Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount PicturesThis dude must be reading a stack of Transformers scripts.
Film producer Ross Putman has been flipping through potential film scripts and he noticed a terrible trend with the way the female characters were being introduced on the pages. The theme and descriptions were so similar that he decided to share it with the world and tweet out how these ladies, whose names were all changed to "Jane," were first brought onto screen.
Spoiler alert: most of these characters are sexy, leggy blondes or women who "used to be beautiful." Or both.
If you're an aspiring screenwriter and definitely want to have a female character who has a more important role than just being eye-candy, do not do write your introductions like any of these below. Our personal favorite is the one about the attractive woman who cares too much about her career to worry about her looks, aka 50 percent of most rom-coms.
Jezebel chatted with Putman about his Twitter spree and why he couldn't keep the constant, sexist descriptions to himself.
"For every confused ‘you're' and ‘your,' there's just as much latent misogyny and sexism in the scripts I read. Women are first and foremost described as ‘beautiful,' ‘attractive,' or—my personal blow-my-brains-out-favorite, ‘stunning.'…I found myself posting to Facebook far too often ‘here comes another script with our 45 year-old male lead dating a 25 year-old woman,' and decided I was going to keep track of the female character introductions in scripts I read for a few weeks. I went back and combed through past scripts too, and the patterns were pretty disconcerting. I plan on posting every one that I read, and there are plenty that aren't offensive, but honestly, most of them have some element—subtle or overt—that plays into latent objectification."
You can follow along with Putman's depressing yet hilarious adventures in the world of female movie characters and the (almost definitely) male screenwriters who are trying to bring them to life in the most sexist way possible.