Feature - Women and Hollywood (and yes, the Weinstein thing)

I have experienced sexism in that I have been directed by male directors 17 times and only twice by women. Emma Watson.

Okay, let's get the Harvey Weinstein business out of the way right at the top, as it's distasteful and you've already been rendered apoplectic by an avalanche of articles on the topic. I have little to add about movie producer's seedy antics or the slew of harassment allegations from which Hollywood is currently reeling. Let me simply say this. The most appalling aspect of the revelations wasn't the details of Weinstien's actions themselves, grisly though those were. It was the culture of silence and fear that allowed those actions to go unchecked for so long. And that leads into a whole other source issue.

The US movie business, as with many industries, has remained a seedbed of misogyny due to the fact that so few women work within it in positions of influence. Yes the behaviour of predatory men should be condemned, but let's face it - such behaviour wouldn't have any wiggle-room (and that conjures up some really unpleasant images), if more women were involved as producers, along with every other job on the way down. No boys' club mentality, no more acting like creepy little boys (or not for long at any rate).

It's didn't occur to me, when my cinema-going habit was established back in the '80s, how few meaningful roles there were for women in Hollywood movies. I think the first time it sank in was when checking the Oscar nominations one year for Best Actor and Actress. The Actors were drawn from the highest profile films of the previous year and there was a huge pool, it seemed, from which to choose. The Actresses, however, had often appeared in more obscure pictures, like it had been a bit of job scraping up enough leading performances of substance to fill the category. 

Outside of romantic comedies and John Hughes teen dramas women were most often set-dressing, occupying support roles to Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas or Tom Cruise. Every batch of fresh pretty faces would stick around for a few movies, until they were replaced by a newer younger batch. If, as happened in the early '90s, a film like Thelma and Louise came along, it caused a furore. Wow - two leading women, in a movie where all the male characters were eye candy (Brad Pitt) or hapless support players. Quite the radical notion, and one which seemed to upset some male film fans. The Ridley Scott movie, along with films like Sleepless in Seattle, earned the tag 'chick flick', a monumentally patronising phrase in retrospect, in an industry that had finally recognised there was an audience of women out there and had decided to toss them a few projects with 'female appeal'. 

I remember Meryl Streep's response in the early '90s to a question regarding how she selected her jobs. The notion that she was so spoilt for choice that she had to reject quality material made her laugh with barely concealed scorn. Well if there were scarcely enough well-written female roles to occupy screen royalty like the Meryl, that provided scant hope for any actress further down the ladder.

How much has changed in the twenty-five years since then? I glanced through the cinema releases I've reviewed since January of this year and out of fifty-three titles around twenty have either female leads or shared female/male duties in the key roles. That suggests some kind of move in the right direction, however slow. High-profile actresses like Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams and Emma Stone are carving out brilliant careers for themselves and studios seem to want to make room for them. It's also a source of delight to me that the reinvented Star Wars franchise does a strong line in gutsy female leads. More depressing though is the dearth of female screenwriters and directors. There's a scattering - Kathryn Bigelow's riveting Detroit leaps to mind, and Jane Goldman's well-judged screenplay for The Limehouse Golem - but it's still a meagre representation overall, in mainstream cinema at any rate. 

'Women,' Streep insisted recently, 'are graduating from film school in equal number to men... but are shut out when they get to the leadership positions'. The reason, she suggests, is chiefly financial - all to do with which film projects receive enough funding to hit the multiplex cinemas. For all the '90s 'chick-flick' sops that were thrown to female cinema-goers, woman-led movies are still seen as less likely to sell tickets. 

It's dinosaur thinking - that women can't write or direct a film in which men would possibly take interest, or that there's such a thing as a definitive 'man's' or 'woman's picture' in the first place. With Hollywood studios so often scratching around for original ideas, they might actually consider that there's a whole other vast pool of talent and imagination on which to draw. That if men and women truly worked in partnership in the movie business, something revolutionary might happen. Not only would it shut down the creepy extra-curricular activities of the industry Weinsteins, it might blow out the boundaries of what is deemed a successful movie formula. It might double the types of story on offer. Hey, it might reinvent film as we know it. 

It's not likely to happen easily or soon, but maybe 2017 with all its nasty revelations will act as a watershed. Maybe it's riled enough people to start righting a messed-up situation. Maybe the Meryls and Jessicas and Emmas and Jennifers will get listened to at last, along with all their less starry Hollywood sisters. I'll be looking for the signs in 2018...