Hi, listeners, this is Lila.

A quick announcement that next week, we are going to start publishing on Fridays instead of Saturdays,

just to get you into the weekend spirit a little earlier.

Okay, that's it.

Enjoy the show.

The producer Kathy Shulman has made a lot of movies.

She was part of the team behind Paul Haggis' film Crash

from 2004, which won three Academy Awards. She was executive producer on Mike Mills'

thumb sucker. She's worked with Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, Jackie Chan, Charlize Theron,

Ryan Reynolds. You get the idea. But when she was in her late 40s, Kathy decided to go

back to school. She had done a lot of advocacy for women in film. And she wanted to find a way

to talk about diversity in her industry as something that wasn't just good politics, but also good

business. So the very first thing as an academic I did was look for the original statistics

that proved that we should be making movies for men and boys.

And by the way, I was taught that as an emerging producer, as an emerging executive.

It came out of my own mouth many of times.

Let's first figure out how the boys and the men or the boys or the men are going to come and then we'll add additional demos.

Wow, really?

Sorry to be totally naive, but that's how the film industry was making movies was how is this going to appeal to men and boys first?

And then once that's figured out, you add additional demos.

Yeah, and that's because that was what the research said, supposedly. So the very first thing I did was go to read that research. Guess what? No research.

It never existed. I ask all of your listeners on planet Earth to find that piece of research. And it does not exist.

...