate, fall for and dream about the quintessential male character.
A study of the maleness of an American male type as in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, is valid and fascinating, perhaps because it strips the world and messy women away. But shouldn’t “Best” be reserved for a film which tells a story that admits the world is peopled instead of dismissing half of it as being of no consequence, as having no part in it via even their absence?
That the marketing of this one wants us to ignore the real elements of Best and is joyfully spending money to become the “Best” anyway, is more of that creeping opening weekend mindset.
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