Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Because in addition to pitching the project that made her husband famous, Platt designed and built the sets, made the costumes, and did hair and makeup for the entire cast. And that’s just what she did on her own. The collaboration between Peter and Polly was so apparent that even Shepherd couldn’t help but remark to Platt: People say you direct because he sits with you and you draw something on the script. You tell him what the shots will be. Shepherd wasn’t the only one who noticed Platt’s influence either. Platt described her co-working relationship with her husband as, “he’s the locomotive and I’m the tracks.” The couple’s closest friends and colleagues even lamented how Bogdanovich’s films suffered after their eventual divorce. The only person who didn’t see how instrumental Polly was to Peter’s films was Peter himself. In the middle of production—and his very public affair with Shepherd—Bogdanovich asked Platt why she didn’t just “go home.”
✏️ A proper example of men taking credit for women, while women do all the freaking work.
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Platt still believed in their creative partnership. She went on, post-divorce, to make two more hits with Bogdanovich: What’s Up Doc? and Paper Moon. But it wasn’t until Platt creatively split from Bogdanovich that her career really took off—and his fizzled out. She produced several films and fostered the careers of JJ Abrams, Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson, and Matt Groening. You might have only just learned about Polly Platt, but you know at least a few of these men—and Platt was instrumental in making them happen. Naturally, this is the part of her career that has largely been forgotten, eclipsed by the salacious affair surrounding The Last Picture Show.
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I never cared for THX because it left me cold. When the studio didn’t like the film, I wasn’t surprised. But George just said to me, I was stupid and knew nothing. Because I was just a Valley Girl. He was the intellectual.
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Lucas didn’t think much of creating emotionally resonant work, famously claiming, “emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.” Marcia’s ability to find the emotional crux of a scene was a strength, but George essentially skewed it as a weakness of feminine sentimentality. And yet, the enduring power of the original Star Wars series is largely due to Marcia’s influence.
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Coppola justified his flagrant affair with his babysitter-turned-assistant Melissa Mathisson by saying that she “was like a girl who [had] a crush on her professor. Her confidence in me made me feel confident.” His wife Ellie Coppola was “regular”; she didn’t feed his outsized, auteur ego, unlike the young, impressionable Mathisson who appeared to see Coppola as he wished to be seen.
✏️ The fact this is seen as adequate justification for infidelity is just astonishing. Creativity and inspiration trumps all else.
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We could certainly amass an international list of brilliant women that qualify as auteurs. But my question is: why would we want to? We can’t retro-fit auteur theory to be feminist; it’s inherently debasing and corrupting. Toxic exceptionalism and ego aren’t man-made glitches of the theory: they’re features. If women assume the ideology of the auteur, treating the collaborative work of filmmaking as a personal fiefdom, then they’re likely to run into the same issues as the men.
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Institutions like the Academy aren’t going to liberate female filmmakers. They’re still squeamish about a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body on film. The Academy will continue to eke out Oscars for women and people of color, slowly, as they’ve done since their inception. Awareness of the problem only goes so far.
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more women than men owned independent production companies in 1923.” Alice Guy-Blaché, the first documented female filmmaker, started her career as early as 1896. To say she was prolific would be an understatement, as some historians believe she directed, wrote, and produced over a thousand films. Many of them were shorts, but several were at least a half hour long.
✏️ This is a not uncommon thing.. We think women have been in the backseat forever and change is slowly happening, when in fact women were leaders of industries ages ago (in a way that makes what they have now pale in comparison)… but men not only took over, they erased women’s history as well to ensure no one laments what was lost or “gets any ideas”. Need to find other examples.. i think the whole beer brewing and witch thing is another example.
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This all changed when filmmaking became a lucrative business and Wall Street started investing. What was once hundreds of small, experimental studios became a handful of monoliths helmed by white male executives. As a result, women were systematically purged from the jobs they practically created. Universal didn’t hire a single female director for nearly sixty years
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describes their marriage as “an unusual heterosexual union for the time.” Demy was bisexual, but that wasn’t what was markedly unusual about their partnership: it was that it was built on mutual support and respect for each others’ work.