SHE’S STILL IN A ‘LEAGUE’ OF HER OWN
Twenty-five years after starring in breakthrough baseball film, Geena Davis is a heavy hitter off camera
It’s been 25 years since Geena Davis starred in A League of Their Own, a film that broke ground not only for its strong, mostly female cast but because it was a major film directed by a woman, Penny Marshall.
Released July 1, 1992, the film was based on the true story of an allwomen baseball league started during the Second World War and went on to become a beloved, and still all too rare, female-centred sports film. Coming out just a year after she and Susan Sarandon made movie history by driving their 1966 Ford Thunderbird into the Grand Canyon, League helped seal Davis’s place in Hollywood as a feminist voice.
Beyond acting, however, she has become a real force off camera.
She founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which conducts research to create statistics around gender and diversity representation in entertainment. And she co-founded the Bentonville Film Festival in Bentonville, Ark., dedicated to supporting women and diversity in the entertainment industry. Davis talks about A League of Their
Own and how she’s still having many of the same conversations about women in Hollywood that she did when the film was first released.
If A League of Their Own were coming out today, the fact that it’s a littleknown story of women’s history with a mostly female cast and a female director would be much talked about. How did people respond to the movie at the time?
Reporters came to the set to interview us and I noticed immediately that they all asked at some point, “Do you think this is a feminist movie?” Sort of conspiratorial, like, “I’m not really saying this out loud” sort of a thing and like, “Wouldn’t it be weird if you actually said yes?”
And I would say “yes.” And they would say, “What, you do? Can I say that you said that?” And I was like, yes, you can. I mean, what’s your definition of feminist? Feminist means believing in equal rights and opportunities, and this is about women playing baseball.
Are things much better now?
No, although I don’t think they’d whisper the question. But as far as the perception of it when it came out, I noticed there was so much prognosticating that this would change everything.
Now that there’s been a tremendous hit, a very successful movie starring women, there were going to be so many female sports movies. And I particularly noticed that because when I had done Thelma and
Louise, which came out a year earlier, it was the same thing, the press was saying this changes everything. There are going to be so many female road pictures, female buddy pictures, just more movies starring women because it struck such a nerve. And neither prediction proved to be true whatsoever.
Was the movie pivotal for you personally?
It was very pivotal to my life in multiple ways. One was experiencing the reaction of young girls to the movie and so many girls and young women saying, “I took up sports because of that movie.” I still have the same number of girls and women telling me they play sports because of that movie now as I did then. It’s like a rite of passage to see this movie.
Also, just on a personal level, I had never really played any sports and I definitely couldn’t play baseball when I got cast.
And so I trained really hard and it was the first time that I was told that I had untapped athletic ability, which was an incredible compliment in my book, and so I felt like I really did, and it changed everything about my self-esteem and my self-confidence.
Learning to play a sport really changed my life. I became a trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation for 10 years; I had a website encouraging girls to know their rights through Title IX and then eventually I took up archery because of that, and at 41, became a semifinalist at the Olympic trials three years later. S
Does the conversation around women in media feel different now? Does having actual numbers through the work of the institute help move the conversation?
That’s an excellent thought, because there is definitely far more talk about it now than back then . . .
But now, as we see, so many of my peers and myself are talking about it and bringing it up, saying, “Hey, I’m not getting paid equally,” “Hey, there’s not enough parts” (rather) than, “I was turned down because I was too old at 36.” And definitely that has changed, though whether that will create more change we have yet to see.
So numbers, two things: one is, children’s entertainment media, I figured out a way to address it, to attack the problem that is tremendously effective, which is getting the numbers.
It’s made all the difference. People didn’t know, the people making kids’ entertainment, they had no idea they were leaving out that many female characters in the world that was being created.
However, for behind the camera, the numbers and the data have done absolutely nothing. The percentage of female directors has been known for decades.
There is nobody who would say, “I’m shocked to find out how few female directors there are.” So that has no impact, knowing the numbers, and to generalize completely I would say that onscreen, lack of women is unconscious bias, and from the evidence one would have to assume that behind the camera is conscious bias.
So numbers are not going to change that and what I think will, is people doing like Ryan Murphy is doing and saying, “I’m just going to (hire) half (women) and making it happen. I just am. I’m not going to complain that there’s not enough, I’m going to find them and hire them.”