Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
Last week, a row erupted over a film review in Variety of Carey Mulligan’s new movie Promising Young Woman. In an interview for The New York Times, Mulligan discussed her frustration of reading character descriptions along the lines of “Beautiful but doesn’t know it”, and with the way movies present women as sexual objects for […]
Today is the first full day of the 2020 Cannes Marché du Film. I’ve written a lot in the past about how Cannes works and how to get the best out of it. And all that’s useless. Well, for 2020, at least. That’s because the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Cannes to move online and offer […]
Last week, I shared research I have conducted into the number of short films made over the past two decades. I focused on live-action shorts which had played at least once at any film festival. While production levels are interesting, they were not the original reason I conducted the project. I was responding to requests […]
In the most recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, they covered the efforts being made to increase the representation of women in below-the-line roles. As part of this coverage, I was asked to crunch the data on the number of women working in specific film departments. So I built a dataset of all feature films […]
Last week, I looked at producers’ careers and this week I am going to use the same data to look at how the picture differs between male and female film producers. This research harnesses my dataset of every feature film released between 1949 and 2018 inclusive. This includes 631,365 producer credits across 274,991 films and […]
Last week, I looked at the average number of films a director is likely to make in their career, and also how many directors work on the average film. Today I am taking into account the gender of directors and looking at how the experiences of male and female directors differ. As a quick reminder, […]
Last week, horror super-producer Jason Blum got himself in hot water after a comment he made during an interview with Polygon. Blum said “There are not a lot of female directors period and even less who are inclined to do horror”. When I first read this, I was horrified! How could he say such a thing? […]
Almost exactly two years ago, Alexis Kreager and I published a big report into the gender inequality faced by film directors working in the UK film industry. Soon after it was published, we were approached by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) about studying the plight of screenwriters, both in the film and television industries. This […]
When I was starting out in film, I always heard the head of the camera department being referred to as either “DoP” (pronounced dee-oh-pea) or “DP” (pronounced dee-pea), both of which are short for director of photography. As I met more filmmakers, I learned that the same role is often called the cinematographer (pronounced… well, the way it’s written). […]
In the past, I’ve looked at how big a movie crew can get, for both UK films and Hollywood movies. But I was recently asked by a reader how the composition of such crews has changed over time. Which departments are getting larger? Which jobs are on the rise and which are waning? To answer […]
