Last week, I reviewed "That Guy Who Was In That Thing", a 2012 documentary about character actors. Three years after that movie, a sister-film came out focusing on the female side of the coin, the women who have recognizable faces but aren't household names. There was one major drawback to "That Gal", but overall I think it was much more compelling.

It's hard for anyone to be a successful actor. For every Brad Pitt, there are a hundred B-list celebs. For every B-lister, there are hundreds of lesser actors, bit roles, character actors. Take the odds of making it, and divide it by five and you'll get the odds that a woman becomes a success. Just one in five acting roles are written for women, making it that much harder to catch a break in the first place, let alone climb the ranks to stardom.

The institutionalized sexism and double standards aren't secrets, in Hollywood or the world in general. Still, it was important to hear the stories from the women themselves. You can read the stat that one in five roles are for women, but it's different to hear what it's like to have to read for male roles, having to explain to a male writer that women don't talk like that, explain to a male director you're not comfortable with nudity. It's brutal for a woman, and one story in particular from Paget Brewster was deeply unsettling and uncomfortable.

Male actors can also get away with being less than perfect. Character actors can be "ugly", they can be fat or shaggy or have a crooked nose or look like creeps. Women are held to a different standard, with the typical "TV ugly" girl being very attractive by "real world" standards. If women are too heavy, they lose out on sexy roles; if they age beyond 40, they're only cast as grandmothers. If they possess the ability to take control of a scene, they're only cast as "the bitch." It shines a harsh light on something that, for whatever reason, has been addressed repeatedly but never had anything done about it.

The negative aspect of this was that I just didn't recognize most of them. With "That Guy" I knew 13 or 14 of the 16 actors interviewed, whereas with "That Gal" I recognized one immediately as a "character actress" (Roma Maffia), another from an older long-running TV show that I never watched (Catherine Hicks of 7th Heaven), and one from a show that is currently on which I love (Paget Brewster of Another Period). When the focus is supposed to be women with recognizable faces, but I don't recognize two-thirds of them, I have to consider that a bit of a failure. It might be on me, because I don't want the type of shows these women are cast in, but I also have to put something on the director for not getting the same type we got in "That Guy."

On the [Celluloid Hero] scale, "That Gal Who Was In That Thing" gets a 6 out of 10.

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