Screenwriters Roundtable (Part 3): Jessica Bendinger, Lindsay Devlin, Stephany Folsom, Liz W. Garcia, Julia Hart, and Lisa Joy
A special treat this week and next as I will be posting excerpts from an extensive screenwriter’s roundtable I did in December 2015 with a group of talented Hollywood screenwriters: Jessica Bendinger, Lindsay Devlin, Stephany Folsom, Liz W. Garcia, Julia Hart, and Lisa Joy.
Here is Part 3:
Scott: As long as we’re here, Lindsay had mentioned this in an email, and I thought, because four of you have got young kids. Lindsay mentioned the unique stresses and pressures, even disadvantages, perceived or otherwise, about being a working mother. Anybody want to weigh in on that, what your experience has been so far?
Liz: What I found most challenging is having to become someone who writes only when you have child care. I don’t have the luxury of deciding it’s going to be a morning writing day, or it’s going to be a dinnertime writing day because it has to be when someone’s watching the kids, and it can’t necessarily be on the weekends unless I can negotiate that with my husband, and what he has to do.
That’s hard when you’re a creative person, when you have bad days, but it happens to be a day when you have childcare so you’ve got to get it done, or you have a great day when you’re feeling really alive and inspired, but you’ve got two little kids on your hands. That’s a bummer.
Julia: I’m always amazed by how many writers, directors there are of us who are new moms, or moms, period. I feel like we need to get this conversation out there because I do feel alone, and I think a lot of us think there aren’t — I forget who said it — models, women to look up to, and to aspire to career‑wise. I’m sure they’re out there, but I don’t see a lot of them talking openly about motherhood. I think some women in our industry are afraid to talk about being moms because of messed up perceptions about what that means for their work. I have never been more prolific or efficient or inspired as I have been since I became a mom. We need to change the conversation.
One of my favorite stories is this HBO show I was doing. Like I said, it’s about a midwife and abortion doctor and I pitched on it and got the job when I was four months pregnant. And all of the producers are women and all of them are mothers.
And then when my son was two weeks old, they all came to my house. One of them was pumping. I think I breastfed at some point. And then we went in to HBO, when my son was two or three months old and sold it.
It was just awesome. It was like, “Oh, this is working because we all are in this together, and supporting each other.” I think building that community is so important.
Lindsay: I participated in a roundtable for a movie last year where I was the only woman. There were like 10 men and myself, and it was a really long day. I was three months postpartum and I needed to pump.
I was like, “How am I going to tell this table of men? Excuse me for 20 or 30 minutes.” I was dying. I was leaking, and it was like…I don’t know what to do. I truly didn’t know in that moment. I wanted to be all feminist. I didn’t want to be embarrassed about it, and yet it felt like a true disadvantage to take myself out of a conversation for 30 minutes.
Julia: You should’ve been able to just do it. I hear what you’re saying, that we haven’t been invited. We haven’t been given permission to just do it. That’s what was so awesome about sitting in my living room with these moms. Doing our jobs. And being ourselves. We all just got it, and it was safe.
Lindsay: I’m just curious. Anybody who has done TV, have you pumped or seen other women pump as a staff writer? Is that something people do? Because the writers room is still such a man’s world from what I hear.
Julia: That’s a real good question.
Lisa: My last show, I was the only woman, so there was definitely none of that going on. On the show before, I don’t think that there were any women who were parents on the show.
In Westworld, I remember I started writing it when I was pregnant, and then we were scouting for the pilot when I was like nine months, and I was a big nine months, man. I ate for two.
[laughter]
Lisa: We were scouting these buttes in Utah and I’m just sitting there huffing, and puffing, and sweating, but it was glorious because my baby was there with me, all through it. When we were filming, after she was born, I brought her on location, and we had a hotel room for her and Grandma so I could still see her in the evenings and mornings.
As fortunate as I am to have help from grandma and other childcare — it’s still really hard to balance all that stuff, but I’m optimistic things are changing just by virtue of the fact that we have all these great voices like you folks on the phone who are starting to change the landscape out there in a positive way.
One of the coolest moments of doing this show was having an audition for actors — and it just so happened a couple of them had recently had babies and needed a place to pump — and I was like — “I got a whole setup in my office. So do what you’ve got to do. No one’s going to look twice, because if they look twice at you, it means they would’ve looked twice at me, and I would’ve never hired someone who did that.”
Scott: Isn’t that the thing? If more women are in positions of authority, at the studio or network level, or series, with them becoming a more understanding type of environment for people working on staff?
Jessica: I don’t know. There’s a generation gap. There’s a patriarchal, a very 1950s culture at the studios. Old school media. Hollywood is an old media business. It has not moved ahead as rapidly as we’d all like, and I think one of the cultural hangovers of that is what you’re seeing. There’s a huge discrepancy and disconnect between the amount of writers and available talent there are for jobs, and what’s actually happening. It’s changing slowly.
I did this Meryl Streep lab she financed for screenwriters over 40. The mentors were talking about the big elephant in the room for us, as female mentors over 40, was that a lot of the problems we encounter are from women. Women in power at the studios and at the networks.
They have a covert history of being the worst offenders, and we all felt very shady and shaky sharing that, because it feels like you’re throwing somebody under the bus who should be an ally. That was the net-net of that lab. We all looked at each other in the eye and were like, “Here’s the problem nobody wants to talk about.”
Scott: Is that a generational thing, do you think, Jessica?
Jessica: I hope so. Lena Dunham called it out. She said, a lot of these women — some call it second wave feminism — they become like the men. They’ve had to fight so hard to get where they are, they’re like, “I want to be the only chick on the life raft.” I don’t know, I can’t speak to what they’re all going through, and I think what they say publicly, and what the forward-facing language is, is very different than what we’ve experienced. I also know it’s complicated.
Stephany: I have to say that the younger generation of female executives, I’ve found them to be extremely supportive. One of my first studio writing jobs was at Warner Brothers, and I got hired because of a female executive there.
It gives me hope. This sounds horrible, but I have, with women from older generations, encountered that kind of stigmatism. I feel there’s a new crop of women executives coming up that really get it, and that gives me a little bit of hope for the future.
Lindsay: I would agree. I also think with social media, there’s been a sort of normalization of things like breastfeeding, and the conversations around motherhood, the work-life balance… 10 years ago, when I was a young executive, I think I probably used to judge women differently. I judged mothers, or women, or breastfeeding in general like that until I went through it, but now, it’s just, I don’t know. It’s become more normalized, and you see high powered executives doing these things. You guys have probably all seen the image of the woman at the U.N. who brings her baby every single day.
Julia: Oh my God, she’s so amazing.
Lindsay: So amazing. Those kinds of images are really powerful. We need motherhood not to be seen as a negative, or a vulnerability, or a weakness, and just part of female empowerment going forward for new generations of women.
Each day this week, I’m going to highlight one of the writers. Today: Stephany Folsom. Stephany’s script Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb made the 2013 Black List. Other movie projects include Missing You and the Disney/Marvel sequel Thor: Ragnarok.
Please take time to leave a reply with your observations and follow-up questions, and while you’re there thank these writers for taking time out of their busy schedules to do this roundtable for GITS readers and the wider online screenwriting community.
On Twitter:
Jessica Bendinger: @JBendinger
Lindsay Devlin: @DevlinLindsay
Stephany Folsom: @StephanyFolsom
Liz W. Garcia: @lizwgarcia
Julia Hart: @juliahartowitz
Lisa Joy: @lisajoynolan
For Part 1 of the series, go here.
Part 2, here.
Tomorrow: Part 4 of this exclusive screenwriter’s roundtable.