Girls on Film: Lessons From a Life of Watching Women in Movies (Filmmaking, Life Lessons, Film Analysis) (Birthday Gift for Her)

By Alicia Malone

First two books have (lifetimes sales) = 35,000 (print only)

Alicia Malone has over 1 million views on YouTube
TedTalk #GirlsinFilm has been seen over 50,000 times
Gender Inequality in Film by the numbers: o In the top 500 movies of all time: 70% of all speaking roles go to men // 2 to 1 ratio of nudity // teenage females depicting nudity has risen by 33% since 2007 // The gender gap for cinematic and film majors does not exsist. Women represent 51 percent of graduate students at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and 46 percent at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.





Social Media Numbers: Twitter - 50.2k (@aliciamalone) Instagram - 63.8k (@aliciamalone) Facebook - 19k (facebook.com/moviesaremyjam) YouTube - 44k (youtube.com/moviesaremyjam) Appears On: Screen Junkies YouTube - 7.7m subscribers Fandango MovieClips YouTube - 10m subscribers Clevver Movies YouTube - 1.3m subscribers HitFix Website - 7m unique/month, 27m page views/month Uproxx Website - 25.5m unique/month Speaking Engagements: TEDx Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk_5KQzstew Worthy Women conference - http://www.worthywomen.co/2016conference/ Savannah College of Art and Design students - https://twitter.com/SCADdotedu/status/790570860079898624 Connected To: Chris Stuckman - 768k YouTube subscribers Jeremy Jahns - 1.2m YouTube subscribers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642506570

Alicia Malone

Alicia Malone is a film reporter, host, writer, and self-confessed movie geek. She first gained notice hosting movie-centric shows and reviewing films in her native Australia, before making the leap to Los Angeles in 2011. Since then, Alicia has appeared on CNN, The Today Show, MSNBC, NPR and many more, talking about movies. Currently she is a Fandango Correspondent, and the creator and host of their weekly show, Indie Movie Guide. Alicia is also a host on FilmStruck, a cinephile subscription streaming service run by the Criterion Collection and Turner Classic Movies. Alicia is passionate about classic films, independent movies and supporting women in film. In 2015, Alicia gave a TEDx talk about the lack of women working in film and why this is important to change. In 2017, she was invited to give a second TEDx talk, where she spoke about the hidden stories of the earliest women working in Hollywood. Alicia has also spoken at conferences around America, and because of this, was named one of the 100 Worthy Women of 2016. Alicia has traveled the world to cover the BAFTAs, the Oscars, the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival and SXSW. She is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and over the years has interviewed hundreds of movie stars and filmmakers.

Book preview

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Girls On Film

Lessons From a Life of Watching Women in Movies

by Alicia Malone

Coral Gables

Copyright © 2022 by Alicia Malone.

Published by Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

Cover Design: Elina Diaz

Art Direction: Elina Diaz

Layout & Design: Megan Werner

Author Photo by: Alissa Hessler | Urban Exodus

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Girls on Film: Lessons From a Life of Watching Women in Moveis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020455390

ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-656-3 (e) 978-1-64250-657-0

BISAC category code: PER004030, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism

Printed in the United States of America

The cinema has no boundary, it is a ribbon of dream.

—Orson Welles

Cinema can fill the empty spaces of your life.

—Pedro Almodóvar

I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!

—Leo Bloom, The Producers (1968)

Contents

Overture

One

Girls on Film

Two

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Three

Mr. Movies

Four

Smooth Talk

Five

Mad Love

Six

Woman of the Year

Seven

The Bad and the Beautiful

Eight

A Woman’s Face

Nine

Love Affair

Ten

Imitation of Life

Coda

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Overture

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book. When shouldn’t it be the other way around?

—Kathleen Kelly, You’ve Got Mail

I’ve always loved that quote from You’ve Got Mail. The rom-com’s script—by Nora and Delia Ephron—had been adapted from a 1940 Ernst Lubitsch comedy called The Shop Around the Corner, which itself was a loose adaptation of a play. Nine years later, there was a musical remake, titled In the Good Old Summertime, followed by You’ve Got Mail almost fifty years after that. It seems appropriate that a quote I identify so strongly with comes from an adaptation that had already been adapted several times over—being that for me, films seem like a refraction of my reality.

If you replace the words read and book in that quote with watch and film, it sums up my life. A lot of what I see reminds me of something I have watched in a movie. Too often, I’ll compare a moment in my own life to its movie equivalent, or feel as if I am on a movie set—making sense of my real world through the prism of fictional, highly scripted pieces of entertainment. Oh, I see, I’ll say to myself after going through a tough time. This is the all is lost moment. Perhaps what I need now is a makeover montage. Really, it should be the other way around. Movies should remind me of my life, of experiences I have had. But this is what happens to a person who has spent almost all her years escaping her reality to watch a (much safer, more entertaining, and neatly presented) version of reality on the screen.

Movies have been a great source of joy in my life. They’ve helped me through tough times, inspired me, even given me a career. Many times I’ve wished that life was like a movie: that complicated problems could be resolved within a two-hour time frame. Or that I had an award-winning screenwriter at my disposal to help me properly articulate my feelings. I’ve stood in front of a mirror, lamenting over the fact that I do not look like a movie star. I’ve also wondered how much easier it would be if villains were more obvious to spot. If people were either heroic or evil, instead of a confusing mixture of good and bad. And why can’t the world be in glorious technicolor, with set designers, costume designers, and prop masters at the ready to make it all look perfect? I believe it was the French director François Truffaut who said, I think I like the image of life better than life. Because I don’t think real life is as satisfying as film. I must agree.

There is little doubt that all of this time spent watching movies has greatly affected my worldview. As someone who is naturally shy and introverted, I have often turned to films for clues as to how I should act. Ironic, since what I am seeing is actors acting. And these actors from classic Hollywood were often acting off-screen too, staying within their given personas. As I wrote this book, it was suddenly clear to me that I had followed their lead: I’d read the stories about old Hollywood stars and created for myself a sort of persona. It had helped my career, but in the process, I lost touch with my real self. Throughout my life, I turned to films for answers to life’s big questions, rather than risk any potential embarrassment that may come from talking to a person. My understanding of politics, culture, and the world in general was built from the Hollywood movies I watched as a child. Lacking the additional knowledge that would have placed them within a necessary historical context, I’ve had to spend time undoing some of these lessons.

The films I have watched have largely been the creation of men during the Golden Age of Hollywood. This was a time when entertainment was pumped out by a factory-like studio for financial profit, with each script going through the censorship office, designed to appease moral and religious groups. These films pushed people of color out to the sidelines or boxed them into dangerous stereotypes. They reinforced binary gender roles, erased overt mentions of a character identifying as LGBTQ, and killed or humiliated many female characters who dared to choose an independent life away from men. But I’ve come to realize that you can love and hate a movie at the same time. Classic movies themselves are full of contradictions and can be both empowering and degrading. Like all classic film enthusiasts, I’ve become adept at performing a mental juggling act while watching a movie—identifying with the good, yet acknowledging the bad.

Film critic Robin Wood wrote in his book of essays, Personal Views: Explorations in Film, I don’t believe I learned to live [from movies] … [but I] presume them to have had some oblique, scarcely definable but potent influence on the development of my sensibility, on my way of thinking, feeling, perceiving, reacting; they have certainly extended and deepened my sense of the possibilities of human experience. When I watch a film, I know that what I am seeing is the result of a collaborative effort, designed specifically to tap into my emotions. I never forget that it’s all make-believe, yet it is still possible for certain movies to leave their mark. When I pick up one of my old diaries, I realize how much I have forgotten about my own life; those places, people, and events feel foreign to me now, but I’ll always remember the movies.

The mark that movies have made on me is what you’ll read about in this book. Each chapter revolves around a part of my life, detailing the movies and stars I looked to for inspiration or answers. It is not intended to be a complete memoir—I’ve left out many major life events, relationships, experiences, and people (sorry) in favor of snapshots from my years as a movie-watcher and teller of film history. It’s also not supposed to be an in-depth study of the way women have been portrayed on screen throughout cinema history—for that, you can’t do better than A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women by Jeanine Basinger and From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell, both of which I reference several times in this book.

I’ve deliberately chosen to focus on movies and stars that a wider range of readers will recognize, and I hope that you’ll enjoy these snippets of movie history. Also, that my story makes you ponder your relationship with the movies. Perhaps you question, as I do, why I choose to see movies in the first place. What am I really looking for when I go to the cinema or pick a film to watch at home? Am I trying to learn about the world or myself? Why do I choose to escape my own life and experience pleasure or pain through fictional characters? How have the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching women in movies affected the way I see myself?

As I type this, I have two Post-it notes stuck on my computer. One reads, dig deeper, and the other, fail better. The first is a reminder to be authentic. This is something I have struggled with, as a private, sensitive person who has chosen a public-facing career that requires a tough skin. Over the years, I have so ingested the comments I’ve received that I can easily imagine a critical reaction to every sentence I type. But trying to appeal to the masses is a fool’s errand. Not only is it antithetical to the idea of writing itself—which requires the spilling of a soul onto a page—but it is impossible to make everyone happy. It’s in the trying, not in the result. Hence, fail better. This is from the Samuel Beckett quote, Ever try? Ever fail? No matter. Try harder. Fail better. That is something I feel confident about promising. I will fail better with this book.

One

Girls on Film

I, too, believe that everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly once in his life. I was twenty when they said a woman couldn’t swim the Channel. You’re twelve; you think a horse of yours can win the Grand National. Your dream has come early; but remember, Velvet, it will have to last you all the rest of your life.

—Mrs. Brown, National Velvet (1944)

The first memory I have is from inside a movie theater. I was three years old, and my mother needed a break from entertaining her three young daughters at home during school holidays. It was an unbearably hot summer’s day in Canberra, Australia, and as a land-locked city, one of the only ways to escape the heat was to sit inside the fridge-like comfort of an air-conditioned multiplex movie theater. Playing on that day was The NeverEnding Story, the fantasy-adventure film from 1984. My memory is hazy, but I recall the thrill I felt as the darkened movie screen suddenly came alive. The light was impossibly bright, and I had never seen people that large before. To this day, I still love those few precious seconds when the lights go down and a film is about to begin, and you don’t know what kind of experience awaits you. In this case, my young brain struggled to comprehend if what I was seeing was happening in front of me. How did those people get inside that screen? I thought, and can I join them?

The NeverEnding Story is based on a novel about a young boy who reads a book, also titled The NeverEnding Story. It’s a book within a book and, in the movie version, it’s a book within a film. The protagonist, Bastian, is a shy boy grieving his mother’s death. On his way to school one morning, Bastian escapes his bullies by running into a bookstore. That’s where he discovers The NeverEnding Story, stealing it to read all day in his school’s attic. (Watching the film again, this was the part that struck me the most. How luxurious would it be to read in an attic all day? By candlelight, no less.) The story Bastian reads is about another young boy called Atreyu. He’s a heroic and brave warrior tasked with saving the life of the Childlike Empress, the ruler of their land of Fantasia. Atreyu has help in the form of his trusty horse, Artax, but the clock is ticking because Fantasia is disappearing—slowly being eaten up by a black cloud called the Nothing. Atreyu is also being chased by a menacing black wolf who describes the Nothing as, The emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world. For Bastian, the Nothing represents the grief he feels from his mother’s death and the depression that threatens to overwhelm him. This grief is big and has been thrust on him too young. His only way out is to hold on to his imagination and have faith that even as a lonely child, he is capable of great things.

That’s all well and good, but what got my attention was the horse. At this time in my life, an obsession with horses was just beginning to take hold. I was a small child, extremely shy, with a rosy face and a shock of thick, blonde hair. The type of kid who would hide behind her mother’s legs if a stranger so much as glanced in her direction. I didn’t speak much, preferring to daydream instead, but I was always happy. In every photo I’ve seen of myself as a young child, I’m smiling, almost laughing, holding a chubby little hand up to my mouth as if I had a hilarious secret I was trying to keep from spilling out. Admittedly, I was probably thinking about horses. They seemed like mythical creatures to me, with their immense size and otherworldly beauty. I wondered what it would feel like to ride a horse, to be tall and powerful instead of small and shy. At three, the most I could hope for was a miniature version, which I had in the form of a pink My Little Pony toy. I took this toy pony with me everywhere, even into my nighttime baths, where I took special care not to drown her. So you can imagine the shock I felt when that’s what happened to Artax, thirty-five minutes into The NeverEnding Story.

The scene that caused this enduring childhood trauma sees Atreyu and Artax trying to cross the Swamps of Sadness. This is another metaphor for grief and depression, because the mud swallows up anyone (or anything) sad. As they make their way through the deep, bubbling mud, Atreyu realizes his horse is sinking. Soon, Artax can’t move at all. Artax! Atreyu screams. Fight against the sadness, Artax! The scene builds, with Artax sinking farther and farther until only his white neck is visible from the dark brown sludge. I’m not exactly sure what this horse had to be sad about, but he must have had some deep feelings because, in the next scene, Atreyu is alone, staring at the mud where Artax once was.

Well, that swamp could have swallowed me whole. I didn’t understand metaphors or movie screens; in my mind, I witnessed the real death of a horse. Worse still, nobody in the theater did anything about it. Not my (seemingly) sweet mum, sitting beside me. Not my two older sisters, Yvette and Natalie, who were usually kind. I looked around the theater. Everyone in the audience sat stone-faced and still. I must do something, I thought. They should realize the horror that has just taken place. Being so young, my options were limited, so I screamed, cried, and crawled under the seat to hide. My eyes became blurry with tears, and my screams were so loud I could barely hear my mother’s sigh as she reached under the seat to drag me out of the theater. I was still screaming as we walked out into the stifling parking lot, Yvette and Natalie following reluctantly behind. My tears stopped when I climbed inside our car and then started again as the hot leather of the seats scorched my bare legs. We had left so early into the film that it was years before I discovered that Artax comes back in the end.

This was a traumatic start to a lifelong love of movies. Even today, watching this scene stirs up deep emotions—taking me directly back to that

Reviews for Girls on Film

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Girls on Film by Alicia Malone is an engaging and informative look at the history of women in film told using Malone's own life story as a framing device. So this is part memoir and part (mostly) film history.I listened to the audiobook and the narrator, Brigid Lohrey, did a wonderful job of making me feel like I was listening to a conversation where all of this information was being offered. I found the ways in which Malone weaved her growing up watching movies, the usual issues of growing up, and the story of women in film into a coherent narrative to be very effective. While I see this referred to as a collection of essays I think that can be misleading. Even connected collections often lack any overarching narrative even though they are on the same topic. This flows as a single narrative with chapters that can be read as standalone essays, or at least that is the way I prefer to talk about it.One of the key advantages of this format is that we see on both a personal level and an industry-wide level what the treatment of women in (and around) film means. How film can be an often poor substitute for education, how having a lack of diversity in the product itself as well as those who discuss and promote the product can distort viewer's perceptions of the world around them.I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in film and film history. It is entertaining as well as informative and offers some nice analyses of a few films. I have gone back and revisited a few because of this book.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.