Trio of books crack open women’s roles in Hollywood
Authors take look at female representation, treatment and opportunity in entertainment
On Jan. 21, the Women’s March became the largest protest in U.S. history, with 50,000 people demonstrating in Toronto alone. Carina Chocano doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence that months later, Wonder Woman emerged as North America’s highest-grossing film of the summer.
“There is something about Wonder Woman’s sincerity, and the fact that it’s coming from a woman and she is fighting for justice,” says the Los Angeles-based writer, whose collection of essays on female representation in pop culture, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages, was released on Aug. 8. “I don’t think we can underestimate how many people need to see that right now, especially after the election.”
Now, Warner Bros. is trumpeting its Best Picture Oscar campaign for Wonder Woman when, just 10 years ago, the studio’s then-president Jeff Robinov was dodging a Deadline report claiming he had told three producers he wouldn’t green-light a film with a female lead (he denied the accusation).
Diana Prince isn’t alone in her battle for the box office. The biggest movie of 2017 so far is the Emma Watson-fronted Beauty & the Beast. The trio of Black female mathematicians of Hidden Figures proved a bigger draw than Pixar’s Cars 3. And the comedy Girls Trip nearly doubled the domestic opening of space opera Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, even though Valerian’s budget was reportedly nine times larger.
“I think there has been a shift and people are more ready to recognize the problems that exist,” Chocano says.
Publishers agree. Earlier this summer, Becky Aikman’s Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge explored cinematic sexism through the 1991Oscar-winning Geena Davis/Susan Sarandon hit.
Erin Carlson depicts the ferocity that equipped Nora Ephron to crack Hollywood in I’ll Have What She’s Having, which came out Aug. 29.
“There is no question that everyone who complains about how little Hollywood cares about women characters is telling the truth,” Ephron said in 1994. She described how shocked When Harry Met Sally director Rob Reiner was that Meg Ryan’s Sally became as charming as Billy Crystal’s Harry once the cameras started to roll.
Reiner had glossed over the complexities Ephron had given her female lead, attributes Ryan brought to life. Yet even after the film was a hit, TriStar refused to even entertain a meeting with Ephron as a potential director for Sleepless in Seattle — they relented when a 30-year-old male producer insisted.
In the early ’90s, unless they came with Julia Roberts attached, femaledriven projects were given similarly unenthused receptions in Hollywood. “When Thelma & Louise was made, Hollywood was so blatant about refusing to recognize a female audience,” Aikman says. Every major studio in 1991 passed on it, she writes, with many openly bristling about a violent road movie with two female leads.
To Chocano, it’s no coincidence that the parade of impossible women we’ve seen onscreen — Flashdance’s Alex, Pretty Woman’s Vivian and Trainwreck’s Amy all receive Chocano’s hilarious analysis in You Play the Girl — sprang from an industry parched for female talent behind the camera. It has been reported that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has laid charges against every major American studio for not hiring a sufficient number of female directors. Last year, only one woman directed a film that cracked the top 50 at the box office: Me Before You’s Thea Sharrock.
In Canada, the National Film Board of Canada has promised gender pari- ty in the projects it supports, while the CBC has committed to hiring women to direct at least half of the episodes on five of its series, including Murdoch Mysteries.
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is raising $3 million to be spent over five years on a talent incubator for emerging female filmmakers. The annual TIFF Soirée fundraiser will raise money for this project, called Share Her Journey. The guest of honour will be Quantico star Priyanka Chopra.
“This subject is one that people in the industry are talking about all over the world,” says Kathleen Drumm, TIFF’s industry director. “In the past, people talked about it and no one really did anything. Now, there is this desire to make the paradigm shift.”
Chocano believes it’s important for cultural institutions such as TIFF to directly target the industry’s institutionalized biases. “Whether people recognize it or not, the studios and networks are systems that have traditionally developed and mentored male filmmakers almost exclusively,” she says.
“You have equal numbers of men and women graduating from film school, and that has been the case for many years. Obviously, there are systemic obstacles and biases in place that are opening the doors for some people and keeping them closed for others.
“I don’t believe it’s a special favour. We need to start recognizing the reality and not pretend that these issues don’t exist.”