So I’ve been busting my boot-ay lately, grinding on different shoots – paid gigs and from the heart projects of mine, and collaborations. It’s a pretty high time creatively in my corner.
What’s been bothering me, though, is the way gender plays out on shoots. During the “school year” I’m usually inundated with education-based creative environments and I’ve also been going to the non-profit and public media worlds as a source of income for film projects. But 2009 (or “two thousand mine” as my friend Taagen calls it) has been the year of creativity for me. I’ve decided to make some changes in the work I produce, going back to my high art roots. I guess I’d produced one too many social documentaries and needed some conceptual, abstract, avant garde in my life. I hadn’t seen it since the early part of the decade.
What’s resulted are video art projects, experimental shoots, working with more art department stuff on music videos and photo shoots and coming up, my first performance art/video art collaborative show next Wednesday at Webster Hall. Yeah.
Its all very fun, but what’s happened is that now I’m back in the fold of “the industry” – completely different from the non-profit/pubic media/children’s media/education world. There’s no politically correct filter. People in the commercial film/tv industry are unrefined like raw sugar. But I’m accustomed to maple syrup.
On a recent shoot, I ran into a woman I used to work with back in the days. She was a producer on this particular project. As always, she is on top of her game – thorough, kind, considerate, timely. She gets the job done and does it well, with grace and ease. That’s why she’s a producer. But why is it that certain men who she outranks exceedingly still refuse to give her due respect? Maybe they’re just a-holes who don’t know the meaning of respect – wrong! The same guys who mistreat a female producer will give much higher respect to a male production manager.
I hate that this is still an issue, mainly because I hate complaining. But it really is atrocious and unfair. I always notice that there are mostly men on the majority of film/video/photo shoots. The industry is still very obviously male dominated and its rare that any of these men check their male privilege, particularly on set.
I’ve been dragging my feet on forming the all female film collective, but I must not drag any longer. I’m getting it started. I think September will be our kick-off month!
