The Bargain

I moved out to LA ready to hustle; ready to fetch coffees, work long hours and grind my way up — starting from the very bottom. But even with experience, even with my sights set on the humblest positions, my opportunities were limited. Once, I was laughed out of an interview and told “women can’t lift things”, as if my feminine frame was too delicate to be near C-stands and softboxes. This distant squashed-down memory is what led me nearly ten years later to create the High Road Series. While the industry has spurred a lot of conversations about female directors and writers lately, women are outnumbered and overlooked in nearly every crew position, too.
The High Road Series concept was simple. I would write a series of female-focused horror microshorts, all from perspectives of maligned women, and I would shoot them with an all-female crew. The goal of the series is to create opportunities for and work with other folks underrepresented in the film industry. These were also the only people who could accurately bring my vision to life. These films attempt to speak truth to power and who better to understand and convey those truths than those on the brink of traditional power structures.
The Bargain explores two of the most chastised roles for women – the murder victim and the ruthless business woman. The Bargain grew from my fascination with women famous for their deaths. It breaks my heart to think of Nicole Brown Simpson or Natalie Wood, whose names cannot even be uttered without mentioning the men that killed them in the same breath. Nicole, in particular, whose life was so dominated by abuse that it was taken from her. And then her death and legacy were taken from her, too. These women’s killers, or alleged killers, not only took their lives, but took their stories, too. Nicole’s story becomes a mere part of OJ’s story. Their stories are no longer their own.
In The Bargain, Joan struggles with toeing the line between honoring the female murder victim and exploiting her. Her dilemma begs the question of whether women can be honored by true crime reporting, or if in selling their stories, we take and give them away. We give them to responsible journalists, but to irresponsible journalists too; we give them to couch-detective message boards for the public to pore over and study like a brainteaser; and in the search for justice, we give their stories to the people who took their lives.
Joan knows all of this, but she also knows what she has to do to eat. To survive. We criticize women for being ‘ruthless’, for fighting tooth and nail to get ahead, but we don’t consider what they’re up against. We don’t consider the women whose careers are stifled, whose opportunities are far and few between, that when forced to compete in industries society doesn’t deem them suited for, it’s not enough to merely be good at your job. We don’t consider that when men are ‘ruthless’, we pay them no mind.