Film is a male-dominated profession. No question. And film school is a direct reflection of that. There are seven girls and forty three guys in the program. It's a man's world and that's fine. What's not so fine is that all the male screenwriters wrote scripts with characters that are "loosly (pfft) based on their ex-girlfriends." It's how teenage-boy-writers air their not-so-dirty laundry, I guess.
This doesn't sound like too much of a problem, young people "expressing themselves" through cinema. But, it turns out, it's a real problem for me. So far I've been casted in four different movies as a girlfriend who kisses their boyfriend a lot and carries around books. I haven't even begun my career in acting (a career that will never develop, I assure you) and I've already been type-casted. Even my cinematography teacher (who uses me to model during lighting exercises and tells me I look like his wife) says I'm the only girl here who has "unconventionally conventional looks." Now, I know I'm not hideous, but I'm not that attractive either. I wake up every morning, just like the rest of the girls here. Pull my self out of bed, debate on wether or not I have time to brush my teeth, and then pray that my jeans will fit, even if I did eat a quart of fried rice, alone, while sitting cross-legged in front of a mirror the night before.
I really wanted to come here, roll up my sleeves, and do some real filmmaking. The dirty work. Lighting. Lifting. Editing. Anything. But I feel like the remainder of my time here will be spent pretending to be in puppy love with boys I just met, all on screen. At least in one of the movies I'm in, I get to kill a robot at the end. That's something.
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