News Archive
Geena Davis Honoured At ‘Beetlejuice’ Musical
While attending the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice”, actress Geena Davis was presented with a gift onstage for her role in the Tim Burton’s original 1988 film. Watch Now…
Geena Davis just made children’s TV more feminist
A few years ago, Geena Davis helped invent a technological tool that had the potential, in her words, to “change everything.” Since launching the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University in 2004, the Academy Award–winning actor and advocate had been commissioning research on the representation of women and girls on screen — especially in children’s media — and sharing the results with decision-makers and content creators in the entertainment industry. Her assumption was that, once her colleagues saw the statistics, change would surely follow. But gathering the data was slow and cumbersome, and the results didn’t reflect such fine-grained subtleties as how much time women spent actually speaking and appearing on screen. Read More…
Academy award winner Geena Davis joins Inclusion summit
Academy Award® winner Geena Davis has joined the ground breaking The Power of Inclusion summit. Davis will speak alongside over 35 international and local history makers from the entertainment industry and beyond, at this pivotal event in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand on 3 and 4 October 2019. The summit will present a two-day programme on pertinent issues in the inclusion and representation space in entertainment. Known for her vast acting roles including the iconic Academy Award® winning film Thelma & Louise, Davis is a longstanding advocate for gender parity in the entertainment and media industry. Read More…
Geena Davis on her fight to redress Hollywood’s gender imbalance
She’s best known for her roles in films like “Thelma & Louise” and the recent Netflix series “Glow”. But today, some of her most interesting work is off-camera. For the past 15 years, Geena Davis has been focused on equality for women in cinema, through the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. She tells Encore! about her new film, “This Changes Everything”. Presented at the Deauville American Film Festival, the documentary is about discrimination against women in Hollywood. Watch Now…
Mars Wrigley’s Berta De Pablos-Barbier: 4 life lessons we’re often taught too late
As a brand builder, I’ve read and validated hundreds of advertisement scripts and countless copy for our iconic brands including M&M’S, Skittles, Orbit gum and DOVE Chocolate. Each year, our company produces award-winning advertisements seen by billions of consumers around the world. When I joined our U.S. business in 2014, I had the opportunity to meet with Geena Davis at the Bentonville Film Festival. I was inspired by her efforts to change the way women are portrayed in film and advertising and wanted to better understand how gender was portrayed in our advertising. This was the start of a journey that was joined by other passionate women leaders at Mars. Read More…
DEAUVILLE 2019 – Hommage à Geena Davis
Retour en images sur l’hommage sur les Planches de Deauville à Geena Davis, Deauville Talent Award de cette 45e édition et productrice du documentaire “Tout peut changer, et si les femmes comptaient à Hollywood ?”, projeté le 10 septembre au C.I.D Deauville. Watch Now…
Lack of female directors in Hollywood an ’embarrassment’: Geena Davis
The #MeToo movement has not changed the fortunes of female directors in the United States, “Thelma and Louise” star Geena Davis told the Deauville American Film Festival on Tuesday, calling Hollywood an “embarrassment”. “Things have profoundly not gotten better for female directors. You just have to look at the figures, down every year,” said Davis, who was in the French seaside town to promote a documentary she produced on gender inequality in the film industry. Davis cited figures published by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which showed women making up only four percent of film-makers working on the top 250 films of 2018. Read More…
Hollywood’s labor problem is a gender bias problem
That “dream factory” label they put on Hollywood is a lot more about the “dream” part than the “factory” part. And while Hollywood’s labor concerns look to be a long way and several decimal points from the tasks and the paychecks of millions of Americans, its images and its examples influence every day how women and girls are regarded and treated, in the workplace and in the world. In his new documentary, “This Changes Everything,” filmmaker Tom Donahue works with facts and figures from executive producer Geena Davis’ Institute on Gender in Media to make it clear how profoundly women have been sidelined and marginalized in the work of Hollywood: Men still appear onscreen more, talk more, do more, are hired to direct and produce and create far, far more than women. Figures like Meryl Streep, Taraji P. Henson, Sandra Oh and Natalie Portman tell their stories to illuminate the point of Donahue’s film — what, in the end, really can change everything? Read More…
What “GLOW” season 3 reveals about the working woman’s gamble
It’s doubtful that Oscar winner Geena Davis would have signed on to the third season of “GLOW” for anything less than a showstopper role. And her character Sandy Devereaux St. Clair, entertainment director of the Fan-Tan Hotel and Casino, is exactly that. Davis doesn’t have a noticeably huge amount of screen time in these new episodes, mind you, but in Sandy she has created a paragon of grace, classic elegance and quiet power. Her showstopper moment arrives at the apex of an AIDS charity gala in season 3’s ninth episode, “The Libertines,” at the end of an hour topped by Sandy stepping out in in full Bob Mackie-designed showgirl regalia, in her capacity as Las Vegas’ Showgirl of 1962. Read More…
Geena Davis on Her New Oscar, Glow, and Changing Hollywood From Behind the Scenes
After winning her first Oscar in 1988 for The Accidental Tourist, Geena Davis was catapulted to stardom with back-to-back roles in hits like Beetlejuice and Thelma & Louise. In the early aughts, she stepped away from acting—mainly, she says, because the roles lacked complexity and the projects weren’t interesting. Davis decided to set her sights on a new challenge: After observing the way women were narrowly stereotyped and hypersexualized onscreen, she launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004 to increase the presence of female representation in film and television. With the institute’s cutting-edge data collection technology that measures how female screen and speaking time is disproportionate to men in film and television, Davis has been quietly revolutionizing the way the entertainment industry approaches gender parity. Read More…
