Names and faces
Venice Film Festival jury president
Annette Bening says female directors should fight film-industry sexism by making movies that appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Bening heads the panel that will choose a winner of the Golden Lion from among 21 films competing for the Italian festival’s top prize. Only one is by a woman: Vivian
Qu’s Angels Wear White. Bening said “it’s a long road” to equality but things are changing for the better. The four-time Oscar nominee, whose film credits include American Beauty, The Kids Are All Right, 20th Century Women and Bugsy, addressed the lack of female directors Wednesday during the 74th annual Venice Film Festival’s opening news conference, saying “We as women have to be very sharp and shrewd and creative ourselves about what we chose to make.” She says filmmaking is always a struggle, and that there’s no question that “sexism does exist.” But, she added that, “The more we can make films that speak to everybody, the more [women] will be regarded as filmmakers.” Bening, the jury’s first woman chairman in more than a decade, said she knew of both veteran and rookie filmmakers struggling to get their movies made “whether they are men or women.” She said the industry has “a long way to go, in terms of parity” but was confident that the “direction we’re going is positive.”
Kathy Griffin has retracted her apology for a gory image of a fake Donald Trump head, saying anger against her was overblown and should be directed at Trump and his administration. A feisty Griffin, interviewed Tuesday on Australian TV in advance of an international comedy tour, slammed the president and his actions as she reversed course from her tearful mea culpa in May. “So the picture happened, the outrage was ridiculous, I made an apology, and now in light of all the crazy stuff that he [Trump] and this administration are doing. He’s unhinged,” the 56-year-old said on the morning show Sunrise. One Sunrise host pressed her on whether it was out of line to pose in May for photos and a video with a mask of Trump covered in tomato sauce to simulate blood from a severed head. Griffin pushed back. “Stop acting like my little picture is more important than talking about the actual atrocities that the president of the United States is committing,” she said. By early June, Griffin had apologized in a video and a tearful news conference in which she called the Trump image “disturbing.” She was also fired from her most high-profile job as co-host of CNN’s New Year’s Eve celebration. This week, she said she’s now on “a mission to tell people, honestly, if it happened to me, as big-mouthed and obnoxious as I am, it can happen to you.”