A year after Weinstein the movie industry is still soul-searching
After Rashida Jones exited Pixar’s Toy Story 4 in 2017 she noted that the studio, after 25 years in business, had not made a single feature film directed by a woman, calling it ‘‘a culture where women and people of colour do not have an equal creative voice’’.
So when Pixar co-founder and CEO John Lasseter stepped down earlier this year after acknowledging ‘‘missteps’’ in his behaviour with employees, he was more than another casualty in the long list of film industry power-players toppled by the MeToo movement. He was a symbol of a Hollywood culture that is under siege.
‘‘These giant, multi-billiondollar companies all need a makeover,’’ Jones says. ‘‘And I think people are starting to recognise that. To me, that is a victory. Brave people have come forward and made this whole machine start to question itself.’’
In the year since sexual assault allegations surfaced against Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood has been soulsearching. The Weinstein case – along with those of Kevin Spacey, CBS’ Les Moonves, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price and many others – laid bare the painful reality for countless women in a movie industry where gender inequality was systematic and pervasive.
The MeToo movement has gone far beyond the movies, but Hollywood remains ground zero in a cultural eruption that began 12 months ago with the Weinstein revelations, published by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
‘‘Definitely there’s been a seismic shift,’’ says British actress Carey Mulligan.
‘‘I feel like if I was walking down the street and someone said something or did something outside the bounds of appropriate, I would feel so much more empowered to tell them to f... off, while before I probably wouldn’t.’’
Mulligan says that in every job she’s had in the past year, there’s been a well-known code of conduct on set.
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative have not yet found any marked difference in female representation on screen, behind the camera or in the boardroom.
More data after the end of the year will give a clearer picture but the previous 20 years have shown almost zero change.
At least anecdotally, studios and production companies are more aggressively hunting for female film-makers. Salma Hayek’s production company has been struggling to find female writers and directors. They’re all already booked.
‘‘Everybody’s looking for their female content,’’ says Jones, whose documentary Quincy was recently released by Netflix. ‘‘They’re starting to understand that content that’s created by and shepherded by
women and people of colour is super under-represented in the business. And everybody’s scrambling to try to fix that.’’
Measuring cultural change in a far-flung, US$50 billion industry is difficult. Many of the epicentres of the movie business – red carpets, film festivals, award shows – have struck a different tone in the wake of Weinstein.
Like many revolutions before it, MeToo has sought to codify permanent changes. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences instituted a code of conduct and booted out Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski.
In addition, contractual agreements to try to hire diverse casts and crews have proliferated. Warner Bros is the first major studio to make a similar pledge. Many prominent film festival directors have signed agreements to push their executive boards to gender parity. In an attempt to abolish the ‘‘casting couch’’ culture that Weinstein allegedly exploited, The Screen Actors Guild created guidelines – supported by the producers’ guild – instructing producers and executives to refrain from holding professional meetings in hotel rooms and homes.
‘‘People have been talking for decades about how terrible the casting couch is. Even with that knowledge, it was still going on.
There was nothing concrete, written down saying: unacceptable,’’ says Gabrielle Carteris, president of SAGAFTRA, the union representing film and television artists. ‘‘Us putting that in a guideline was so empowering because we’ve all been put in that situation. The movie business still lacks a single, industry-wide reporting system for sexual harassment and assault, though a committee led by Anita Hill is working to create one. Time’s Up, which is spearheading much of the pressure put on Hollywood, has also amassed a US$21 million legal-defence fund for women who suffer from harassment and assault at work in any industry.
Yet with everything that has happened in the past year, most observers say not nearly enough has been done to address longterm inequalities in Hollywood.
‘‘It feels like we’re moving in the right direction, but women and minorities are such a tiny percentage of this industry,’’ says film-maker Nicole Holofcener.
‘‘I open up my Director’s Guild magazine, and it has films that the DGA is screening and sometimes there’s not one woman, not one black person. They are all white male directors and my jaw is on the floor. I think: How can this still be?’’
Holofcener has mixed feelings about all the attention on gender.
‘‘It’s a good thing to highlight our work, but I wish we didn’t have to,’’ she says.
Julia Roberts, who was once among the highest paid movie stars, agrees. ‘‘Every year that it’s ‘the year of the woman’, let’s just have it always be the year of the artists,’’ Roberts says. ‘‘If we have to keep spotlighting the gender of this and the gender of that, we’re kind of blowing it.’’
There are plenty of others in Hollywood who have misgivings about MeToo. Sean Penn derided what he called the movement’s ‘‘salacious’’ quality, saying its spirit is ‘‘to divide men and women’’.
Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of the advocacy group Women in Film, believes that the path to ending harassment is through parity. ‘‘The more women we have in leadership positions, the less likely the incidents of harassment. So we have a lot of work to do on that front,’’ Schaffer says.
‘‘We’ve been living in a sexist, racist society for hundreds of thousands of years,’’ she adds. ‘‘We’re not going to undo it in a year.’’
‘‘People have been talking for decades about how terrible the casting couch is. Even with that knowledge, it was still going on.’’ Gabrielle Carteris