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11 February 2016updated 27 Jul 2021 9:12am

“The very beautiful, very troubled JANE”: quoting scripts to highlight film industry sexism

A producer is tweeting the introductions for female characters in the scripts he reads, verbatim. It’s not pretty.

By Anna Leszkiewicz

Producer Ross Putman was growing tired of clichéd, sexist descriptions of women in film scripts. “The more that I read, the more I started to recognise some pretty awful constants,” he told Jezebel. “Women are first and foremost described as ‘beautiful’, ‘attractive’, or – my personal blow-my-brains-out-favorite, ‘stunning’. I went back and combed through past scripts too, and the patterns were pretty disconcerting.”

After finding himself “posting to Facebook far too often”, Putman decided to start a Twitter page cataloguing every introduction of a female character he found distasteful. The account, @FemScriptIntros, amassed 40,000 followers in days, prompting a kaleidoscope of heated reactions: stunned, angered, not-surprised-but-disappointed.

Reading like bad erotica, the introductions range from hackneyed to surreal, but can be broadly divided into two camps: Jane is either obviously beautiful, or beautiful, but not, like, in an obvious way. “The suggestion is that women are only valuable if they’re ‘beautiful’,” Putman added.

“Changing the names to JANE for me, while maintaining that focus on systemic issues, also – at least, I think – demonstrates how female characters are often thought about in the same, simplistic and often degrading way. […] Jane has no control over her role in this world – which is far too often to be solely an object of desire, motivating the male characters that actually have agency in the script.”

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So, meet Jane, in all her (limited) forms.

Jane: the clear stunner

Jane: gorgeous, but doesn’t know it

Jane: pretty, yet over 25?!

Jane: beautiful, but troubled

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