Where Are Hollywood's Women Film Directors? Ask Guerrilla Girls

Broadcast television's "America's Sweetheart" and recently divorced actress Jennifer Aniston, who was separated from her long-running romantic comedy on NBC, Friends in 2004 has rebounded nicely and is the central character in director Nicole Holofcener's latest film Friends With Money a www.sonypictures.com/classics/ a tale of several intertwined relationships.

During the Academy Awards the www.Guerrillagirls.com erected the largest billboard in Hollywood with the legend "Unchain the Women Directors" fifty-feet-across it. Honest, I am not making this up, if I was that creative I would be writing scripts myself instead of writing for America. The Guerrilla Girls are creatively challenging Hollywood to make more films with women directors.

If you're going to have friends and listen to their relationship psychodramas, they might as well have money to pickup the check at lunch is one view of Nicole Holofcener's latest relationship narrative. Her previous Lovely & Amazing film from 2002 starred Catherine Keener as the oldest of three sisters; an artist who makes miniture chairs out of twigs but discovers that she cannot sell them. Her husband is beating her with a stick, metaphoricaly speaking, to get a real gig.

Ms. Holofcener's first feature in 1996 was also a www.lionsgatefilms.com release, Walking and Talking (both DVD's are available at www.deepdiscountdvd.com ) starring the bubbly Ann Heche and Catharine Keener as childhood friends grown-up, become bright-light big-city women coping with their ever ebbing-and-flowing love-lives. Will their friendship last? It's all about the relationships.

Which brings us up-to-date with our Friends With Money starring Catherine Keener (my script, tentantively titled The Catherine Keener Filmic Konspiracy is in the hands of my agent, J. Burns.) Jennifer Aniston is the central character Olivia who quit her teaching job at a prestigious Westside Los Angeles private school to become a... housecleaner.

Olivia, in her mid-thirities, is still searching for Mister Right, a caring, considerate and sensitive guy. Her three married friends and their husbands are woven into this tale of people that really don't have to worry about money. Jane (Frances McDormand) is a successful designer who is growing to have less in common with her husband Arron (Simon McBurney) who is her designing partner also. (I have always wondered how couples that are in business together manage the 24/7 togetherness. As the proliferation of Ebay "home businesses" spreads we are going to see alot more of these dual property relationships.)

Christine (Catherine Keener) is a screenwriter whose husband Patrick (Jason Isaacs) is getting more difficult to deal with as her writing partner. Collaborating proffessionally is more difficult than living together as a couple. Franny (Joan Cusack) and her husband Matt (Bob Stephenson) are inherently independantly wealthy and seem to be the happiest of the bunch.

Olivia yearns for the security of marriage while her married friends idealize her "freedom". Her vulnerability is endearing, the audience reacts with her as she goes through the catharsis created by writer/director Nicole Holofcener.

In this period of enmass release of "Family Movies", Ice Age: The Meltdown (an animated sequel to 2002's Ice Age) opened the same weekend and grossed $68 million in the hundreds of theaters it was shown in across the country.
Meanwhile, in another neighborhood crosstown in South Los Angeles a different relationship between a teacher and a student is taking place.

Lion's Gate Films has a hand in this feature also. Akeelah And The Bee: Changing the World One Word at a Time is the true story of eleven-year-old Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) who is enchanted by the words in the English language. Her mother Tanya (Angela Basset) is against her spelling contest involvement, which she encouraged to continue by Doctor Larabee (Laurance Fishburne).

Akeelah's spellabilities takes her from South Central Los Angeles to the Scripps National Spelling Bee held at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel in the District of Columbia. www.grandwashington.hyatt.com The E. W. Scripps Co. www.scripps.com which operates Broadcast/Cable Television, Newspapers and the Scripps Howard News Service runs the spelling bee (bee means "a gathering" in this context.) on a non-profit basis.

Starbucks is entering the DVD sales business at it's 8,300 North American stores. www.starbucks.com
Starbucks Entertainment has Nikkole Denson, Director of Business Development picking the films to be marketed by the coffee that America runs on company. The first film to be selected was Akeelah And The Bee which was written and directed by Doug Atchison.