The Election, Strong Women and Love 10 to 1

This film was conceived some four years ago when Christine and I met at a directing class at UCLA. At the time there were four stories - each about 20 minutes long. During one of our first meetings, the news broke that John Kerry had gotten the nomination from the Democratic Party. Fast forward four years later, and when I was on set shooting Love Song, news broke that Barack Obama got the nomination from the Democratic Party. Talk about coming full circle. It took us about 2 years to write the script. During the first year one of the writers parted ways because she knew she was not going to be able to raise the 5k that at the time we thought each story was going to cost - we were so innocent to think that we could shoot each story for 5k! But I digress.

By the time we release the film there will be a new President in the White House. Which brings me to the current election; I won't use this blog to take sides or to profess my preference for a candidate, but I will use it to state the obvious; The media and a good chunk of the country did Hillary wrong and now they are going after Michelle Obama. The woman is being crucified for speaking her mind and then when she tries to show a different side of her personality by going on The View they gang up on her for being "fake". The allure of being a woman and especially a strong woman is that we have many facets to our personalities. For example, if a woman is the CEO of a big corporation, or a film director, she's going to behave differently in the boardroom or on the set than she would when she's baking cookies for her kids or when she's out to dinner with her friends. Women today are expected to be Super Man, juggling career, kids, social life etc. In the case of Michelle Obama, campaigning alongside her husband, being under media scrutiny, taking care of her kids, plus all the other things she does, she should be allowed (without the media making something more out of it) to be who she is; that probably means that she's warm and sweet around her girls, smart and supportive when she's campaigning for her husband and all around Super Man/Wonder Woman the rest of the time. I have not heard anything about Cindy McCain but I've been living in the world of filmmaking where it's easy to loose touch with the world when you are in production. I'm sure Cindy is Super Man/Wonder Woman as well.

I strongly believe that behind a successful man there's usually a few women responsible for getting him there, usually their mother, wife, sisters and daughters not to mention a father, brothers or sons. Obviously the logic works in reverse as well.
Bottom line is that to be successful it helps if you have a strong support system and if that's not the case you need to be like the little engine that could and just keep moving ahead.

Which brings me to my next point - As a writer/producer/director on this project I wore additional hats, I basically did what needed to be done to take care of my crew, my actors and anything that came up, basically Super Man/Wonder Woman. As I'm watching the footage, I take pride in the strong women I created, because of that, the film is beautiful and sexy; that's my vision, those are my images up there and I need to stand by them. I had a conversation with Christine today and we came to the conclusion that in order to sell sexy we need to be sexy. We are going to embrace our inner Candace Bushnell, Pamela Des Barre and Jackie Collins - why is it that it's ok for female authors to be sexy if they are going to sell sexy books and not for female directors? We're going to change that!

We'll put the pictures of the director's photo shoot and you can judge for yourself - let's hope Suzie is available to give us a make over.

xoxo,

Lucy