Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill to spearhead fight against harassment in Hollywood

Anita Hill, who sparked a nascent national reckoning with sexual harassment when she testified during Clarence Thomas’s supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991, has been chosen to lead a commission on sexual misconduct organized and financed by some of the most prominent figures in Hollywood.

The Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace will be charged with tackling “the broad culture of abuse and power disparity” in media and entertainment, a statement from its organisers said.

Capital and Captain America

Sometimes the biggest things hide in plain sight.

This thought occurred to me in the midst of Captain America: Winter Soldier, a long, overblown and distinctly uninteresting piece of work. It resembles a giant colouring book more than a film. The outlines are already there, all you need to do is fill them in.

The film trots about doing just that, in rote repetition, just like the many comic book film adaptations before and after it. They are lined up like planes on a runway at the moment: The X-Men Again Already, Spider-Man 11, Defenders of the Galaxy, Transformers 2.0, Godzilla Gets Stompy, etcetera. The only thing that sets Winter Soldier apart from the rest of the ilk is the whiff of conspiracy theory that attends the plot.

China's Investment In Hollywood Movies Has Begun

HONG KONG - China's state-owned film distributor is making its first investment in Hollywood movies by taking a stake in two projects by production company Legendary Entertainment.

The two companies said on Tuesday that China Film would make an "eight-figure equity investment" in two upcoming films, "Seventh Son" and "Warcraft."

The exact amount was not specified.

Hollywood's Big Women Problem, In 1 Chart

In November, the New York Film Academy took a look at gender inequality in films from 2007 to 2012. The results were startling: there five men for every one woman working in the industry. As the year comes to a close, we decided to take a closer look at the films of 2013. Adding up the leading roles in this year's 50 highest-grossing films (as listed by Box Office Mojo), we tallied how many featured a female lead, how many featured a male lead, and how many included a co-ed ensemble cast.

The results: Not only are women -- as the New York Film Academy found -- less prominent in the film industry, the movies that garner the most attention rarely focus on female narratives. Of this year's 50 top-earning movies, just six starred a female lead ("The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," "Gravity," "The Heat," "Frozen," "Identity Thief," "Mama" and "Safe Haven"). More than 32 of the movies among the top 50 starred only male leads and 20 percent of the total films did not even include women as secondary characters.

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.com/
Author: Lauren Duca  

George Lucas: Hollywood Didn't Want To Fund My Film Because Of Its Black Cast

After Jar-Jar Binks, it's hard to not to give George Lucas' new film Red Tails the side-eye. The movie is World War II-era action flick based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the heroic and decorated pilots who were first black servicemembers to fly combat missions at a time when black Americans were not recognized as full citizens on the United States, despite their willingness to fight and die in its defense.

In an interview with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart on Monday night, Lucas was frank about the trouble he had getting the film made—in part, he said, because the studios weren't willing to finance a film without a white protagonist as an anchor.

"This has been held up for release since 1942 since it was shot, I've been trying to get released ever since," Lucas joked—although he did say that the film took about 23 years to develop. "It's because it's an all-black movie. There's no major white roles in it at all...I showed it to all of them and they said nooooo. We don't know how to market a move like this." Lucas goes on to explain that major studios don't believe films with majority black casts do well in foreign markets. Lucas was unbowed, telling Stewart that "we do want to do a prequel and a sequel," which I take as a measure of how excited and proud about Red Tails Lucas actually is. Bonus exuberance: "This is the closest you'll ever get to Episode Seven."