"In Hollywood, boys never outgrow their toys" (Cars movies)/ "The 'Jane Test,' a New Way to Tell if Your Scripts Are Sexist"

Jun. 17, 2017 "In Hollywood, boys never outgrow their toys" (Cars movies): Today I found this article by Kate Taylor in the Globe and Mail:

When my son was younger, he spent a lot of pocket money on Lego mini-figures. These sought-after little people, about the size of an adult thumb, came in surprise packages and portrayed various characters, professions or types. 

We had a gangster, a genie, a mechanic and a royal guard in a busby. I suppose the toys were collected mainly by boys, but I couldn’t help noticing how few female figures there were.

I guess Lego noticed, too, because it seemed that gradually, as the company released series upon series, a few more women crept into the mix. My son accepted them readily – the “kimono girl” was a real prize and a female skateboarder was greeted enthusiastically as a skateboarder – but they felt like grudging additions on Lego’s part.

At best, the girls made up a quarter of any given series and with amusement I would picture the guys in some Danish design lab scratching their heads.

“We had a cheerleader and a nurse. Goddamn it, Magnus, what else do women do?” The designer who figured out that you could match the caveman with a cavewoman and the Scottish chieftain with a female warrior must have earned himself a hefty raise.

In popular culture, there are a lot of these fictional worlds where women appear as occasional members of some exotic minority rather than ubiquitous examples of half the population.

In its stubborn and prolonged anthropomorphization of the automobile, Disney’s Cars franchise has struggled to find a place for female characters in a project whose chief motivation is surely to sell toys to boys.

This excuse for more Lego – I keep thinking maybe I could sell some of those old sets on Kijiji – also produces female characters at the rate of about one for every four males in the Cars series.

These are mainly minor figures such as the showy Flo, owner of the local café and tattoo parlour, but there is also one central female character, the lawyer Sally Carrera. 

She’s a baby-blue Porsche Carrera with class and brains who provides a low-key love interest for the hero, the red racing car named Lightning McQueen.

So, at least Sally is not powder pink with inflated lips and spider-leg eyelashes. It’s progress, I guess, but she was largely written out of the male-dominated spy plot of Cars 2.

With the new Cars 3, Sally reappears from time to time, but there is a new and more important female character: Cruz Ramirez is Lightning’s chipper new trainer and a bright-yellow sports coupe.

To return the victorious Lightning to the underdog status he enjoyed in the first film, the screenwriters have produced a bunch of obnoxious new second-gen racing cars all ready to eat him for lunch.

Maybe it really is time for Lightning to retire. (At last, a plot to which the dozy grown-ups can relate!) Cruz’s job is to get Lightning revved up again using all the newfangled training tricks, including a racing simulator that the old guy promptly crashes, providing the film’s most genuinely funny moment. 

Of course, it turns out that Lightning can also teach Cruz a thing or two on a real track as she suddenly reveals her own thwarted ambition to race.

Is Cars ready to hand the franchise over to a female character?

The trouble with this outing is that Cruz is not a compelling figure. She’s introduced as an ebullient cheerleader with – like many a trainer – a hint of sadism beneath the rah-rah attitude.

Then suddenly, she morphs into a fragile underachiever who needs Lightning to provide her big break.

Perhaps that’s a humanly plausible contradiction that the screenwriters might like to explore in an adult drama; 

in a kids’ cartoon, it only creates a character whose behaviour is inconsistent.

As voiced by Owen Wilson, Lightning is the classic Hollywood good guy, affable and determined, Jimmy Stewart on racing slicks.

And Cruz is? Well, she’s bubbly but she actually lacks self-confidence; she’s a successful professional, but ... .

In other words, 

she’s undergoing a transformation that is mainly a convenience of plot, 

and if Cristela Alonzo fails to produce a figure identifiable enough she can be summarized by a toy, it’s more the fault of the script than her voice work.

Cruz just feels like tokenism, another ill-conceived female character insufficiently integrated into a world imagined by men who have difficulty seeing women as normative.

Hollywood can do better.

The standard to match here is Daisy Ridley, keeping it real in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as she plays the spunky, no-nonsense warrior Rey – a character and a performance powerful enough to inherit the Force.

Meanwhile, Warner’s DC Extended Universe just got a shot in the arm from Gal Gadot’s interpretation of an idealistic Amazon in Wonder Woman, striding across First World War battlefields like a latter-day Joan of Arc.

In contrast, the confusing Cruz character looks like a dead end for Cars.

This summer, sales of Wonder Woman action figures may yet lay to rest industry wisdom that female characters sell less merch; certainly, the real test for Cars and that little yellow coupe lies not at the multiplex but at the toy store.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/cars-3-shows-that-in-hollywood-boys-never-outgrow-their-toys/article35318545/

I found this article on Screenwriting Facebook group on Dec. 19, 2021.

Feb. 2, 2016 "The 'Jane Test,' a New Way to Tell if Your Scripts Are Sexist": This article is by Angela Watercutter in Wired.   

PEOPLE OFTEN POINT to sexism in movies for what happens onscreen, but really, it's in play before our heroine has a chance to say a line. 

It happens when she’s cast. 

It happens when she’s costumed. 

It happens when she gets her paycheck. 

But before all of that even has a chance to go down, it happens in the script

—the very first keystroke that could make her 

a well-rounded individual, 

or a reductive pile of cliché. 

Far too often, she’s the latter.

Want proof? Just follow @femscriptintros on Twitter. The feed, which a script-reader named Ross Putman started earlier this week, pulls female character descriptions out of screenplays, changes all names to “Jane” (to protect the innocent), and then sends them out 140 characters at a time. 

The result is a parade of one-note, superficial notes that describe characters' looks, but rarely anything about them.

It only launched three days ago, but in that time has gained nearly 50,000 followers—and sparked a lot of soul-searching amongst Hollywood screenwriters.

Gary Whitta, one of the story writers for the upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One, tweeted that after seeing the feed he began “going through my old scripts to see if my female characters would pass the @femscriptintros test.” 

He eventually gave himself poor marks for his female introductions in The Book of Eli and After Earth, but then said “I just checked the intros of the last two female protags I wrote, waaaaay better.” (Let’s hope one of those was the Rogue one.) 

Parenthood writer Sarah Watson tweeted “scanning through my latest pilot and so far I pass the #FemaleCharacterIntro test. I’m guessing that I haven’t always.” 

Other writers scoured their old scripts and did the same.

It was, as much as Twitter can provide them, a Teachable Moment. (And an actual, real Twitter Moment.) So, what can we learn from it? 

Back in 1985, comics writer and artist Alison Bechdel famously wrote that one of her characters would only see a movie if it had at least two women in it who spoke to each other about something other than a man. 

These requirements became known as the Bechdel Test, and that measurement has since become a go-to sniff test for spotting gender bias in film. 

But what about everything that happens before a movie hits theaters?

To help screenwriters put an end to overly simplistic female characters before they even write them, we went through the @femscriptintros Twitter feed and spoke to its creator Ross Putman (a real-life script reader and producer) to create a few basic guidelines writers can follow to pass muster. 

In honor of the fact that Putman changes the names on the script blurbs he tweets to “Jane,” we’re calling it the Jane Test.

Does The Introduction Focus on the External Attributes of the Character?

"The idea would be: Is there anything in this description that actually helps us understand what makes this character tick, or are we simply being given external, aesthetic traits?" Putman says.

Is She a Twenty- or Thirtysomething?

When Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted the Golden Globes in 2014, Fey noted that August: Osage County was a demonstration that "there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60." 

The joke, of course, is that there are never parts for women 50 or older, and if there are, they all go to Meryl Streep.

Look through @femscriptintros and you’ll see why. Everyone is listed as “28,” “23,” “mid-30s,” “19.”

Taking this back to the larger issue of what the female character's imagined appearance, Putman points out that movies get made based on who is attached to star. If it's, say, Streep or Jennifer Lawrence, all is well. But, if that's the case, it's unnecessary to bother giving detailed descriptions of the characters in the first place.

"Producers have to be pragmatic and go after people that get them financing," Putman says. "

So even just understanding that sad truth of film production, why would we be describing a person in a very specific way (blonde, leggy, insert-overly-sexualized-adjective-here) if we're simply going to have to get the best and most pragmatic person for the role anyway?"

Is She Dating Someone Decades Older Than Her?

For a while, Putman just ranted on Facebook about the sexism he saw in scripts. He was inspired to start a Twitter feed, he told Jezebel, after "I found myself posting to Facebook far too often, 'here comes another script with our 45-year-old male lead dating a 25 year-old woman,' and decided I was going to keep track of the female character introductions in scripts I read for a few weeks." 

No one's saying May-December romances don't happen, they just seem to happen a lot more in movies.

If You Answered 'Yes' to All of the Above...

It's time to rethink your female lead. Trust us: once you do, she'll be a lot more compelling.

 "Sure, writers can take license and use their voice in the way they describe a character," Putman says, but they should "stick with objective traits. 

Any good writer should be able to describe a person in an interesting way without resorting to subjective, bland adjectives like 'beautiful.' Why not do better?"

https://www.wired.com/2016/02/jane-test-movie-gender-roles/