8 ms·

Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, broken down by gender and age

89 points by traviskuhl 10y ago

nhebb 10y ago
Related Reddit post, with one of the authors answering questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_analysis_of_film_dialogue_by_gender/ https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_... Also, from that thread, someone posted that USC does an annual film gender study. The latest is here [pdf]: http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content%20Manager/%7E/media/3E7C3476F61349A8A6246F95332F9256.ashx http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Syrup-tan 10y ago
How to mislead with bar graphs; the tutorial https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png
- juliendorra 10y ago
  What do you find misleading? The absence of 100%? Or the age ranges they chose? The bar graphs might visually amplify the gap, but 1.1 million lines versus more than 5 million is a real gap, for example. If anything, they gave us 2 different views on the data, and that double ;-) what we usually get.
- vulpino 10y ago
  The bar graphs were not designed to compare total amount of lines for each gender/age-range combination. Rather, they're meant to indicate how the percentage of lines for each gender is skewed older for male actors vs younger for female actors. If they were to determine the length of each bar using amount of lines instead of percentage of lines, all that would be immediately clear is that females have less lines, a fact well established in the rest of the article, and the point would be lost.
  - danielsf 10y ago
    author here. YESSSSS
maxlambert 10y ago
Well, that's not very surprising. People write what they know, and most of the screenplays are written by 30+ male writers. If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different. I don't think that screenwriters owe us any social justice. All they need to do is to write the best story they can, and it's much easier to do if you can more easily relate to the main characters.
- schmichael 10y ago
  > If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different. How do you know they don't?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 10y ago
    You presume Hollywood is more misogynist than profit driven, and would pass great scripts if delivered by women? Maybe women are discouraged from becoming writers at an earlier age, but the above sounds BS.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  This is one film student's experience: http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/ http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwrit... When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold. There was just one little problem. I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see. I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot. Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters) At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.” --- George R.R. Martin on writing women: George Stroumboulopoulos: There's one thing that's interesting about your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really different.... Where does that come from? George R.R. Martin: You know, I've always considered women to be people.
ps4fanboy 10y ago
What I would much prefer to see is what effect the % of dialog has on profitability. Audiences buying behavior is what is responsible for what kinds of movies, actors and characters are made because movies are profit driven endeavor. Looking at their data, I took the "top 20" male and female movies and compared their world wide gross, male movies averaged 50% more than female. http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png
- minimaxir 10y ago
  I am currently working on a post (completely coincidental to the existence of the submission) attempting to determine the difference in domestic box office revenue from movies with male leads and movies with female leads.
  - ps4fanboy 10y ago
    It would be nice to see some control as well, like filtering out movies that do not make back their budgets (within reason), as they are probably just terrible movies regardless of diversity characteristics. Or maybe a minimum gross filter of 500K?
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      I added filters for minimum 10M domestic revenue and released 2000 or later for various data fidelity reasons. (I do not have access to budget information so cannot account for that) Sample Size is still 2,012 which is good enough. Spoilers: yes, movies which star male actors (fitting this criteria) earn significantly more than female leads on average, and it is statistically significant. Additionally, there is no difference (practical and statistical) between RT/Metacritic scores of movies with male leads/female leads.
      - ps4fanboy 10y ago
        Which is odd because the box office os 50/50 on gender. http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2014.pdf http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MPAA-Theatric...
facepalm 10y ago
Why did they google 8000 screenplays and matched their lines, then used only 2000 for the analysis?
- J_Darnley 10y ago
  They needed to find some evidence of their conclusion? /cynic
- danielsf 10y ago
  Author here: we scraped every script website on the Internet. First we tried to normalize the dataset but only doing stats on the top 1,000 box office, but we were missing too many scripts. So we decided to go big and then display a cut of the data that's only films in the top 2,500 box office (we had about half of those). We're aware of sampling error and the potential for cherry-picking, but also struggled to figure out what was a representative sample.
  - facepalm 10y ago
    How do scripts end up on such script websites? Is it a fair assumption that it is random if a movie's script is online or not? If you go by box office success it seems to me you already introduce the bias of consumer preferences, not choices of the movie industry. Wouldn't it be better to go by production costs (and marketing budget, if that is not included in production costs)? Although over time one would hope the industry choices would reflect consumer preferences.
facepalm 10y ago
Looking at the movies with > 60% male lines, a lot of them seem to be action or war movies. I don't think it is unfair if not 50% of war and action movies have a female heroine, because there are reasons men are more likely to go to war or do dangerous jobs (and no, that reason is not lack of role models in popular entertainment). I don't think an analysis like this is very useful at all. What matters is that all demographics get to see the films they like. It doesn't hurt one demographic if another demographic has more films made for. Take women's magazines for example - while I haven't counted, it seems there seem to be an awful lot of them. Would it hurt men if there were more women's magazines than men's magazines? I'd argue it wouldn't hurt men at all. So if you can show that there is a significant population that doesn't get to see the movies they want, I think you could get a better response.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tomlock 10y ago
  The idea that you trust your judgement on the magazine ratio is probably one of the reasons that this analysis is useful. Are you sure that you aren't just biased against noticing men's magazines? Or perhaps there are a lot of magazines with language specifically gendering the reader as male that you consider neutral...
  - facepalm 10y ago
    I am sure there are certain media that cater primarily to women. For example, at least in my country, there is a whole genre of romantic novels about physicians. The main point is that it is not a problem if some product category caters primarily to a specific demographic. What would be an issue would be a significant part of the population being neglected. However, there is no reason why that shouldn't be fixable by the market alone. I can think of several TV series that cater specifically to women, with lots of women talking. How can we be sure that the 2000 movies the article talks about randomly selected movies, not movies cherry picked to show the desired result? Even if we pick random scripts that are available online, there might be an inherent bias? For example, maybe older scripts (from the 50ies) are more likely to be online?
Animats 10y ago
Is the layout of that page just broken, with text on top of text, or is it at my end?
cperciva 10y ago
I love it when people actually provide data rather than merely working based on "gut feelings"! I have a few questions jump out at me as potentially affecting the reliability of the analysis and conclusions, though: 1. Since the mapping from lines to gender goes through the actor/actress involved, it seems that "trouser roles" (particularly in animated features) may skew the statistics. I don't know if the effect is large enough to matter, though. 2. The analysis seems to be conducted on the basis of "lines" rather than "words". Does this skew the results? I wouldn't be surprised if predominantly-male "action" scenes had fewer words per line (or, put another way, more lines per word) than other scenes. 3. The analysis of actor/actress ages aggregates screenplays over all years of publication. This makes it impossible to distinguish between a bias towards young actresses and a bias towards actresses born after a particular date. This is a very important distinction in terms of policy response, since there is little gap between genders up to age 31: If the problem is "older actresses don't get many roles" then it needs a response, but if the problem was "actresses born before 1985 don't get many roles" then the problem will self-correct as the older generations are replaced by more egalitarian ones.
WalterBright 10y ago
What about the old trope that the hero uses a Mac and the bad guys use Windows? :-)
cm2187 10y ago
A disproportionate amount of movies are about crime stories. Most policemen and criminals are young and men (today, and even more in the past). For the same reason most war movies will also be dominated by young men. Same thing for western movies, the role of women at the XIX wasn't to hold the gun, and guns is what keeps the audience entertained. Why would it be surprising to have a disproportionate amount of young males on screen given the sort of stuff the audience watches? For the same reason I would expect to see a disproportionate amount of policemen, soldiers and criminals. They should do that by genre. I would be surprised if comedies, romance, or drama would be much imbalanced.
- AlecSchueler 10y ago
  There is a by-genre section in the article which shows little deviation in the trend across the board.

89 points by traviskuhl 10y ago

nhebb 10y ago

Related Reddit post, with one of the authors answering questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_analysis_of_film_dialogue_by_gender/ https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4e15fa/the_largest_... Also, from that thread, someone posted that USC does an annual film gender study. The latest is here [pdf]: http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content%20Manager/%7E/media/3E7C3476F61349A8A6246F95332F9256.ashx http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Applications/Content...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Syrup-tan 10y ago

How to mislead with bar graphs; the tutorial https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png https://denpa.moe/~indy/e75d18.png

juliendorra 10y ago
What do you find misleading? The absence of 100%? Or the age ranges they chose? The bar graphs might visually amplify the gap, but 1.1 million lines versus more than 5 million is a real gap, for example. If anything, they gave us 2 different views on the data, and that double ;-) what we usually get.
vulpino 10y ago
The bar graphs were not designed to compare total amount of lines for each gender/age-range combination. Rather, they're meant to indicate how the percentage of lines for each gender is skewed older for male actors vs younger for female actors. If they were to determine the length of each bar using amount of lines instead of percentage of lines, all that would be immediately clear is that females have less lines, a fact well established in the rest of the article, and the point would be lost.
- danielsf 10y ago
  author here. YESSSSS

maxlambert 10y ago

Well, that's not very surprising. People write what they know, and most of the screenplays are written by 30+ male writers. If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different. I don't think that screenwriters owe us any social justice. All they need to do is to write the best story they can, and it's much easier to do if you can more easily relate to the main characters.

schmichael 10y ago
> If 20-30 year old women would write more great scripts the situation would be different. How do you know they don't?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago
  You presume Hollywood is more misogynist than profit driven, and would pass great scripts if delivered by women? Maybe women are discouraged from becoming writers at an earlier age, but the above sounds BS.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
This is one film student's experience: http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/ http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwrit... When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold. There was just one little problem. I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see. I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot. Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters) At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.” --- George R.R. Martin on writing women: George Stroumboulopoulos: There's one thing that's interesting about your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really different.... Where does that come from? George R.R. Martin: You know, I've always considered women to be people.

ps4fanboy 10y ago

What I would much prefer to see is what effect the % of dialog has on profitability. Audiences buying behavior is what is responsible for what kinds of movies, actors and characters are made because movies are profit driven endeavor. Looking at their data, I took the "top 20" male and female movies and compared their world wide gross, male movies averaged 50% more than female. http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png http://i.imgur.com/24dUzBD.png

minimaxir 10y ago
I am currently working on a post (completely coincidental to the existence of the submission) attempting to determine the difference in domestic box office revenue from movies with male leads and movies with female leads.
- ps4fanboy 10y ago
  It would be nice to see some control as well, like filtering out movies that do not make back their budgets (within reason), as they are probably just terrible movies regardless of diversity characteristics. Or maybe a minimum gross filter of 500K?
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    I added filters for minimum 10M domestic revenue and released 2000 or later for various data fidelity reasons. (I do not have access to budget information so cannot account for that) Sample Size is still 2,012 which is good enough. Spoilers: yes, movies which star male actors (fitting this criteria) earn significantly more than female leads on average, and it is statistically significant. Additionally, there is no difference (practical and statistical) between RT/Metacritic scores of movies with male leads/female leads.
    - ps4fanboy 10y ago
      Which is odd because the box office os 50/50 on gender. http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2014.pdf http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MPAA-Theatric...

facepalm 10y ago

Why did they google 8000 screenplays and matched their lines, then used only 2000 for the analysis?

J_Darnley 10y ago
They needed to find some evidence of their conclusion? /cynic
danielsf 10y ago
Author here: we scraped every script website on the Internet. First we tried to normalize the dataset but only doing stats on the top 1,000 box office, but we were missing too many scripts. So we decided to go big and then display a cut of the data that's only films in the top 2,500 box office (we had about half of those). We're aware of sampling error and the potential for cherry-picking, but also struggled to figure out what was a representative sample.
- facepalm 10y ago
  How do scripts end up on such script websites? Is it a fair assumption that it is random if a movie's script is online or not? If you go by box office success it seems to me you already introduce the bias of consumer preferences, not choices of the movie industry. Wouldn't it be better to go by production costs (and marketing budget, if that is not included in production costs)? Although over time one would hope the industry choices would reflect consumer preferences.

facepalm 10y ago

Looking at the movies with > 60% male lines, a lot of them seem to be action or war movies. I don't think it is unfair if not 50% of war and action movies have a female heroine, because there are reasons men are more likely to go to war or do dangerous jobs (and no, that reason is not lack of role models in popular entertainment). I don't think an analysis like this is very useful at all. What matters is that all demographics get to see the films they like. It doesn't hurt one demographic if another demographic has more films made for. Take women's magazines for example - while I haven't counted, it seems there seem to be an awful lot of them. Would it hurt men if there were more women's magazines than men's magazines? I'd argue it wouldn't hurt men at all. So if you can show that there is a significant population that doesn't get to see the movies they want, I think you could get a better response.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tomlock 10y ago
The idea that you trust your judgement on the magazine ratio is probably one of the reasons that this analysis is useful. Are you sure that you aren't just biased against noticing men's magazines? Or perhaps there are a lot of magazines with language specifically gendering the reader as male that you consider neutral...
- facepalm 10y ago
  I am sure there are certain media that cater primarily to women. For example, at least in my country, there is a whole genre of romantic novels about physicians. The main point is that it is not a problem if some product category caters primarily to a specific demographic. What would be an issue would be a significant part of the population being neglected. However, there is no reason why that shouldn't be fixable by the market alone. I can think of several TV series that cater specifically to women, with lots of women talking. How can we be sure that the 2000 movies the article talks about randomly selected movies, not movies cherry picked to show the desired result? Even if we pick random scripts that are available online, there might be an inherent bias? For example, maybe older scripts (from the 50ies) are more likely to be online?

Animats 10y ago

Is the layout of that page just broken, with text on top of text, or is it at my end?

cperciva 10y ago

I love it when people actually provide data rather than merely working based on "gut feelings"! I have a few questions jump out at me as potentially affecting the reliability of the analysis and conclusions, though: 1. Since the mapping from lines to gender goes through the actor/actress involved, it seems that "trouser roles" (particularly in animated features) may skew the statistics. I don't know if the effect is large enough to matter, though. 2. The analysis seems to be conducted on the basis of "lines" rather than "words". Does this skew the results? I wouldn't be surprised if predominantly-male "action" scenes had fewer words per line (or, put another way, more lines per word) than other scenes. 3. The analysis of actor/actress ages aggregates screenplays over all years of publication. This makes it impossible to distinguish between a bias towards young actresses and a bias towards actresses born after a particular date. This is a very important distinction in terms of policy response, since there is little gap between genders up to age 31: If the problem is "older actresses don't get many roles" then it needs a response, but if the problem was "actresses born before 1985 don't get many roles" then the problem will self-correct as the older generations are replaced by more egalitarian ones.

WalterBright 10y ago

What about the old trope that the hero uses a Mac and the bad guys use Windows? :-)

cm2187 10y ago

A disproportionate amount of movies are about crime stories. Most policemen and criminals are young and men (today, and even more in the past). For the same reason most war movies will also be dominated by young men. Same thing for western movies, the role of women at the XIX wasn't to hold the gun, and guns is what keeps the audience entertained. Why would it be surprising to have a disproportionate amount of young males on screen given the sort of stuff the audience watches? For the same reason I would expect to see a disproportionate amount of policemen, soldiers and criminals. They should do that by genre. I would be surprised if comedies, romance, or drama would be much imbalanced.

AlecSchueler 10y ago
There is a by-genre section in the article which shows little deviation in the trend across the board.