Kerry Washington repping as the only WoC in THR's TV Actress Roundtable

The Hollywood Reporter: What's your worst audition?
Connie Britton: "We just didn't get you."
Anna Gunn: "We just didn't respond to you."
Monica Potter: I'd just had my last kid..I was pushing like 180 pounds at the time. I'm like, "You guys, I just don't feel physically fit yet." I had my Spanx on and looked like a damn sausage, but I went in and thought I did a really good job. I got home and get the call from my agents. I'm like, "I did good, right?" And they say, "You did great. The problem is you're just …" "I'm too fat." "Yeah, we're just going to wait a little bit." I said, "I already told you this!" The weight thing is a crappy thing in this town, you know?
Elizabeth Moss: On the first season of "Mad Men," I had to wear a fat suit and prosthetic makeup to make me look bigger.... We all have this perception of what we're supposed to look like. But that's what's so great about all these women here today: We're all completely different-looking, you know? We're all beautiful, but real women.
Connie Britton: I agree. I've never had somebody say to me that I needed to look a certain way for a role, but I've always lived in dread of what that would be like. It's our responsibility to play these full-fledged women, and to play women who look like people we actually see in life. It's more interesting, and I think audiences appreciate it, too.
Kerry Washington: It's a little bit different for me because I'll audition for something and they'll just decide that they're not going "ethnic" with a character, which I hear a lot.
The Hollywood Reporter: Casting directors still use the word "ethnic"?
Kerry Washington: If not "black," then yeah. People have artistic license … that's what casting is: fitting the right look to the right character. Whereas you could maybe lose some weight, there's not really anything I can do, nor would I want to, about being black.

ladyfabulous:

aka14kgold:

invisiblelad:

dorkthropology:

The sad truth. [x]

.

Yes, this.

I AM A HETEROSEXUAL.

I think if you go back and look at the original letter-writing campaign that kept [Star Trek] on the air for the third season, which made it buy-able for syndication packages—the majority of the leaders of that campaign were women. And while the women were disappointed in the ways they were portrayed on Star Trek often, it kept alive this idea that women alongside men would be active participants in shaping the future.

Henry Jenkins, of MIT, during “On the Media“‘s discussion of Star Trek. (via strangerwmf) —

also since a lot of the representation etc stuff was largely (not entirely, but largely) focused at children’s entertainment, now the issue is seen as ‘childish’. (instead of, you know, how even a child can comprihend this.)

OMG YES

So true!!!

Right, as if the solution to tokenism is erasure. WHOSE DUMBASS BRAIN THOUGHT THAT ONE UP. It’s like, in one fell swoop you can assuage internalized self-“hatred” (I don’t like calling it hatred but WORDS FAIL ME) and privileged people’s guilt at the same time and just how insidious is that. As if anyone should be embarrassed for wanting or needing or getting representation.

WE’RE POST EVERYTHING NOW DIDN’T YOU KNOW

Ugh diaf. (Not you.)

they also whitewashed bane, who was originally hispanic in the comics. their film relationship/romance is also problematic bc he tried (succeeded?? idr) to rape her in the comics

See I didn’t know any of this!!!!! D: D: D:

omg miss idk if i have tunnel vision but i really feel like the 90s were more progressive in terms of media and now we’ve regressed

I mean, I think mainstream respect for the importance of the issue of representation waned because it’s too basic and earnest and not ironic or hip enough. Deeper territory was charted in later times but by fewer than would have been projected earlier on. That’s my unscientific … feeling, I guess.

firstmurabess:

hollylderr:

Representation Visualization: Time to Wash Those Men Right out of our Hair

Mainly reblogging for the prime Broadway reference from the blogger who wrote this caption ^^^^

PREACH

(Source: popinsomniacs)

Newsrooming it: How Aaron Sorkin reframed bad media behavior

studiosixty:

The worst episode of “Newsroom” has become prescriptive and culturally omnipresent

Last July, the most widely ridiculed episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” aired. Titled “I’ll Try to Fix You,” it climaxed with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The staff of “News Night,” assembled at the office on a Saturday, quickly went into action, as the sound of Coldplay’s “Fix You” began to play on the soundtrack. Other news agencies— NPR, and then Fox, MSNBC and CNN— began to report that Giffords was dead. The crass head of ratings stormed into the newsroom and demanded that the “News Night” team “call” Giffords’ death: “Every second you’re not current a thousand people are changing the channel! That’s the business you’re in,” he shouted, looking to his typical ally, the cynical producer Don, for support. Don didn’t provide any: “She’s a person. A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news,” he said. Jeff Daniels’ Will McAvoy then made the righteous choice, deciding not to announce Giffords’ death on air, but to stick to the facts. Seconds later, word came that Giffords was alive and headed for surgery. The “News Night” team, virtuous resistor of peer-pressure, had made the right call. The Coldplay swelled.

This segment cemented what was so noxious about “Newsroom,” overwrought self-importance and self-righteousness papered over with cheese-ball sentimentality. (Coldplay, really?) The episode made the most important aspect of Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting a fictional cable news show: as Esquire put it when the episode aired,  “Sorkin isn’t interested in the story of Gabby Giffords, per se, much less in the six people who died that day, who don’t rate a mention here. He has a meta-journalism point to make.” And the tone in making that point was supremely grandiose, as if a make believe news crew, with hindsight and a script from Aaron Sorkin, really were “saving” the news.

But in the nine months since “I’ll Try To Fix You” aired, something strange has happened: while still mocked, the episode has become prescriptive and culturally omnipresent. Every time one of the cable news networks disseminates wrongful information — as CNN did yesterday when it reported a “dark skinned” suspect had been taken into custody in the Boston bombings only to spend an hour walking that particular untruth back— twitter fills up with jokes about “The Newsroom.” Every time the cable networks mess up in the way— as they did by IDing Ryan Lanza as the shooter at Newtown, as they did yesterday, as they did before “Newsroom” ever aired with the botching of Affordable Care Act decision  — we now describe it, even as we sneer, in terms of “The Newsroom.” “My Twitter feed just wrote an episode of The Newsroom,” someone tweeted yesterday.

There’s no journalism in journalism any more.

adthehero:

The news is so confused right now. They don’t know whether to humanize them as misled white boys or treat them like middle-eastern terrorists. 

Television Shows That HireTelevision Shows With No People Of Color As Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

fatpinkcast:

• America’s Funniest Home Videos
• Anger Management
• Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader
• Baby Daddy
• Best Friends Forever
• Big Time Rush
• Blue Mountain State
• Boss
• Breaking Bad
• Californication
• The Client List
• Comedy Bang! Bang!
• Dancing With The Stars
• Eastbound and Down
• Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
• The Firm
• Free Agents
• Futurama
• Game of Thrones
• Free Agents
• Geniuses
• A Gifted Man
• Glee
• Good Luck, Charlie
• Gossip Girl
• Gurland On Gurland
• Happily Divorced
• Hart of Dixie
• Homeland
• How To Be A Gentleman
• The Insider
• Jane By Design
• Kickin’ It
• Lab Rats
• Last Man Standing
• The League
• Longmire
• Make It Or Break It
• Man Up
• Mike and Molly
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Once Upon A Time
• One Tree Hill
• The Protector
• Ray Donovan
• Revenge
• State of Georgia
• Stevie TV
• Two And A Half Men
• Veep
• Web Therapy
• Weeds
• Workaholics I
• Workaholics II

The link also has a list of shows with no women writers

19% of prime time television characters are non-human while only 17% are women

A Profile of Americans’ Media Use and Political Socialization Effects: television and the Internet’s relationship to social connectedness in the USA ― Daniel German & Caitlin Lally

There are more “non-humans” on TV than women. Talk about unequal gender representation in the media.

(via yourlittle-bird)

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