In the autumn of 2016, I was sitting in a conference room in the Irish Film Board (now Screen Ireland) offices in Dublin.
I was part of a team vying for the big catch of grants available to filmmakers in this country; the €50,000 Focus Shorts award.
We were one of the ten projects shortlisted for interview that year. Even that was something of an achievement, especially for someone like me.
The film industry in general, and especially the one in Ireland, is notoriously cliquey and nepotistic. There were generally two ways of breaking in; be related to/best mates with someone on the inside or be rich enough to fund your own projects until you grabbed the attention of the movers and shakers.
Being from a rural working class background with zero connections meant neither of those was an option for me.
My first attempts at breaking in occurred in the mid to late noughties. Social media wasn’t a thing and jobs weren’t really advertised online. In those days, the career advice consisted of getting onto ‘the union’ for a chaser list or finding out which pub the film folk frequented and ‘get chatting to them.’ I never did source a chaser list or find out where the heads of department did their boozing.
After a few years of cold calls and emailing CV’s into the digital oblivion, I eventually snagged an unpaid intern position on the set of The Tudors.
I travelled from Laois to Ardmore studios as much as my dole money would allow, spending a few months helping out with extras casting, assistant directing and taking snark from surly grips and camera assistants.
Ultimately, my foot in the door moment didn’t lead anywhere. I later learned there was a very fallow period for the industry after the last season of The Tudors wrapped, extending into much of 2010. There’s only so long you can hear “give it a few months” before throwing in the towel.
After trying my hand at a few real jobs for a number of years, I returned to my first love of filmmaking by enrolling in an add on degree year in Colaiste Dhulaigh.
In the space of a few months I had attained a first class degree, won two awards from the college for my graduate film and landed my first real paying job on actual film production (the Mel Gibson/Sean Penn starring The Professor and the Madman).
Then, to add compliment to remedy, my first application to the Film Board had resulted in a shortlist interview. Everything was comin’ up Millhouse.
The interview went smoothly too. Our team was well prepared, any technical queries from the panel were met more than adequately.
Went smoothly, that is, until the final question of the interview; “would you consider changing the main character to a woman?”
This one genuinely stumped us. We exchanged unsure glances for a moment, until our (female) director replied; “no, I wouldn’t see the point in that.”
Now, at that juncture, I was well aware of the feminist trend sweeping through Hollywood over the previous number of years. Shows like Girls, Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City were setting the tone in the comedy world. One of the biggest films of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road was essentially a feminist reboot of The Road Warrior.
It seemed the taste makers in Hollywood were trying out new things, and those tastes were filtering down to the aspirational class. I spent more time than I’d care to mention working on an idea for the Irish version of Girls.
The hipsters/millennials who came of age during the economic and cultural wasteland years of the early ‘10s were obviously looking for some variation from the same old Tom Cruise lookalikes when it came to their screen heroes. Hollywood, to borrow a phrase, was there for it.
For an industry that revolves around novelty and freshness, it seemed like a natural progression for studios and TV networks to diversify their output. It didn’t take long for the sinister agenda to reveal itself.
Fast forward two years, and I’m sitting in another short list interview, this time in the Galway Film Centre, this time with a script about a female protagonist.
Again, the interview went pretty well, the all-female panel seemed impressed with my idea.
Then came the stinger at the end; “we don’t feel like this character has much dialogue, is there anything you could do to change that?”
Prior to my graduation from college in 2016 and my second shake at a career in film, a see change had occurred in the Irish entertainment industry, namely the waking the feminist movement.
Ostensibly focusing on female representation in Irish theatre, the playbook of waking the feminists was used across all facets of the Irish media industry. It was around this time that the Film Board began instituting female only funding and training opportunities.
The first female Director General of RTE began her tenure. To say RTE has become a staunch feminist organisation since then would be an understatement.
Of course, these proceedings in Ireland were set against a turbulent backdrop in the wider entertainment industry. The MeToo movement, initially founded to apprehend the chronic abusers of the industry, quickly turned into a witch hunt which sought to destroy anyone who was even mildly critical of the movement’s intentions. See how Terry Gilliam fared for evidence of same.
That interaction in that interview in 2018 was a lightbulb moment for me. These funding panels didn’t really care about equality and diversity. Their only concern was maintaining the new power dynamic, a dynamic in which feminists call the shots and any man who doesn’t agree is cast into the wilderness.
Quentin Tarantino faced a similar line of questioning over lack of dialogue for a female character during the release of Once Upon a time in Hollywood. The feminist hive mind is nothing if not predictable.
The great pariah of the left, Jordan Peterson, recently left his post at the University of Toronto, citing the abolition of meritocracy and the mandating of so called progressive policies as the main reasons. He calls it D.I.E; diversity, inclusion, equity. Three ideologies that are being used to de-platform, denigrate and demonize straight white men, from academia to business, from media to sports.
It’s these ideologies that currently rule the roost in the Irish media and entertainment industry. Don’t just take my word for it. Look up Screen Ireland’s website, or any of their press releases, and you will see D.I.E repeated like some tedious mantra.
Look up the social media of Irish filmmaker Terry McMahon. In a facebook post from the summer of 2019, his story of being swindled by a female producer is both sobering and maddening in equal measure.
Look up the article ‘Hollywood’s New Rules’, which chronicles the woke tyranny currently pervading Hollywood.
Feminism is the engine that drives the woke machine. It’s not leaving the industry I aspire to be part of anytime soon. Which means I may never be a part of that industry.
Now, I’m well aware that the casual movie fan will read these observations and think, so what? Are the explosion fuelled Hollywood shlockbusters being released today all that different from the ones released in the preceding forty years? Does it really matter that the heroes are now idealised women rather than men? And who cares about Irish films?
But details matter. When ideologues who are obsessed with gender, race and any other identity they’d care to weaponize can completely overrun an entire industry in a matter of years, you can be damn sure it’s going to happen elsewhere.
To any men reading this who aren’t concerned about how the moving images on their screens came to be there, just ask yourself one question; how long before they come for you?
Mark Dollard is a film school graduate, an aspiring writer, filmmaker and has worked in the industry for three years.