#joy press

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

Jodie Foster, Ascendant at 61, Reckons With Her Complex Mother’s Ghost

With magnetic roles in both ‘True Detective: Night Country’ and ‘Nyad,’ a legend looks back.

Excellent interview by Joy Press with Jodie Foster in Vanity Fair.

Read the full interview here.

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in March:

1). Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television (Joy Press)

2). Actress (Anne Enright)

3). Reading in the Dark (Seamus Deane)

4). The Argonauts (Maggie Nelson)

5). Blueberries (Ellena Savage)

6). State of the Union (Nick Hornby)

[reactingtosomething]

Killing Eve’s Runaway Success Proves There’s an Audience for Off-Kilter Drama

“Keep it weird,” is what BBC America president Sarah Barnett told show-runner Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The advice worked.

I feel like you mostly hear the narrative, especially if you don’t work in or around the industry, that development executives are dumb, penny-pinching un-creatives who stand in the way of greatness, but development executives are actually often responsible for nurturing the TV and movies we love into existence. (There are other kinds of executives who are less cool, but this isn’t an article about one of them.)

For Barnett, who took over at BBC America in 2014 after nurturing such critically acclaimed series as Rectify and Top of the Lake at Sundance Channel, Killing Eve has the potential to help define the network as a space for daring drama. She and fellow Fleabag fan Nena Rodrigue, BBC America’s head of original programming, began developing Killing Eve a few years ago. They were attracted, Barnett said, “by the thought of Phoebe being attached to an hour-long drama that had some of the big swings in storytelling that our audience loves, [but set] in this very female world.”

BBC America had attracted a ferociously devoted following for the twisted-sister drama Orphan Black, a fandom that came to be known as the #CloneClub. With the series ending after five seasons last August (after earning its star, Tatiana Maslany, a lead-actress Emmy in 2016), Barnett was keen to build on that enthusiasm for oddball, female-driven genre programming.

Rather than pushing Waller-Bridge to make more of a conventional thriller, Barnett encouraged her to probe deeper into the psychology of these women. “The note we kept giving, actually, was, ‘Keep it weird,’” she said.

Interview by Joy Press, author of Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television

[shesalittleobsessed]

[theladysuffragettes]

Where the Beatles' appeal was that they were 'nice boys', the Stones' ruffian image seduced (some) girls with the prospect that they would be treated roughly, without respect. The Beatles/Stones split solidified the split between pop and rock: between the groomed stars and scruffy outsiders, romance and raw sexuality, courtship and brutal ravishment. [...] They helped enshrine the idea that pop panders to 'girly' sensibilities (pretty boy image, harmony 'n' melody, sentimental lyrics) while rock is made by and for tough boys.

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'n' Roll.

auskultu: One can see this play out in miniature in the Beatles' own career. The Beatles' early work is often dismissed as fluff for teen girls, and it is not until they 'grow up' with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper that they become 'true' artists. Those works were album-based, where their prior work was often focused on the single. Singles were a favorite medium of the young and female, whereas albums catered to the older and male. Thus, the Beatles apparently become 'better' when they start appealing to serious boys rather than those silly, screaming girls.