Wellywood Woman

I've been writing an article about women New Zealand women who write and direct feature films (not docos). Lots of statistics. New Zealanders based in New Zealand produced at least 75 features during the six years ending December 2008, some not yet released.  Women wrote and directed seven of these films (about 9%): Perfect Strangers, The Strength of Water, Apron strings, Jinx Sister, Vintner's Luck, Piece of My Heart, Home by Christmas. Women   were directors or writers or co-writers or directors in nine more (12%) but I don't categorise these as 'women's' films because what men think and feel, including what they think and feel about women as an audience, will have been more influential than in features that women write and direct (though I don't like 'pink & blue' thinking about writing and like to write interesting male characters myself). There are 97 writer credits on the 75 films and 20 (21%) are women's. There are 82 director credits ...

Women script writers don't often write about their working lives for publication: one reason I went back to re-read Virginia Woolf about women writers.  But men do.  David Mamet's Bambi vs Godzilla   entertained me and gave me a title for my thesis: Living with deferred hope: Autoethnography and New Zealand women's participation in script writing for feature films . ("Dramatic structure consists of the creation and deferment of hope... The reversals, the surprises, and the ultimate conclusion of the hero's quest... in direct proportion to the plausibility of  the opponent forces.") And Joe Eszterhas' T he Devil's Guide to Hollywood; The Screenwriter as God! gave me a helpful slogan, among his advice about laptops, and masturbation, and writing six pages of script a day, in a chapter called "Slit a vein and drip it on the page!" (He seems to like exclamation marks, and ...  though one teacher told me that scriptwriters don't use them: Use ...

Galvan's on YouTube , almost five years after we finished making Sister Galvan, soon after he died.   Gary-the-editor did it. His email heading: late Xmas gift. Wonderful Gary. A clip of Galvan in his shower talking about his life as an ageing and castrated gay man. Another one where he talks about Holocaust gay artist Richard Grune. And one where he talks about New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. And the clip where he talks about what makes gays gay, what being gay means to him.  So now, just before he would have had his 68th birthday ("more than likely I'll live till I'm 86," he says in the film, how I miss him)  I'm asking friends to translate the tags into French and Spanish (there's a Spanish DVD) and monitoring viewer demographics on Insight. New Zealand viewers I can understand. And California. But why are most other viewers in North Carolina, Texas and Saudi Arabia? Korea, Ireland? And how can I get more viewers?