From casting couch to Weinstein case: Why did Hollywood
In his acclaimed crime fiction novel The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy chronicles the real-life 1947 murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, and the seedy backdrop of post-war Hollywood. His narrator, Bucky Bleichert, an LAPD officer, says of the victim: “We know Betty was moviestruck and promiscuous, and that she bragged about being in a movie last November, so my bet is that she wouldn’t turn down a role on the casting couch.”
Back then, the casting couch — a euphemistic term denoting the trading of sexual favours in return for career advancement — was the worstkept secret in Tinseltown’s booming film industry. Seventy years on, we might expect times to have changed, but if the Harvey Weinstein scandal has shown us anything it is that they have not.
The roll call of actresses who’ve spoken out against casting-couch culture undoubtedly represent a fraction of the true number who’ve experienced it. Alison Brie has pre- viously described how she was asked to remove her top while auditioning for a minor role in HBO series Entourage early in her career. Thandie Newton has detailed how a director “had a camera shooting up my skirt, and asked me to touch my t*** and think about the guy making love to me in the scene,” during a casting audition early in her own career. She later discovered he was showing the footage to friends after poker parties. Charlize Theron spoke out in 2005 about an audition she attended at the age of 18, which curiously took place on a Saturday night at the director’s house in LA. “It pretty soon became very clear to me what the situation was,” she told Marie Claire magazine. But, she said: “I knew how to deal with it.”
Others have spoken of the pressure to flirt, to wear skimpy or revealing clothing or to perform sexual favours at auditions. Not all have done so publicly, but a forum set up in 2015 — “S#!t People Say To Actresses” — gave those who wish to remain anonymous a space to share their horror stories.
Although each high-profile figure who speaks out makes it that bit easier for everyone else, calling out sexism in Hollywood is still by no means easy. The trickle of stars going public with their condemnation began noticeably slowly. “Part of the reason people are remaining silent is that a certain percentage of them will have readily gone along with this culture and don’t want that to come out,” says a LA source. “The amorality in Hollywood is such that people will readily flirt with those in positions of power or offer themselves up if they