News Archive
2017 Bentonville Film Festival Submissions Now Open
Submissions are now open and will close in late January 2017. Next year’s festival will be held May 2-7, 2017 and we could not be more excited! This year we are expanding faster than ever with a few new categories. In addition to narrative and documentary feature-length films, we are now accepting submissions for short films, commercials and episodic content. Read More…
‘The Exorcist’: Oscar winner Geena Davis could contend at Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards
Geena Davis returns to series television on Fox’s “The Exorcist.” This marks her first regular role since playing the eponymous character in ABC’s “Commander in Chief” from 2005 to 2006. Despite that drama’s troubled production — three show runners over 18 episodes — and swift cancellation, Davis was roundly acclaimed for her commanding performance, winning the Golden Globe for Best Drama Actress and earning nominations from the Emmys and Screen Actors Guild Awards. It was no breakout role for Davis though, as she was already an Academy Award winner for “The Accidental Tourist” (Best Supporting Actress, 1988) and nominee for “Thelma & Louise” (Best Actress, 1991). Read More…
Advertising and Hollywood Have the Power to Change How People See Women Erasing gender stereotypes ‘overnight’
How women are portrayed in advertising and in Hollywood has a major impact on how people see and think about women, and whether they belong in positions of power, panelists discussed today during Advertising Week. “Overnight every brand, every Hollywood movie, can show female CEOs,” said Madeline Di Nonno, CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, during the “Our Challenge to Erase Gender Stereotypes in Ads” panel. “We’re the only sector that can fix that gender disparity overnight.” Read More…
Shining a Light on Gender Imbalance in Media
While the Bechdel Test has been a positive conversation-starter in the fight towards gender equality in art, it clearly doesn’t go deep enough. How much are males dominating the screen? And are the depictions of a females on screen a fully realized portrayal of a person or a mere stereotype? The Geena Davis Institute’s GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) hopes to paint a clearer picture on a film’s gender representation, and urge content creators to fight against their unconscious biases and tell stories that are truly reflective of the world. Read More…
Geena Davis Wants to Solve Hollywood’s Gender Gap Problem With New Tech Tool
Actress Geena Davis has a new weapon in her arsenal for her decades-long battle against gender inequality in Hollywood. At a global symposium in New York City on Thursday, she unveiled the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (or GD-IQ). The new tool, sponsored by Google and crafted at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, can track how often women appear on screen, how much they talk and the quality of their dialogue. Read More…
Geena Davis on ‘Exorcist’ TV series reboot: We want it to be as ‘life-scarring’ as original
Geena Davis, who stars in the new television series reboot of the classic horror film “The Exorcist,” tells TODAY that the original movie was “life-scarring, and we’re trying to do that to a new generation.” She says she doesn’t have trouble sleeping after working on the show because “we’re just trying to make it so YOU can’t sleep.” She also appears to have no trouble with the world’s hottest tortilla chip (but then again, she is an Oscar-winning actress). Watch Video…
Geena Davis Talks About ‘The Exorcist’ and Women Onscreen
By her own admission, Geena Davis is not the norm when it comes to gender disparity onscreen. “I’ve been really lucky to play a lot of important roles in movies, and I got to be really cool things,” she said, ticking off a list that includes a baseball phenomenon (“A League of Their Own”), a pirate captain (“Cutthroat Island”) and, perhaps the coolest of them all, a housewife on the lam in “Thelma and Louise.” Now she’s Angela Rance, a Chicago hotel manager, wife and mother of two daughters, in Fox’s “The Exorcist,” a retooling of the 1973 horror classic with a debut on Friday. Read More…
Geena Davis on KPCC’s Talk Two
Geena Davis spoke with Take Two’s Alex Cohen about GD-IQ, the new software that breaks down representation in TV and films. Read More…
How Long Is an Actress Onscreen? A New Tool Finds the Answer Faster.
The effort to catalog the inequity in onscreen roles for women and minorities has a new weapon. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, at Mount St. Mary’s University, with financial backing from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic division, will announce on Wednesday a tool that employs video- and audio-recognition technology, along with algorithms, to identify gender, speaking time and additional details about characters presented in films, television shows and other media. The software, called the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (or GD-IQ), will speed up and automate the painstaking data-collection process that researchers use to study representation, a key initiative in recent years as the entertainment industry has begun to focus on equity onscreen. Read More…
Geena Davis envisions ‘Exorcist’ as ‘the scariest TV show ever’
Geena Davis remembers when she first saw the 1973 film “The Exorcist” — and she’s not the only one. Davis’ own vivid memory was of seeing it “when I was a kid at a drive-in with my friend’s family.” Laughing loudly, she says, “My parents would have freaked out if they knew what I had watched that night. It really is the scariest movie ever. Our goal is to make this the scariest TV show ever.” Read More…
