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A year after Weinstein, Hollywood is still soul-searching

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NEW YORK — After Rashida Jones exited Pixar’s “Toy Story 4” in 2017 she noted that the studio, after 25 years in business, had not made a single feature film directed by a woman, calling it “a culture where women and people of colour do not have an equal creative voice.”

So when Pixar co-founder and CEO John Lasseter stepped down earlier this year after acknowledging “missteps” in his behaviour with employees, he was more than another casualty in the long list of film industry power players toppled by the #MeToo movement. He was a symbol of a Hollywood culture that is dying — or at least under siege.

“These giant, multi-billion-dollar companies, they all need a makeover,” Jones now says. “And I think people are starting to recognize that. To me, that is a victory. Brave people have come forward and made this whole machine start to question itself.”

In the year since sexual assault allegations surfaced against Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood has been soul-searching. The Weinstein case — along with those of Kevin Spacey, CBS’ Les Moonves, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price and many others — laid bare the painful reality for countless women in a movie industry where gender inequality was systematic and pervasive.

The #MeToo movement has gone far beyond the movies, but Hollywood remains ground zero in a cultural eruption that began 12 months ago with the Weinstein revelations, published by The New York Times and The New Yorker. Through interviews with actresses, filmmakers, producers and others, The Associated Press sought to assess whether it is a palpably different place today than a year ago.

“Definitely there’s been a seismic shift,” says Carey Mulligan, the British actress. “I feel like if I was walking down the street and someone said something or did something outside the bounds of appropriate, I would feel so much more empowered to tell them to f— off while before I probably wouldn’t. Those sort of grey area things are now no longer grey areas.”

Mulligan, who played an early 20th century women’s rights activist in 2015’s “Suffragette” and has herself been vocal about Hollywood’s pay gap, says that in every job she’s had for the last year, there’s been a well-known code of conduct on set. She’s optimistic that more change is coming.

Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative have not yet found any marked difference in female representation on screen, behind the camera or in the boardroom. More data after the end of the year will give a clearer picture of 2018, but the previous 20 years have shown almost zero change. At least anecdotally, studios and production companies are more aggressively hunting for female filmmakers. Salma Hayek has said her production company has been struggling to find female writers and directors. They’re all already booked.

“Everybody’s looking for their female content,” says Jones, whose documentary “Quincy” was recently released by Netflix. “They’re starting to understand that content that’s created by and shepherded by women and people of colour is super underrepresented in the business. And everybody’s scrambling to try to fix that.”

Measuring cultural change in a far-flung, $50 billion industry is difficult. Many of the epicenters of the movie business — red carpets, film festivals, award shows — have struck a different tone in the wake of Weinstein. While “who are you wearing” has steadily crept back into the red-carpet lexicon a year after women wore black to the Golden Globes, protest has engulfed many of the frothiest events on the movie calendar, from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival .

But some see a limit to what such demonstrations can accomplish.

“It’s a great thing when you’re on the red carpet and people are talking about sexual assault. At least it’s out in the open,” says actress Viola Davis. “My fear is that people feel like the focus of sexual assault is just on actresses in Hollywood and studio execs like Weinstein.”

She worries about the movement becoming limited to “outing the men, putting them in the court of public opinion and just destroying their careers. It’s way bigger than that. One out of every 4 women — and there’s some statistics that say it’s 1 out of 3 — will be sexually assaulted by the time they’re 18.”

Like many revolutions before it, #MeToo has sought to codify permanent changes. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences instituted a code of conduct and booted not only Weinstein but Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski.

In addition, “inclusion riders” — contractual agreements to try to hire diverse casts and crews — have proliferated. Last month, Warner Bros. became the first major studio to make a similar pledge. Many prominent film festival directors have also signed agreements to push their executive boards to gender parity.

In an attempt to abolish the “casting couch” culture that Weinstein allegedly exploited, The Screen Actors Guild created guidelines — supported by the producers’ guild — instructing producers and executives to refrain from holding professional meetings in hotel rooms and homes. It urged members not to agree to meetings in “high-risk locations.”

“People have been talking for decades about how terrible the casting coach is. Even with that knowledge, it was still going on. There was nothing concrete, written down saying: unacceptable,” says Gabrielle Carteris, president of SAG-AFTRA. “Us putting that in a guideline was so empowering for members because we’ve all been put in that situation. And I really want to salute the studios because we did it really in partnership with them.”

The guidelines will soon be expanded to establish rules around nudity on set.

“The kind of work we do is so intimate. It’s different than being a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist,” Carteris says. “But there are rules for workers in this country, and it was really important to define what those rules are.”

The movie business still lacks a single, industry-wide reporting system for sexual harassment and assault, though a committee led by Anita Hill is working to create one. Time’s Up , which is spearheading much of the pressure put on Hollywood, has also amassed a $21 million legal-defence fund for women who suffer from harassment and assault at work in any industry.

Yet with everything that has happened in the last year, most observers say not nearly enough has been done to address long-term inequalities in Hollywood.

“It feels like we’re moving in the right direction, but women and minorities are such a tiny percentage of this industry,” says filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, whose latest is “The Land of Steady Habits.” ”I open up my Director’s Guild magazine, and it has films that the DGA is screening and sometimes there’s not one woman, not one black person. They are all white male directors and my jaw is on the floor. I think: How can this still be?”

Holofcener has mixed feelings about all the attention on gender.

“It’s a good thing to highlight our work, but I wish we didn’t have to,” she says.

Julia Roberts, who was once among the highest paid movie stars, agrees.

“Every year that it’s ‘the year of the woman,’ let’s just have it always be the year of the artists,” Roberts says. “If we have to keep spotlighting the gender of this and the gender of that, we’re kind of blowing it.”

There are plenty of others in Hollywood who have misgivings about #MeToo. Sean Penn derided what he called the movement’s “salacious” quality, saying its spirit is “to divide men and women.”

But as the recent re-editing of “The Predator” showed, some behaviour remains a work-in-progress. Shane Black called his casting of an old friend, Steven Wilder Striegel, a previously convicted sex offender, an “irresponsible” decision . Striegel was cut the from the film only after actress Olivia Munn alerted 20th Century Fox to Striegel’s past.

Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of the advocacy group Women in Film , believes that the path to ending harassment is through parity. Evidence backs her up.

“The more women we have in leadership positions, the less likely the incidents of harassment. So we have a lot of work to do on that front,” Schaffer says.

“We’ve been living in a sexist, racist society for hundreds of thousands of years,” she adds. “We’re not going to undo it in a year.”

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP .

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press







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Kananaskis G7 meeting the right setting for U.S. and Canada to reassert energy ties

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Energy security, resilience and affordability have long been protected by a continentally integrated energy sector.

The G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, offers a key platform to reassert how North American energy cooperation has made the U.S. and Canada stronger, according to a joint statement from The Heritage Foundation, the foremost American conservative think tank, and MEI, a pan-Canadian research and educational policy organization.

“Energy cooperation between Canada, Mexico and the United States is vital for the Western World’s energy security,” says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment and the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and one of America’s most prominent energy experts. “Both President Trump and Prime Minister Carney share energy as a key priority for their respective administrations.

She added, “The G7 should embrace energy abundance by cooperating and committing to a rapid expansion of energy infrastructure. Members should commit to streamlined permitting, including a one-stop shop permitting and environmental review process, to unleash the capital investment necessary to make energy abundance a reality.”

North America’s energy industry is continentally integrated, benefitting from a blend of U.S. light crude oil and Mexican and Canadian heavy crude oil that keeps the continent’s refineries running smoothly.

Each day, Canada exports 2.8 million barrels of oil to the United States.

These get refined into gasoline, diesel and other higher value-added products that furnish the U.S. market with reliable and affordable energy, as well as exported to other countries, including some 780,000 barrels per day of finished products that get exported to Canada and 1.08 million barrels per day to Mexico.

A similar situation occurs with natural gas, where Canada ships 8.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day to the United States through a continental network of pipelines.

This gets consumed by U.S. households, as well as transformed into liquefied natural gas products, of which the United States exports 11.5 billion cubic feet per day, mostly from ports in Louisiana, Texas and Maryland.

“The abundance and complementarity of Canada and the United States’ energy resources have made both nations more prosperous and more secure in their supply,” says Daniel Dufort, president and CEO of the MEI. “Both countries stand to reduce dependence on Chinese and Russian energy by expanding their pipeline networks – the United States to the East and Canada to the West – to supply their European and Asian allies in an increasingly turbulent world.”

Under this scenario, Europe would buy more high-value light oil from the U.S., whose domestic needs would be back-stopped by lower-priced heavy oil imports from Canada, whereas Asia would consume more LNG from Canada, diminishing China and Russia’s economic and strategic leverage over it.

* * *

The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.

As the nation’s largest, most broadly supported conservative research and educational institution, The Heritage Foundation has been leading the American conservative movement since our founding in 1973. The Heritage Foundation reaches more than 10 million members, advocates, and concerned Americans every day with information on critical issues facing America.

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Poilievre on 2025 Election Interference – Carney sill hasn’t fired Liberal MP in Chinese election interference scandal

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From Conservative Party Communications

Yes. He must be disqualified. I find it incredible that Mark Carney would allow someone to run for his party that called for a Canadian citizen to be handed over to a foreign government on a bounty, a foreign government that would almost certainly execute that Canadian citizen.

 

“Think about that for a second. We have a Liberal MP saying that a Canadian citizen should be handed over to a foreign dictatorship to get a bounty so that that citizen could be murdered. And Mark Carney says he should stay on as a candidate. What does that say about whether Mark Carney would protect Canadians?

“Mark Carney is deeply conflicted. Just in November, he went to Beijing and secured a quarter-billion-dollar loan for his company from a state-owned Chinese bank. He’s deeply compromised, and he will never stand up for Canada against any foreign regime. It is another reason why Mr. Carney must show us all his assets, all the money he owes, all the money that his companies owe to foreign hostile regimes. And this story might not be entirely the story of the bounty, and a Liberal MP calling for a Canadian to be handed over for execution to a foreign government might not be something that the everyday Canadian can relate to because it’s so outrageous. But I ask you this, if Mark Carney would allow his Liberal MP to make a comment like this, when would he ever protect Canada or Canadians against foreign hostility?

“He has never put Canada first, and that’s why we cannot have a fourth Liberal term. After the Lost Liberal Decade, our country is a playground for foreign interference. Our economy is weaker than ever before. Our people more divided. We need a change to put Canada first with a new government that will stand up for the security and economy of our citizens and take back control of our destiny. Let’s bring it home.”

 

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