Women facing tough screen — and off-screen — tests
Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film
By Helen O’Hara Robinson, £18.99
In Women vs Hollywood, film journalist and Empire Magazine editorat-large Helen O’Hara explores women’s roles in front of and behind the camera since the birth of Hollywood and what can be done to “change the picture”. While Jewish women are not the subject of the book per se, they feature prominently nonetheless because they have been a notable part of Hollywood from its origins to the present. Silent star Theda Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman to a Jewish father. Alla Nazimova (née Leventon) carefully cultivated an on-and-off-screen image as an exotic vamp.
O’Hara details the abuse Jewish actresses endured at the hands of men, many of whom were also Jewish. As
Hadley Freeman noted in the Guardian recently, Jewish actresses are presented as desirable in movies — if they look like Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, or
Winona Ryder! When Francis Ford Coppola felt that Ryder was not sufficiently upset when making Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he got the cast to shout “You whore” at her repeatedly. Howard Hawks built Betty Perske’s career, even supplying her screen name “Lauren Bacall” but was furious when she began dating Humphrey Bogart rather than him.
Harvey Weinstein is discussed at length, but his ethnicity is never brought up. Nor was Harry Cohn’s who was “like some proto-Weinstein”, showing how the “casting couch” has had a long and dishonourable history in Hollywood.
Weinstein pressured Gwyneth Paltrow for sex despite knowing she was Steven Spielberg’s goddaughter and daughter of the well-known producer and director Bruce Paltrow. Depressingly, Weinstein appears to have been enabled by an entire “ecosystem of support” that included Jewish women like the lawyer Lisa Bloom.
But this isn’t simply a story of disempowerment. Barbra Streisand was consistently able to add depth and texture to her roles because she was one of the biggest Hollywood boxoffice draws of the 1960s and ’70s. She started to consider directing Yentl when she saw what chutzpah her unqualified peers (including her then boyfriend) displayed. In 2019, Scarlett Johansson was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress at approximately $56m but this still paled by comparison with her male counterparts.
Interestingly, the only times Jewishness is mentioned by O’Hara explicitly is concerning men, and not in a good way. An antisemite, writing for a Catholic journal, called the studio heads “foreign-born Jews of the lowest type”. Joan Crawford described Otto Preminger as “sort of a Jewish Nazi”.
There are some curious omissions, one being that, despite the extensive discussion of Wonder Woman, there is no Gal Gadot. O’Hara’s isn’t the definitive take on Jewish women in Hollywood. That book is still to be written.