What is going on with the attendees of the Tribeca Film Festival? First, a guy tries to pitch Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan a script during a Q&A, forcing organizers to stop it prematurely, ruining it for everyone. Then, Michelle Pfeiffer has an incredibly sexist question put to her during a panel under the guise of feminist allyship.
At the recent Scarface Reunion Panel at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the cast came back together to talk about the making of the classic film. While the male cast members were asked about their work, or their experiences making the film, one gentleman in the audience thought it important to ask Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe-nominated actress Michelle Pfeiffer about how much she weighed during the film. You can check out the excruciating exchange here:
The infamous moment at tonight’s #Scarface reunion panel where #MichellePfeiffer was asked by the moderator (who apparently is “the father of a daughter”) how much she weighed during filming, which was followed by a mixture of confusion and disdain from the audience. #Tribeca2018 pic.twitter.com/xQUQ6FJqtC
— Mark Espinosa (@SportsGuy515) April 20, 2018
The guy asking the question first prefaces it with “As the father of a daughter concerned with body image…” which is very much akin to starting a statement with “I’m not trying to be racist, but…” He then asks her how much she weighed during the filming. The audience immediately started getting into an uproar, with some audience member loudly saying “Seriously?”
Well, thank goodness we weren’t the only ones who thought this question was a problem!
Pfeiffer was clearly, and rightfully, taken aback by it, but answered gracefully, saying “Well, O.K. I don’t know, but I was playing a cocaine addict, so that was part of the physicality of the part which you have to consider.” The gentleman who asked the question then slips in, “To my point!” But then doesn’t ever clarify what his point is.
Pfeiffer then takes her answer more into the realm of the process, trying to keep the conversation relevant: “The movie was only supposed to be a three-month, or a four-month shoot. And of course, I tried to time it so that as the movie went on, I got thinner and thinner and more emaciated.”
According to Vanity Fair, she then said that she was starving by the end of the shoot because they kept putting off her final shoot day for various reasons. “I literally had members of the crew bringing me bagels,” she explains. “Because they were all worried about me and how thin I was getting. I think I was living on tomato soup and Marlboros.”
Now, while this was, indeed, an interesting look at her process as an actress, it sucks that, as the only female person on this panel, she has to field questions about body image at all. This is freaking Scarface. While I personally am not a huge fan of the film, there’s no question of its place in cinema history. Reducing its nuanced female lead to the token spokesperson about “body image,” when there were plenty of other disintegrating coke-heads in that film is sexist.
And that’s giving the “father of a daughter” the benefit of the doubt. I can see how, possibly, his intention with the question was to get her to talk about how unfair the process was, or to talk about her position as female representation and how being that emaciated on screen might affect women. I get that. But he literally only qualified his question by saying he’s the father of a daughter concerned with body image, and rather than asking her directly about either of these two points I mentioned above, he just asks her how much she weighed.
Interesting, too, is the fact that this guy’s question wasn’t the only instance of sexism to be found. First, there’s just the fact that Pfeiffer was the only woman on the panel. Even the panel’s moderator was male. Secondly, there was this exchange that Vanity Fair pointed out:
Were the film to get remade today, Kornbluth later posited to Pfeiffer, could she see it starring a female version of Tony Montana? Before she could answer, Pacino, and Bauer both replied, “No.”
“No,” Pfeiffer added, blunt and resigned at this point.
“I think it’s quite remarkable that the movie we made is a remake of a really great movie,” Pacino added—specifically, the classic 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name. “That’s really hard to do.”
The correct answer is, of course, we can see that. There have already been films and TV shows about and featuring female drug lords and criminals. Queen of the South. Colombiana. Hell, the TV show The Bridge featured a female drug lord demanding oral sex from a subordinate the way we’ve seen countless male characters in her position expect BJs from the women they surround themselves with.
All of this is to say…it’s 2018, people. Come on.
(featured image: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
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