BEFORE: Gloria Steinem carries over from "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything". I really wasn't going to include the Barbara Walters doc this year, because it had SUCH a huge cast of people seen in archive footage that I was going to save it to maybe get myself out of some possible linking jam next year - it's a shame to just use a film like that to connect two films with Ronald Reagan in them, it's like throwing away an opportunity or something. But then I recorded this doc about Ms. magazine and the cast list for this one was much smaller - it seemed like there was a good change that if I put this one off until Movie Year 18 too then maybe I'd never get to watch this one, it would just sit on my list taking up space for years.
BUT if I included the Baba Wawa doc, I saw that I could get this one linked in as well. If that was the only film in the world that ever featured footage of both Groucho Marx and Gloria Steinem (basically polar opposites, if you think about it) then using it as such seemed like a much more noble undertaking. In my brain, anyway.
This is the last last-second drop-in for this year's Doc Block, this played at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and I was working at the screening, the film's three directors were there to do a Q&A after about their segments, and Gloria Steinem was there also, and I got a couple very blurry photos of her from a distance.
THE PLOT: Three filmmakers dive deep into the storied and complex legacy of Ms. magazine through the lens of some of its most iconic covers, featuring never-before-seen archival footage and engaging interviews.
AFTER: From what I overheard of the Q&A after the screening, it seemed like the three directors of this film were able to sort of choose the topic of their segment, or they each chose a famous cover of the magazine and built their segment around that, but that seems a little weird now because each segment was about so much more than a famous magazine cover. It seems quite confusing, why not just assign each director to cover a part of the magazine's history from a specific angle, in much the same way that a magazine editor might assign a story to a journalist, like write me a story about the magazine's debate over racism and approach it from THIS angle. Since that's pretty much what happened, why not start there and not try to over-complicate things?
The first segment ended up being about the founders of the magazine getting together, deciding what would be covered in the first issue, and then making that happen over the period of a few months. Makes sense, just start at the beginning, right? There was an offer from Newsweek to publish the first run of the first issue, and include subscription cards, keep that issue on newstands for two months so they could build up a fan base, and if that didn't work out, well then there would just be no issue #2. But it DID sell, the first issue sold out in fact, so they proceeded with more articles, more staff, and eventually an office that wasn't just two rooms in the upper part of some generic four-floor walk-up Manhattan office building.
The second segment was (more or less) about the complicated intertwined issues of sexism and racism, especially since Essence magazine had started up just a few months before, so there were questions about how heavy Ms. should lean on this topic, since there was competition in the marketplace, or should they avoid discussing it altogether and keep the focus on gender-based equality? Also, as a glaring omission the Ms. magazine founders kind of neglected to hire any non-white staff at first, so yeah, it was maybe a few issues before they realized their mistake and thought about hiring some minority female writers. One cause at a time, I guess.
This brings up kind of a double-edge sword for me, because they initially hired only women to produce the magazine, which, sure, that's great because it starts to make up for all of the inequality over the years, years when society didn't think that women could be reporters or editors or publishers, and no, they're not going to achieve balance overnight, it's going to take time, also they would need to get other magazines and newspapers on board to really make a change in the world. But they tried, and that's a noble thing. BUT, if the magazine only hired female writers and female artists and female managing editors, isn't that a form of sexism in itself? Aren't they therefore NOT hiring qualifed male candidates for those positions? I mean, overall they were acting as a force for positive change in the world, but if they were really trying to foster equal rights then shouldn't they have hired an equal number of males and females?
Which brings me back to the directors, they gave three female film directors the chance to direct segments of this - so I'm guessing they didn't even consider any male directors. Yes, of course, there's still work to be done to equalize things, as there are still many more male film directors and film executives in Hollywood than there are females. But by only considering women for the position, whoever exec. produced this was practicing a form of sexism. Just saying - I see both sides of this argument.
The third segment of the doc concerns the rather touchy subject of pornography, and this was back in the 1970's, it was a different time. Playboy had been around since the 1950's, but suddenly there were x-rated films everywhere, porn peep-shows in Times Square and coming off the decade of free love, suddenly there was more sexual freedom and that meant porn was becoming a lucrative business. Unfortunately for the magazine, there were feminists on both sides of this issue - there were anti-porn feminists and there were sexual freedom feminists. It looks like nothing really got resolved except that the magazine tended to side with the anti-porn side, and then there was a contradiction of sorts, especially when it came to light that there were a few adult film stars who were not making movies against their will, in fact I think the women adult film stars were getting paid more than the male ones, and some were becoming producers and film executives in that space.
So, umm, was porn a good thing or a bad thing? Feminists who were anti-porn found themselves criticizing an industry that was female forward, paying women more than men and producing well-paid, sex-positive performers like Annie Sprinkle and Gloria Leonard. The magazine had just spent the last few years promoting sexual freedom, it would seem like a cop-out if they suddenly reversed themselves and said that women shouldn't be sexually free to star in x-rated movies that men (and maybe some women) enjoyed watching. Well, while everyone was trying to figure this out the whole world changed, and then the internet got invented and every kind of porn was everywhere for free, so the whole thing kind of became a moot point. Yeah, sure, it's dirty and pointless and degrading, but it's also free speech, so there's no going back to Puritan standards now.
Anyway, we're fast approaching the point where porn's going to be created by A.I., and then everyone will be able to see anything they can imagine, and umm, again I ask, is that a good thing or a bad thing? OK, real women won't be degraded on camera, but also, porn actors will be out of jobs because CGI graphics will be made more cheaply. I just got out of the animation business because pretty soon all those movies will be made by pushing a button, and then I'm guessing x-rated movies will be next. Welcome to the future, just tell us what your fantasies are, just please, please, no Wookiee porn.
The magazine is still around, it changed hands a few times over the years and was owned by various media companies based in other countries, then in 1998 a group of investors (including Steinem) formed Liberty Media to buy it back and run it independently without advertising. Great idea, but Liberty Media went bankrupt in 2001 (gee, I wonder why) and the magazine was donated to the Feminist Majority Foundation, which moved the editorial headquarters from NYC to L.A., and published Ms. bi-monthly, and then quarterly. Gee, this sounds like the same way they killed MAD magazine, but I'll cover that in the next Doc Block, hopefully. All magazines are struggling though, it's only a matter of time before they all fold and everything is just published online. Which is a shame, because I don't really see that much positive social change coming from Tik Tok videos or Snapchats.
There was a weird montage of 1970's movie and TV clips used here, everything from "Young Frankenstein" to "The Incredible Hulk" was featured to prove points of some kind, or more often, no real point at all. A clip of Mary Richards complaining to Lou Grant that she's getting paid less than a male reporter, sure, that's relevant. A clip of Dolly Parton fending off her horny boss in "9 to 5", yes, that's a great way to illustrate a point about sexual harassment. But the montage of clips from "Grease", "SNL", "The Jeffersons", "Taxi" and "M*A*S*H" was extremely confusing, it didn't add up to much of anything. I've seen better 1970's TV montages twice in the last 2 weeks, in "A Disturbance in the Force" and "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution", and both of those made a whole lot more sense.
Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, Alice Gu, Salima Koroma
Also starring Alan Alda (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Pat Carbine, Lisa Coleman, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Robin Leonardi, Suzanne Braun Levine, Robin Morgan, Jane O'Reilly, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Annie Sprinkle, Ellen Sweet, Lindsy Van Gelder, Michele Wallace,
with archive footage of John Amos (last seen in "Me Time"), Edward Asner (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Carroll O'Connor (ditto), Sally Struthers (ditto), Marlo Thomas (ditto), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Jane Curtin (ditto), Bill Murray (ditto), Paulette Barnes, John Belushi (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Richard Bey (last seen in "Bruno"), Peter Boyle (also last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Carol Burnett (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Jerry Falwell (ditto), Sherman Hemsley (ditto), Charles Nelson Reilly (ditto), Lily Tomlin (ditto), Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Dick Cavett (ditto), David Hartman (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Dolly Parton (ditto), Jane Pauley (ditto), Gilda Radner (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Harry Reasoner (ditto), Gene Shalit (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Shirley Chisholm, Dabney Coleman (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Esther Rolle (ditto), Jean Stapleton (ditto), Danny DeVito (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Phil Donahue (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Andrea Dworkin, Mike Farrell (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Lou Ferrigno (last seen in "I Am Your Father"), Stephen Furst (last seen in "Belushi"), Tim Matheson (ditto), Jackie Gleason (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Dorothy Pittman Hughes, Andy Kaufman (last seen in "Nyad"), Jean Last, Lisa Leghorn, Gloria Leonard, Mike Lookinland (last seen in "The Towering Inferno"), Catharine A. MacKinnon, Del Martin, Audrey Meadows, Barbara Mikulski, Mary Tyler Moore (last seen in "Brats"), Robert Redford (ditto), Susan Myer, Olivia Newton-John (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), John Travolta (ditto), Yoko Ono (last seen in "Killing John Lennon"), Oliver Reed (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Rob Reiner (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Peter Riegert (last seen in "You've Been Trumped"), Candida Royalle, Roy Scheider (last seen in "Bob Fosse: It's Showtime!"), Phyllis Schlafly, David Ogden Stiers (last seen in "Magic"), Linda Lee Tracey, Carole S. Vance, Veronica Vera, Alice Walker, Fred Willard (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Diane Williams, Shelley Winters (last seen in "Groucho & Cavett")
RATING: 5 out of 10 feminist rallies
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