Copyright Alexandra Trushen
Naomi McDougall Jones and I briefly met after she spoke at a Women in Entertainment Panel at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) in Los Angeles, her former - and my current -drama school. Earlier this year, her revolutionary book The Wrong Kind of Women was published in which she writes about the deeply patriarchal structures of Hollywood, how to tackle these problems and abolish them all together. Even for an artist and activist like me, who has heard and experienced so much of what the author writes about in her book and who has spent countless hours raging about and pondering on the subjects of her book’s pages, her story both impacted and challenged me immensely. Early on, it became clear to me how extremely well written and researched her book is, leaving not even the slightest room for questions or doubts. As I personally believe this book is an absolute must read in any acting school today, I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed by me.
You attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Could you tell me a little bit more about your journey there? I actually attended a different liberal arts school first, but ended up transferring to AADA because I really wanted to be in an environment with people who aspired to become actors the same way I did. My whole childhood had been about acting from the time I was about four years old. So, studying at AADA was huge and it meant that I was finally able to share a space with people who cared about acting as much as I did. They also had some really extraordinary teachers there.
After you graduated from AADA, what were your immediate, first experiences in the industry? Well, right off the start I hit Backstage [A magazine and online resource portal for actors to find jobs and current information on the industry] like nobody's business. I was on a mission, felt like my life had finally begun. I was in my mid 20s and living in New York City, which at the time I thought to be my ultimate dream. And in many ways, I had a very good time. I got to work on some good projects with good people but there also was the other side to that, which was the never-ending experience of sexual harassment. I would submit for hundreds of roles every week, hustling agents, managers and casting directors. Sadly, I think that it's so easy to buy into the idea that all of that is fine, to just let it slide off your back, not stand up against sexual harassment and not think about it very hard because it's just the thing that is expected from you and you're going to do whatever it takes because you're not going to be one of those that gives up. But eventually I just reached the point in which I felt like I was in this incredibly difficult profession, which was fine because it was what I had signed up for, but I actually didn't really care about the roles I was offered to play or I was having to tell stories I didn't really believe in. Eventually it just all seemed sort of like this never-ending backdrop of sexual harassment paired with the complete lack of quality for the roles that I was auditioning for, were not worth it.
Many people say that things in Hollywood have shifted so drastically after the #metoo movement went viral and think that today, white males are a minority in the business and struggling to find work opposed to their male colleagues of color and the women in the business. I hear this all the time. And particularly now we're starting to hear a lot of complaints from white people. They say:” Well, I would have gotten hired on this show, but this woman of color took my job”. When was this job yours in the first place? The reality is right now that white men get to direct roughly ninety five percent of studio films. At the same time, white men are about 30 percent of the US population. So, what that means is that 70 percent of our perspectives and stories are being shoved into 5 percent of the stories. In order to rebalance that, we are going to have to give jobs that would traditionally have gone to white men, to other people. What that does not mean is that white men are not still getting the overwhelming majority of jobs, despite the fact that they are themselves a minority population. This is why the data is so important. Everybody has their own experience. The white men who are complaining feel that they're not getting the job that they would have gotten and that, therefore, there must be a mass discrimination against them. We need the data to contextualize. Here are the facts. Here's the actual state of the universe.
As a young actress, I have often found myself lacking in excitement, specifically in regards to a lot of classic American plays that I was introduced to and cast in. When I would bring this up, I was almost always told that these beloved pieces displaying racism, sexism, misogyny and underrepresentation of females belong to American history and deserve to be told as they are. What are your ideas when it comes to working on and with older, classical material? Do you think these plays are still relevant and how can we bring them to todays audience in a responsible and reflected manner if we are hired for or chose to work on them? This is the crux of why I make my own stuff. I just did not want to do it anymore. Whether it's getting naked, playing the stripper, or working on material which is just fundamentally not what I want to be saying to the world. I think theater and film have different problems in this respect. I do think there's less of an audience for avant-garde and modern theater here [in the US] because, for the most part, American audiences want to see the old standards. I think in film there's more room for other material. But it also shows the actor’s quandary. If you constantly rely on getting cast in things, then you often have no actual voice in the stories that you're putting out into the world unless you start producing or making your own stuff.
Today you are not just an actor but have also become a successful filmmaker. Can you tell me more about your work and how you learned all of the required skills? At some point, my friends and I from acting school had been on so many different sets with people who were way less talented and way less organized than we were. We thought, if they can do it, we can definitely figure this out. So, we made a spreadsheet with all the producers we could find in New York, started cold-emailing and -calling them, asking if they would let us take them to coffee and pick their brains on how to make a movie. I honestly don't know what we were thinking, but for reasons I will never understand, enough of them actually said yes. So, we just pieced it together. I learned by doing all of it and approached it with the perspective that making a film is just basically solving an endless series of problems. You don't need to know how to solve all of them immediately. You just need to figure out how to solve the next problem in front of you.
Would you say that coming from the liberal and feminist household you have spoken about in previous interviews has shaped you as an artist or was it more the experiences you had within the business itself? Well, I think both things are true. Growing up, I was given the impression that sexism was more or less solved. That I would never run into any problems because of my vagina. I thought I could do whatever I wanted to do in the world and that anything was possible. I truly believed it. That upbringing let me run full force into the world of Hollywood. Suddenly, I was having this Matrix moment in which I realized that actually none of it was true. How is it possible that this is still like it is? This isn't solved yet. That then led me to speak up about it.
Just recently you published your first book “The Wrong Kind of Women - Inside our revolution to dismantle the gods of Hollywood”. Could you describe what your experience and process of writing the book was like? I had the advantage of giving a lot of talks on the theme before writing the book, and then in November of 2016 I gave a TED Talk. A year later, the Weinstein story broke and TED.com put my talk on their home page. That was the point in which it went viral and over a million people watched it. As a result of that, a literary agent got in touch with me and said that if I'd like to write a book, they would try to sell it for me. So, I wrote a book proposal. With that, I had the great advantage of knowing who my editor was – the wonderful Rakia Clark - and being able to have conversations with her before and during writing. After turning in the first draft after about 9 months, I rewrote most of the book while I was on tour, living in a RV, driving and bouncing across the country, while releasing my second film. Which is, by the way, not how I would recommend writing a book, but it all worked out well.
What type of reader did you write the book for? I think the main people I wanted it to be for are women of all ages. Whether they are at the end of their careers in the industry, whether they never had a career in the industry because they got squeezed out, whether they’re at the end of drama school or 16 and thinking about entering the industry. I want women to understand what's happening because what I see, over and over again, is that women blame themselves. They don't know that these barriers exist. They don't understand the systems by which they're being kept out. So, they head into them, assuming that it is a meritocracy. And then they don't succeed, blame themselves and spend a lot of energy berating themselves, trying to psychically fix themselves to be the kind of woman who could succeed when in reality they're just running into these same structures. If they just understood that, then they could find ways around it. But if you don't know they're there, you're just going to keep running into that same wall over and over. So that was one reason for writing the book; but, also, the big hope, of course, is that the people who actually wield the power might read it. And in fact, one of the major streaming services bought a copy for every member of their content staff. That seems incredibly hopeful. If the people who are actually the gatekeepers would read it, they would understand what they're doing unconsciously and may not even realize they’re doing. I have also heard of a man who had been a misogynist for a very long time. After he read my book, he realized how wrong he had been all that time, that sexism does, in fact, exist. Since then, he has committed to buying a ticket to a movie by a woman every weekend for the rest of his life to try and make up for it. It shows that for somebody who had been that invested in believing that sexism didn’t exist, something like reading a book really can change someone’s mind and perspective.
You are the Co-Founder of the 51 Fund. What is the 51 Fund exactly? The 51 Fund is a private equity fund to finance film by female directors, specifically focusing on budgets between half a million and fifteen million. We try to get women over the hump from the micro-budget space into a space where they could be considered for bigger studio films. I co-founded it with Lois Scott, who's the former CFO of the City of Chicago. We've been working on it for just about four years now.
What else are you currently working on? My second feature film “Bite Me” is now in the international sales process and we have also been invited by one of the networks to rewrite and pitch it as a TV Series. In the meantime, I'm on the 15th draft of my third feature film, which is about an eight-months pregnant woman who gets locked overnight in a castle full of famous ghosts. We’ve been ramping up to film in fall of 2021, which now, of course, is sort of up in the air due to the current situation in the world. Another thing I'm really excited about is that I just got greenlit to be the showrunner for a narrative podcast that I co-created called “The Light Ahead" in which we pair twenty three screenwriters with twenty three next-economy activists, having the writers each write fifteen-minute narrative podcast episodes exploring the question what would the US be like in 2030 if we had an economy that truly worked for and took care of people.
It has been so inspirational speaking to you. As a last part, could you tell me what you are currently watching and would really recommend? I think that the show Mrs. America is so good and shows such important feminist history which a lot of people don't know and even I didn't know in such detail until before watching the show. And, of course, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" by Celine Sciamma. I also just saw "Atlantics" by Mati Diop which was incredibly beautiful. I am currently watching "Killing Eve" and also just rewatched "Songs my Brothers Taught Me" by Chloé Zhao, which is one of my all-time favorites.
