Movies. We all love a good piece of cinematic creativity whether it be an animated adaptation of a children’s classic or a gritty drama based on the real-life adventures of someone cooler than we are. The film industry, in all its various formats, rakes in billions of dollars a year and still complains that it’s not enough.

We love how Hollywood entertains us. However, since its inception, the film industry has been home to some of the worst corruption, cronyism, favoritism, cheating, lying, stealing, and both physical and sexual abuse on the planet. We’ve  always known this. The revelations of the past few weeks are no surprise to anyone who has ever paid attention. The film industry is full of not-nice people.

I won’t speak to the current allegations as that’s not the reason for this project. Instead, what grabbed my attention earlier this year is the ongoing lack of films where women are portrayed as strong, independent, and intelligent people who don’t need some wise-cracking male counterpart alongside to help them survive. Not only are there few strong roles for women, it is even rarer for those female characters to not look at a male character for help in a moment of crisis. The message being sent to our daughters by Hollywood is too painfully clear: ya’ gotta have a man to survive.

Need some evidence? Let’s look at the top ten grossing films and see how they stack up.

We can make a reasonable argument for one strong female-centric film out of ten and that one is an animated fairy tale. Please tell me I’m not the only one who sees a problem here.

This absolutely barren landscape is why we came up with Five Films Someone Needs To Make Right Now. We wanted to show how attractive, interesting, and potentially even profitable female-centric movie ideas could be. Not that there haven’t been such concepts pitched to Hollywood before, but the good ol’ boys network has some atoning to do for the decades of looking the other way while men like Harvey Weinstein treated all of Hollywood like their personal whore house.

We are proposing five films, all with strong female leads, none of whom are necessarily dependent on men to do anything more than cause trouble. Those five concepts are:

• The Woman Who Would Be Pope

• The Girl Without Any Tattoos

• Reporting From Home

• Magnetic

• Writing Her Life Away

Our models, listed in the same order as their associated film concept, are:

• Jamie Mattingly

• Loren Hawk

• Betty Blade

• Wendy Pund McLish

• Kat Franson

Kat pulled double-duty fulfilling all the hair and makeup duties for all the concepts.

Stories for all five concepts are over on Old Man Talking, which is better suited for large expanses of copy. What we’re posting here is the movie poster concept as well as two supplemental support images for each movie.

We’re not filmmakers here.  As much as I’d love to take each of these concepts and run with them, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing beyond what we’ve already done. Granted, from what I’ve seen in Hollywood, I’m not sure folks at some of the studios know what they’re doing, either. Still, we’re tagging the major studios, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Disney, Universal, Sony, Dreamworks, MGM, New Line Cinema, or Paramount, in hopes that one of them can see the value in just one of these concepts. I’m in a deal-making mood, so contact me.

More importantly, we want to start a conversation about making women more prominent, giving them more power and more say in the production of movies because they know better than anyone the impact of what our children see on that screen. Even the most implied concepts resonate through our society and send messages that are amplified in the way we respond to each other. Showing strong and intelligent women in film need to be as high a priority as telling a good story.

We want to thank our five models for their participation and patience in this project. Almost everything was shot prior to the September Ready-To-Wear season took off and it has taken the remaining time to develop the concepts into the images we’re sharing now. I especially want to that Jamie, for whom this whole modeling thing was a new experience in a year where she’s seen several new experiences. Hopefully, this one was positive.

As always, click on any of the thumbnails below to open the full-size gallery. Don’t forget to check out the full stories over at Old Man Talking. Thank you for taking the time to view the images and we hope you’ll help us further the conversation about the role of women in film.

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