Feature - Women and Hollywood (One Year On from Weinstein)

I encourage women to step up. Don't wait for somebody to ask you. Reece Witherspoon.

It was seeing Sean Young with her kit off that brought it home to me - I mean really slammed it home. I'd known, for sure, but there are different levels of knowing. Hollywood, I said, you have one embarrassingly chauvinistic history. 

To explain - I was brushing up on the original 1982 Blade Runner movie just over a year ago in preparation for reviewing its 2049-based sequel. The DVD included the excellent Dangerous Days making-of documentary, in which members of the all-male production team recounted a debate they'd had on set. Should the pivotal Harrison Ford/Sean Young love-scene be more titillating? An alternative version had actually been shot (see above) and the doc showed it in its dubious soft-core glory - pure '80s exploitation at Young's expense. Ford, being a proper male movie-star, kissed her while keeping his shirt and trousers on. Even in the context of that distant-seeming era it was glaringly sleazy male wish-fulfilment, and it jarred horribly with the movie's overall tone. (Admittedly the teenage me would have loved it, but that, my friends, is scarcely the point.) Thankfully good sense prevailed on this occasion and the director Ridley Scott opted for something with more Bogart/Bacall-style restraint for the final cut. (For all Blade Runner's numerous final cuts.) 

But the fact that they even shot a nudey version of the scene speaks volumes regarding the era and what was regularly passed as acceptable. It's everything from which women in Hollywood have been struggling to free themselves for decades, with incremental hard-won success. Prior to the allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein last year, scenes of the sexed-up Blade Runner variety had become far less prevalent, but the attitudes that spawned such a scene had not, hence all the naming of (male-predator) names and the advent of the #metoo movement. 

A year ago today I posted my thoughts on the situation (click here to read them in full), with a hardly controversial view that the underlying issue was one of representation. Once you have enough female directors, producers and actors doing high-profile work, you undercut the whole predatory culture and consign it to history's dustbin. The predators might still be around, but they won't have the same male-dominated structure in which to operate. Bit of a no-brainer - but the problem of course is actually achieving that reality. 

With that in mind that I added a 'Where Are the Women?' feature in my reviews, an effort to chart progress on that front. It's not meant to be a tediously PC box-ticking exercise; a period war-movie like Overlord is obviously going to have a largely male cast and talented guys established in the movie business should have room to keep doing what they're already doing well. Nor am I under any illusion that my humble week-to-week bloggings hold sway over those in positions to make changes (well not yet at any rate). It's simply of interest to me, and hopefully some of my readers, to monitor what, if any, changes are taking place within America's highly influential movie industry. I think the conclusions twelve months on are at the very least interesting...

I've watched and reviewed 70 US-made films - many of them from Hollywood studios along with a handful of independents - and rated them on similar terms to those I watched in 2017, i.e. how many of them have females either as protagonists or featuring in a number of leading roles. 50 of those meet those basic criteria, that's 71%, up from the previous year's 38%. True it's anecdotal, based on very limited data and frankly of no real use to anyone, but I think some observations of genuine value can be made. 

The first is the prevalence of the female protagonist. Molly's Game kicked-started my filmic year, with Jessica Chastain crushing it as a real-life poker-game hostess in an oppressively male environment. Then Michelle Williams was the emotional centre of Getty kidnapping drama All the Money in the World. The entire awards season was similarly dominated by memorable leading women - Frances McDormand, Sally Hawkins, Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie each put a firm stamp on major film projects. 

It's a pattern that extended throughout 2018 - Shailene Woodley was resourceful at sea in Adrift, Jodie Foster took no crap running her secret hospital for criminals in Hotel Artemis and Anna Kendrick teamed up with Blake Lively to scintillating comic effect in A Simple Favor. Then three generations of fighting women took on serial killer Michael Myers in the new Halloween - a visceral #metoo display if ever there was one. I've yet to catch up with Alicia Vikander and Jennifer Lawrence in Tomb Raider and Red Sparrow respectively, but clearly the female action hero was kicking ass all over the show. Even my beloved Marvel Studios have been getting with the program. Black Panther was as much about its powerful ensemble of female characters as King T'Challa himself, while Ant-man was teamed with Evangeline Lilly's Wasp with hugely enjoyable results. And even if the Avengers relied more on their male old-guard in Infinity War, the ending teased the most powerful addition to the MCU so far - Bree Larson ready to make her debut in 2019 as Captain Marvel. 

We had several examples of the female ensemble too, and not just in unfortunately lacklustre comedies such as Book Club. Two all-woman heists took place - Ocean's 8 carried theirs out in passably entertaining fashion, while the Widows did so with real dramatic guts. And while I've yet to see it, Netflix-released sci-fi thriller Annihilation has garnered great reviews with its largely female cast. (I really need to get onto that one fast.) The girl-gang movie is becoming a more regular occurrance, and one much less limited by genre. It's almost like the big studios are realising that (1) women enjoy cinema as much as men, (2) they like different types of cinema and that (3) men aren't necessarily put off films due to their having a bunch of women in them! See? There's a lot of good news here.

Perhaps the most heartening thing I noticed all year is a widespread understanding that supporting female characters should never be a cipher for male leads - reduced to bland wife-girlfriend status or plot-facilitating stereotypes. Hence in Mission: Impossible - Fallout Tom Cruise's lead is aided and/or opposed by a variety of women with real agency, intelligence and strength. In First Man Claire Foy brings award-baiting dramatic heft rather than simply being 'the astronaut's wife'. And in Creed II Tessa Thompson has her own properly developed character threads, rather than remaining the fighter's loyal ringside partner. So while Hollywood screenwriters are still predominantly male, at least they have an ever-developing sense that the women in their screenplays should be as three-dimensional as the men. Hey - Dwayne Johnson headed up two action movies this year (Rampage and Skyscraper) and while both were thoroughly dumb, the female co-star of each was proactive and smart. Now that is cause for celebration!

My screenwriter comment, however, leads to progress yet to be made. There are terrific female writers out there in the world of cinema - this year Diablo Cody created a fascinating original script in Tully, Audrey Wells wrote a searing adaptation of The Hate U Give and Gillian Flynn of course presented us with that terrific new version of Widows - but the most recently compiled statistics put the percentage of Hollywood films written by women at not much over 10%. The numbers concerning women in top production jobs isn't much better - shy of 20%. 2018 saw the UK release of Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird, Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here and Debra Granik's Leave No Trace - all superior work, but in each case a relatively small-scale production. It's still noteworthy when a big-studio event movie - whether a popcorn flick or a prestige project with awards-season ambition - has one or more women at the helm. (This goes far beyond Hollywood too. Statistics regarding the British film industry for example are scarcely more heartening.)

I won't even get into reasons - that's a whole other article and a whole lot more research on my part - save to say this... There are many more talented female writers, directors, cinematographers, etc out there, than are being given room in the film industry to show what they can do. Thankfully a slow but significant culture change has been underway, I'd say for the past decade, and the events of the past year are having a catalytic effect in speeding this up. Nor is that ground, once gained, likely to be lost. If a significant proportion of the top jobs are gained by women, that will become a self-perpetuating situation of its own, one resulting in greater equality and a more even sense of gender representation.

Why does it matter particularly to me? Well it's partly the innate belief in fair play with which I grew up, but there's more to it than that. You see I love cinema and the stories it can tell. But if only certain people are given opportunity to be creative within that art form, then a narrower range of stories gets told. The greater variety of individuals who are encouraged and enabled to direct and write and act, the more far-ranging and original and surprising those stories become. That's good for me as a viewer. And it's good for cinema as a whole. 

The Hollywood culture that threatened to objectify Sean Young way back in 1982 is properly losing its hold. Allow women their full stake in the whole process and watch the creativity explode on screen - those different energies clashing and combining and complimenting each other. Now that's properly sexy.