“Women in Film Production” Panel at SDCC Derailed by Male Con Staffer Who Didn’t Realize He Wasn’t There to Moderate Or, Like, Even Talk

Ok so now that I am finally sitting down on a 3hr train ride, I wanted to address something that happened at our rad ladies panel on Friday

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

Cinematographer and creator/dean of RocketJump Film School Lauren Haroutunian sat on a panel this weekend at SDCC called “Women in Film Production.” It was moderated by her friend Brittany Sandler, who has led versions of this panel before at multiple conventions. Haroutunian saw it as a wonderful opportunity to educate and inspire aspiring female filmmakers, and for a majority of the panel, that’s exactly what happened. That is, until the male SDCC staffer who was there to facilitate decided to “help” the poor ladies on the panel with his “wisdom.”

As Haroutunian explained in a series of tweets yesterday, at the end of the Q&A portion of the panel, the older male staffer took it upon himself to hijack the conversation with his own words of wisdom as a filmmaker, promoting his own filmmaking school with loads of patronizing assumptions about what the ladies did or did not know:

Our panel was “Women in Film Production.” My good friend organizes and moderates versions of this panel for a lot of different events

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

Whenever she asks, I always try to be on it. It’s an important, well-done & really POSITIVE panel and always has really cool women on it

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

I think our panel was going extremely well. I loved all of the questions we got. But then one of the SDCC staffers, an older gentleman…

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

Decided it was cool to interrupt and take control over the Q&A, plugging his own film program and answering questions not asked of him

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

Here is a panel full of professional female filmmakers, and this man decides his knowledge is important enough to be inserted into our panel

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

He begins telling the room about the importance of PAing. “And of course, PA stands for….!” He waits for us to answer, like students

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

We stare at him. I am trying to process if this is ACTUALLY happening? So he answers “Production Assistants! Yes!” And continues to talk

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

With the audience clearly uncomfortable, and the moderator and panelists gobsmacked, the facilitator proceeded to wrap up the panel on the moderator’s behalf. He then had the nerve to do this:

He then comes up to me after the panel and talks to me passionately about the “females” in his program and how to encourage them

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

You can check out Haroutunian’s full recount of the incident starting at this link to her Twitter feed. Needless to say, both the panelists and the audience were horrified at the sheer lack of respect and regard from a person who was there to facilitate for these women. He was basically there to hold the microphone during the Q&A, be there in case something went wrong, or help if the panelists needed anything. This was a clear case of overstepping.

Haroutunian regrets that they couldn’t bring themselves to say anything, and wishes that she could’ve been a better example for the women in the audience:

My polite “just get out of this” mode had switched on and I am so regretting that my “Sit the fuck down” switch did not show up

— LH (@laurasaurusrex) July 24, 2016

As much as I’d like to think that in that situation I totally would’ve told that guy off, the fact is I have no idea if I would. Just as women are trained to “let guys down gently” even when they hit on us aggressively—lest they be “provoked”—there are countless situations like this one in which male comfort is subconsciously treated as more important than a woman standing up for herself. That’s programming that’s very difficult to work against.

I’ve reached out to Haroutunian, Sandler, and San Diego Comic Con for statements, and will update this story as needed. However, it’s disheartening to know that for too many men, “helping” women still means “doing things for them,” instead of “respecting the space they create to do for themselves.” *sigh*

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