I’ve always loved watching movies. This started way back when I was in elementary school and my dad designated the largest room in our house as the movie watching room, to be used strictly for watching movies. Since then, movie watching has remained my favorite form of passive entertainment.
I signed up for MoviePass a while back, which has led to me watching movies way more frequently than I used to. I also started using Letterboxd around the same time, and it has quickly become one of my favorite websites. I’ve added nearly every movie I’ve ever seen to my profile on it, and it has replaced both Wikipedia and IMDB for me as my go-to site for looking up basic info about a movie, an actor, or a director.
Lately I’ve become increasingly aware of how few women I see when I’m browsing directors of movies that I’ve watched. The gender disparity in Hollywood is nothing new, and people have been talking about it for a long time now. I realized that, despite knowing about it, I had never really thought about how it relates to what movies I choose to see or how I perceive the movies that I see, so I decided to take a look at my personal movie-watching history and see what the gender breakdown is in the directors whose movies I’ve watched.
In this post, I will go through the basics of the ruby script that I wrote to do this and I will write about what I learned from it. (If you’re interested in what I learned, but not in the technical details, you can skip to the end. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended.)
Collecting the Data
Fortunately for me, since I joined Letterboxd, I’ve been logging every single movie that I watch on it, so making a list wasn’t a difficult task. I could have gone through this list by hand and written down the gender of each director, but I decided to have a little more fun with it and write a script that does that for me.
Getting My Movie Diary from Letterboxd
Letterboxd doesn’t have a public API available yet,
but they do let you download all of your personal data as CSVs.
One of these CSVs is a file called watched.csv that includes a row for every
movie that I have ever marked watched.
After getting that file, I used Ruby’s CSV class to parse it:
men = 0
women = 0
CSV.foreach('watched.csv') do |movie|
...
end
puts "#{women} women, #{men} men"
Now to find out what to do with it…
Finding Metadata for each Movie
Each of the rows in watched.csv contains a bit of metadata about a movie that
I have logged, including the url for the movie’s Letterboxd page,
but no info about the director, so I knew I would have to do a bit of
scraping to find the directors and their genders.
I used http.rb to fetch the pages I needed and used nokogiri to parse and search them.
Letterboxd gets its movie data from TMDB, a community built movie database.
Fortunately, the Letterboxd devs use semantic web techniques in their markup, so finding each movie’s TMDB ID was not difficult.
letterboxd_movie_doc = Nokogiri::HTML(HTTP.get(letterboxd_movie_url).to_s)
tmdb_id = letterboxd_movie_doc.at_xpath('/html/body/@data-tmdb-id')
Determining the Genders
Once I had the TMDB IDs, I used the TMDB API to get the credits for each movie, which consist of a bit of data about each person in the movie’s cast and crew, including their gender, as listed on TMDB.
tmdb_movie_credits_url = "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/#{tmdb_id}"\
"/credits?api_key=#{ENV['TMDB_API_KEY']}"
movie_credits = JSON.parse HTTP.get(tmdb_movie_credits_url)
Woohoo we have the director info that we need!
movie_credits['crew'] is an array with an object for each crew member
that contains basic info about them.
At this point I thought I was pretty much finished. I just had to filter out the directors from the rest of the crew and add up the gender counts.
TMDB seemed to be using integers to represent the genders, with 1 representing female and 2 representing male, but I was slowed down a bit when a bunch of movie directors came back as 0: neither female nor male. What did 0 mean? Was TMDB being progressive and providing more than two gender options? No, it was just that their data is all crowdsourced and a 0 simply means that no one has added a gender for that person yet.
movie_credits['crew'].each do |credit|
next unless credit['job'] == 'Director'
case credit['gender']
when 1
women += 1
when 2
men += 1
else
tmdb_person_url = "https://www.themoviedb.org/person/#{credit['id']}"
puts "Unknown gender: #{credit['name']}, edit here: #{tmdb_person_url}"
end
end
At first I thought I’d just manually look up all the unknown directors and add up the numbers myself, but then it hit me that that would be a bit wasteful given that TMDB is crowdsourced and I could just update the data there directly! I added that url to the else clause of the case statement so that I could easily reach the TMDB page for each director that my script ran into who didn’t have a gender listed on TMDB.
Adding genders for those directors turned out to be really simple and took just a few minutes of browsing TMDB, cross-referencing with other sources, and submitting the relevant updates. Now I had a more sustainable solution, which will hopefully help out future TMDB users as well.
Adding It Up
The final step was to add up the numbers and check the results. Here is the full code (minus a bit of error handling):
require 'dotenv/load'
require 'csv'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'http'
men = 0
women = 0
CSV.foreach('watched.csv') do |movie|
letterboxd_movie_doc = Nokogiri::HTML(HTTP.get(movie[3]).to_s)
tmdb_id = letterboxd_movie_doc.at_xpath('/html/body/@data-tmdb-id')
tmdb_movie_credits_url = "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/#{tmdb_id}"\
"/credits?api_key=#{ENV['TMDB_API_KEY']}"
movie_credits = JSON.parse HTTP.get(tmdb_movie_credits_url)
movie_credits['crew'].each do |credit|
next unless credit['job'] == 'Director'
case credit['gender']
when 1
women += 1
when 2
men += 1
else
tmdb_person_url = "https://www.themoviedb.org/person/#{credit['id']}"
puts "Unknown gender: #{credit['name']}, edit here: #{tmdb_person_url}"
end
end
end
puts "#{women} women, #{men} men"
Results
It turned out that as of this writing, among all of the directors for the 720 movies that I have marked watched on Letterboxd, 788 were men, and only 39 were women. (Many movies, especially old childrens’ movies, had more than one director listed.)
Final Thoughts
I wish I could say that those results came as a surprise to me, but to be honest I was expecting about that level of imbalance. I have known for as long as I can remember that most directors I watch are men, but that has only recently started to feel strange to me. I am not, to my knowledge, avoiding movies that are directed by women. It seems that there are just a lot fewer big movies directed by women out there to choose from.
If that really is the case, then why is it? I am not qualified to speculate about that, but I do feel confident that striving for a more equal balance in directors would lead to a more interesting, more varied, and overall better selection of movies for audiences to choose from. I believe that one way we can work toward that is by supporting female-directed movies, and showing Hollywood that people really want them.
Personally, I am going to try to change my watching habits over the next year and make a point of exposing myself to more female-directed movies. My specific goal is for at least 1/3 of the movies that I watch over the next year to be directed by women. I don’t think that my doing this is going to change Hollywood, but I do think that I will expose myself to a broader range of perspectives in movies that I probably wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise, and will hopefully discover some new favorite filmmakers along the way.
This is my first post touching on a current social issue, and all opinions expressed here are my own, but I am very much open to feedback on my choice of wording and my thought process. If you have any comments or questions related to all this, technical or non-technical, please let me know!
Links
While writing this, I read up on the issue and found some articles that are worth checking out if you are interested in this topic: