Zap2It‘s Daniel Fienberg again, this time about my riff about industry attitudes and hurdles commonly thrown in front of women filmmakers: “You’re gonna get plenty of angry e-mails regarding your comments about female directors, but the point is this: white male filmmakers don’t need to go out of their way to tackle issues important to white males, because there are oodles of films out there showing just how darned difficult and complicated it is to be a white male. Somebody like Curtis Hanson can step outside of his personal interest group to direct an In Her Shoes because he can sleep knowing that his issues as a white male are being adequately represented by many other films. But if Jane Campion went to somebody at Paramount and said, “I want to direct a Jim Carrey movie,” they’d say, “Well, we already have a certain Generic Male Director interested, but we have this Mandy Moore movie where she gets cancer, if you want it.” At that point could you blame her for preferring to just go make her own movie? It’s much more difficult being a female director than even an African- American filmmaker. It’s taken decades to get to the point where a black filmmaker can make a movie without African- American themes. When a Spike Lee gets to make an Inside Man or F. Gary Gray makes an Italian Job, that’s a step forward. Heck, John Singleton doing Without Remorse is a sign of progress.”