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Charles Glass, author of The Deserters, tells Dave Davies about the Parisian black market run largely by deserters during WWII:
The Paris press was writing about it a lot at the time — that [there] was ‘Chicago-style vandalism and gangsterism’ in the streets of Paris, and the American military had to do something about it. There were shootouts between the Paris police and the American and British MPs on one side and the deserters on the other side. They would rob banks, they would rob cafes, they would stop people on the street and steal women’s jewelry, they were gangs of real, hardcore outlaws, and they were armed and trained.
Image of Paris in 1940 via the NEH](http://25.media.tumblr.com/550828a34baeeb31c3e1d304395a4885/tumblr_mojtw9ubLP1qd9dz2o1_500.jpg)
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
"At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.
(via kdhart)
