On the Importance of the Lesbian Screenwriters » ... if I only encountered really, really amazing scripts about lesbian women for the rest of my career, I’d be perfectly happy. I’m just looking for the best material.« Katherine Waterston, main actress of the World to Come, Pride Source interview, February 22nd, 2021 You would be surprised how film crew (directors, screenwriters, producers, programme editors, actors, scenographers, costumographers etc.) are narrow-minded and downright homophobic and misogynists. I was rather shocked about that when started writing screenplays and shooting documentaries for national television. I was even more surprised because they are supposedly artists who want to 'enlighten' the world by presenting the world as it is. Or is that in fact a work of philosophers? I started writing screenplays for television because I found out that people were obsessed with watching TV instead of reading books and nowadays are obsessed with You Tube influencers and Tik Tok 15-60 seconds clips. I also started writing screenplays because philosophy tackles issues of emotions and sexuality within reason and sometimes action but it always involves on one hand logic as much as possible and what is a wrong or right feeling or action, respectively. Also nowadays, only rare people know that that the condemnation of homosexuality and homosexuals originated with philosophers, precisely with one of the most dominant and influential philosophers of all time, Plato. That was rather strange in a time of ancient Greece where male homosexuality was the most predominant and desirable relationship for men, wasn't it? However, if there wasn't Plato with his platonic (asexual, asensual) love with its telos to procreate either in body or preferably in mind/soul as he wrote in Symposium (1989, 206b) and his condemnation of homosexuality in Laws1 and Republic2 Christianity wouldn't have its base for condemnation of homosexuality and having sex only when/to procreate. Therefore as a philosopher I wanted to have more freedom to express myself when I started writing screenplays. I didn't want having the philosopher's moralistic/Socratic daemon speaking to me in the form of superego how we should live and love while wanting to present a genuine human love in everyday life, especially if it is a love between two women. I also did not want to use a system of (either tragic or comic) storytelling from another philosopher, Aristotle as he wrote about it in Poetics. As an amateur self-taught screenwriter I worked many years to finally understand how to write documentary screenplays and even more to write film screenplays. Even more time I spend thinking how to write and what to write about if I didn't wish to either kill my main character of mock her as Aristotle suggested. At the same time I was thinking how to make such story still appealing and emotionally or socially engaging. It took me almost ten years – three different stories and three versions of each – and many negative commentaries by mostly straight female directors, some television programme editors and colleagues to finally get positive reviews for the latest version of my third screenplay. Since screenplay it is still not great I am doing my final revision. But the fact is if I didn't wish to tell a bit of different lesbian story I would never learn about so many prejudices and stereotypes regarding lesbian love stories by film artists and television programme editors. And then people wonder and complain why there are so little lesbian films and even less great lesbian films and the least films having a happy ending. First, there is a small number of lesbian screenwriters and great lesbian screenplays are even rarer. Second, there is a great deal of prejudices and reluctance from the producers and straight directors and/or television editors to finance such projects. They always find some excuses not to finance a film or lesbian TV series. Last year a producer from one of the local private Slovenian television replied to my screenplay for lesbian series that he doesn't know any screenwriter in Slovenia who could write a great screenplay according to my idea/concept. Third, speaking from my own experience each good quality film takes a lot of hard work, lots of finance and time to make. Like I said, and then people wonder why there are so little lesbian films. And last but not least, one of the lesbians from L chat said what it should be said about making more lesbian films: »If you want to see more films made and promoted by lesbian ... women, why don’t you petition big-shot producers bankrolling the 17th Avengers’ sequel? Rather than complain all over an indie women love women (wlw) production that wasn’t to your personal taste, why don’t you go and champion for Hollywood to expand the pie and feature more wlw stories in general, so viewers can each find a film or two that represents what they wanted to see? ... The solution should be, 'Make more wlw films — so many, that everyone can find films and actors they like in them. Like straight audiences do.'« This is certainly the right way to go but my response to this is again: from my experiences with film producers and TV editor programmes it is the hardest because we have just been watching the boys stories for a really, really long time and they are the most reluctant to turn that trend around to finance more lesbian films despite there are countless proofs of neglected past and present presenting women love women and that there is loads to explore. And finally how am I to become a good and great screenwriter if my screenplays are frequently not accepted since one's masters her 'craft' by practical demonstration? Perhaps by continue being stubborn and working and working ... References 1. »That was exactly my own meaning when I said I knew of a device for establishing this law of restricting procreative intercourse to its natural function by abstention from congress with our own sex, with its deliberate murder of the race and its wasting of the seed of life on a stony and rocky soil, where it will never take root and bear its natural fruit, and equal abstention from any female field whence you would desire no harvest« (Laws VIII 838e-839a). 2. »Socrates: Thus, then, as it seems, you will lay down the law in the city that we are founding, that the lover may kiss and pass the time with and touch the beloved as a father would a son, for honorable ends, if he persuade him. But otherwise he must so associate with the objects of his care that there should never be any suspicion of anything further, on penalty of being stigmatized for want of taste ...« (Republic III 403a-c).
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Katarina Majerholdphilsopher, lesbian, editor Archives
May 2023
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