Alicia Malone gives ‘Girls on Film’ a TCM night
As she has shown through her work on Turner Classic Movies, tracing the history of women in film is a calling for Alicia Malone.
The channel co-host also has shown that through a number of books she has written, including her latest: the recently published “Girls on Film: Lessons From a Life of Watching Women in Movies,” the last in a trilogy on the subject. It’s also the theme of a TCM night of programming Tuesday, April 5, in which Malone will be interviewed by close friend and TCM colleague Dave Karger while introducing such appropriate attractions as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the original 1934 version of “Imitation of Life.”
“It’s kind of a combination of what I’ve done before and finding something new,” the ever-pleasant Malone says of her new book and the offshoot evening on TCM. “It’s the film history that I delved into in ‘Backwards and in Heels: The Past, Present and Future of Women Working in Film’ and the film analysis that I tried to do in ‘The
Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women,’ then adding a personal flavor.
“When I first moved to L.A.,” notes Australia native Malone, “I was keeping these journals, and it was actually quite satisfying to step back and look at that as a whole.”
It’s a bit of an irony that many male associates of Malone piqued her interest in what women have achieved in the industry. She cites veteran film historian and critic Leonard Maltin as one of them, maintaining that he “showed me the way. I didn’t really notice the lack of women working in film or writing about film, or just the fact that they weren’t as prevalent as their male counterparts, until much later.”
Malone admits that she has paid a certain price by putting a spotlight on it: “I mentioned a statistic about (there being so few) female directors on a show I was doing, and there was a big negative reaction to my talking about it. That’s when I realized I had to use my platform to speak up for women in film.”