“In this breakdown, the two characters are a couple:
‘Male: 30. 30 going on 21. He’s married to [female]. He’s a fun, hip
guy, but at his core, he’s become a family man’. ‘Female: 29 – 30 years old . She’s both beautiful and cool and just a few notches this side of
New-Agey’. The man is described by his personality and his character’s
transformation, but the woman’s personality description is intertwined
with a description of her looks.”
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Frings looked over as many casting breakdowns
as she could get her hands on, and found that more often than not,
female characters were defined first by appearance; for male characters,
appearance was an afterthought. Women can either be attractive, or
abject terrors employed for comic effect, and very little in between.
(Of course, the rot begins to set in well
before the casting notice goes out; if you’ve read scripts with any
regularity you’ll be aware of how often the (inevitably male) writer
will describe female characters with such witless sentences as “pretty without trying”.)
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