TELEVISION
Three prominent male members of the industry are the instigators of Project: Her, which pairs up-and-coming female writers and directors with distinguished female mentors to create drama and comedy pilots.
The trio — director-producers Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia and Avnet's son Jake, who launched Indigenous Media in 2014 — had already established their support for industry women with The Big Script, an incubator for rising feature filmmakers, and with their digital channel WIGS. Since 2012, the channel has presented programming with female leads, often written and directed by women. The shows air on watchwigs.com, YouTube and Hulu.
"The WIGS content was about women, for women and starring women," says Jon Avnet, whose credits include FX's Justified and the features Black Swan and Fried Green Tomatoes. "It was not a great leap to continue [with a female-centric television project]. There is such a lack of female showrunners and directors."
Indigenous isn't looking to present the so-called "woman's voice," adds Garcia (HBO's In Treatment, Six Feet Under, Carnivale). "Every artist is their own person. You really want to find new artists, new voices, in that other half of the world that has been so grossly misrepresented."
Project: Her mentors are Lesli Linka Glatter (Showtime's Homeland), Mimi Leder (HBO's The Leftovers), Kasi Lemmons (the feature Eve's Bayou), Betty Thomas (HBO's Dream On) and Sarah Treem (Showtime's The Affair).
Thomas, who is first vice-president of the Directors Guild of America, notes this important element: "These will be DGA projects. I want more women in the DGA. In a small but significant way, these projects will see women becoming DGA members."
-Libby Slate
DIGITAL
Young women are increasingly looking outside traditional venues for entertainment that speaks to them. And companies like AwesomenessTV (majority-owned by DreamWorks Animation), New Form Digital (a collaboration of Discovery and Imagine Entertainment) and YouTube are welcoming female creators and performers.
"On a macro level, the digital media world has broken down barriers to entry," observes Liam Collins, head of YouTube Spaces, Americas. "In the traditional media environment, there was a lot of downside to content creation. There was the risk of losing a lot of money — that made it hard for people to take chances."
But what used to look risky now makes good business sense. "Teens watch a lot of content, and it's an underserved audience," says Shauna Phelan, head of development and production at AwesomenessTV. "Whether we're putting up a romance or a thriller or a musical, they're really excited to see something for them."
Anna Akana, creator and star of Miss 20S9 — a series that will debut on the go90 streaming app — is one of the many women forging her own path.
"[Traditional media] is definitely a slower and more frustrating process," she says. "That drove me to do digital. There's so much more control. I can cast myself in roles I would otherwise never go out for, create projects that I'm passionate about, and learn about filmmaking on a level I otherwise couldn't have."
To foster female voices, YouTube has funded more than 50 gender-balanced productions as part of its women filmmakers program at YouTube Spaces worldwide. The company is holding workshops throughout 2016 aimed at helping women develop their storytelling and production skills and connecting with other creators.
When it comes to making women's voices heard, "We want to make sure we don't repeat history," Collins says, "but instead do it right this time."
—Liane Bonin Starr
