Thelma, Louise and Hollywood’s eternal problem of gender equality
The year was 1991, and it felt like women in Hollywood might be turning a corner.
Barbra Streisand directed a successful adaptation of the best-selling novel “Prince of Tides.” Kathryn Bigelow made a splash with the vaguely homoerotic surfer action movie “Point Break.” Jodie Foster played a steely FBI cadet who matches wits with a serial killer in “The Silence of the Lambs,” a role that earned her a second Oscar in four years.
Most significant, first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri saw her passion project hit the big screen, the unapologetic story of two female outlaws (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) sticking it to The Man (and killing a man). “Thelma & Louise” felt like a zeitgeist changer, a hit action comedy that tackled gender inequality with ferocity and style. It garnered deafening praise and provoked hysterical backlash (as all cultural happenings seem to do). Khouri won the Oscar for best original screenplay. “Ten years from now,” trumpeted the Boston Phoenix in 1991, “it will be seen as a turning point.”
It wasn’t to be, as Becky Aikman writes in her lively new “Thelma & Louise” book “Off the Cliff.” It’s a thoroughly reported chronicle of the movie’s improbable path to the multiplex, the subsequent cultural reverberations and a Hollywood revolution that never happened. Aikman’s book is subtitled “How the Making of ‘Thelma and Louise’ Drove Hollywood to the Edge.” A good alternative might be “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.”
Aikman has plenty of thoughts on the matter. She also has numbers to back them up.
“Of the top-50 movies at the box office in 1991,” she writes, “four were directed by women.” In 2016, one, “Kung Fu Panda 3,” was co-directed by a woman. Also: “Four women without male partners wrote top-50 movies in 1991, the same number as in 2016. Women as leading characters managed to move the needle a little more. Nine movies featured them in 1991, and nine in 2016, but 13 if you count films with men and women as equal costars.”
Or, as she puts it: “The overall numbers don’t lie. They barely budge.”
Aikman, who has covered entertainment for Newsday, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, hears echoes of the 1991 optimism in today’s buzz. She is understandably reluctant to believe the hype.
“It’s grim,” she says in a telephone interview. “There’s a moment now where people feel that there’s progress being made. There’s been so much attention to ‘Wonder Woman’ and some other big films with women as main characters this year. So at the moment people are once again saying, ‘Maybe the problem is solved.’ But we’ve had those moments before, and the problem wasn’t solved.”
Indeed, the summer of “Wonder Woman” has brought renewed hope. Patty Jenkins’ Amazonian blockbuster has pulled in $346 million at the domestic box office. Bigelow’s new movie, “Detroit” (set during the 1967 Detroit riots), arrives in August. Ava DuVernay (“Selma”) is directing a big-budget adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine.
But these remain exceptions in an industry that remains slow to hire woman to make movies, or tell stories from a female perspective. Aikman ticks off some of the reasons. For a business with such a liberal reputation, Hollywood is terrified of change. It’s also decentralized at the production level, meaning there’s no human resources division tracking issues of fairness or harassment. “Off the Cliff” is rife with stories about drooling male executives chasing women around offices or propositioning them outright.
“There’s a very, very long history of people in the movie business thinking movies should be made by and for men,” Aikman says. “That doesn’t seem to change as much as it would if there was perhaps more scrutiny.”