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I saw “The House Bunny” with my family on the day it opened, in Miami Beach, where we were vacationing (yes, it was August), and it was obvious that it was a launching-pad for serious comic talent. In his Profile of Anna Faris in the magazine this week (available to subscribers), Tad Friend describes it as the actress’s “breakout film” (she plays a Playboy Playmate who is thrown out of the mansion and ends up teaching a sorority of social misfits the ways of seduction) but it also launched Emma Stone, who has ably filled the cinematic vacuum left by Lindsay Lohan’s indisposition and adds, to the role of sympathetic but socially challenged young woman, a charming tint of self-conscious intellectualism (which comes to the fore in “Easy A”).
One of the great virtues of the article is its rundown of the behind-the-scenes considerations involved in getting a Hollywood movie made, from the purely numbers-driven (e.g., Faris is less popular with international audiences than is Reese Witherspoon, which is why studios are inclined to meet her higher pay rate) to the politico-social: what Tad calls “the almighty Laws of Date Night,” which include such terms as “Men rule,” “Women don’t have to be funny,” and “Also, women aren’t funny.” Tad speaks with Nicholas Stoller, who directed “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek,” who says, “There’s a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likability for women stars.”
Here’s where the margins grow mighty: what Hollywood studios can, or dare, to do is necessarily dependent on producers’ sense of widely held attitudes; what independent filmmakers can do depends mainly on a filmmaker’s sense of what makes for a good movie. And when a movie connects with a crucial niche audience, the fast filtration (thanks to the world of the Internet) from the margin to the mainstream may well effect changes in popular attitudes—not because of any political persuasion or underlying social change, but purely because of the artistic equivalent of fashion and style—that would otherwise have arrived only very slowly and very gradually. I hope that Tad’s piece inspires women filmmakers to do all that the studios say they can’t—and the fact that Lena Dunham’s inspired “Tiny Furniture” has been brought under the aegis of Judd Apatow’s production company (as Rebecca Mead reported here last year) is a sign that it may actually be happening.
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