Conspiracy nuts may think there's a plot to keep women in their place on the screen. But the problem's more serious than that.
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In Hollywood, a huge popular success has always spawned imitations. When Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lit up the box office in 1969, they generated a whole decade's glut of male buddy movies, from The French Connection to The Deer Hunter. Then Star Wars and other big-budget spectacles started a cycle of action-adventure movies built around male superheroes. A bunch of baseball movies trailed Bull Durham, and the success of Dances With Wolves will surely launch a whole wagon train of westerns. Every hit movie produces a slew of carbon copies--with one single exception. Two of the biggest hits of 1990--_Ghost_ and Pretty Womanwere love stories with female protagonists. As I write this, the two most successful movies of 1991The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping With the Enemy--have also had women as their central characters. If Hollywood plays by the usual rules, shouldn't we expect to see a barrage of women's movies well into the '90s?
Don't bet on it. The usual logic vanishes when women are involved. Suddenly Hollywood abandons its typical practices because of a jumble of unspoken and irrational assumptions. When asked why Hollywood doesn't make more movies about women, studio executives invariably reply that women's pictures don't make money; they explain that they are only reflecting public taste. If one points out that Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias were box-office hits, the response will be that those movies were flukes. Now that several more strong women's films have clearly caught the public's fancy, it is harder to argue that these hits are freak accidents. Yet the executives continue to ignore the evidence. No matter how many dismal action movies like The Hard Way falter, Hollywood keeps churning them out. Obviously the people in power simply feel more comfortable with all-male movies, and they aren't going to let any verifiable data cloud their prejudices.
You see the same stuff in movie after movie," Bette Midler told me. "I don't want to see blood and gore or be scared shitless in every movie. The only kinds of pictures the studios want to make are male action pictures and teen comedies. They're frightened of strong relationship pieces. But who wants to see movies called Career Opportunities or Taking Care of Business? They sound like baked beans. There's no poetry in them. I want to see movies with titles like Gone With the Wind."
Even the cautious Hollywood press has begun to complain about the absence of female characters of depth, mystery, and vitality. As Meryl Streep explained when she spoke to a SAG Women's conference last year, she did not object simply to the scarcity of women in important positions behind the camera. "Where I felt starved," Streep said pointedly, "was as a member of the audience, as someone with daughters and a son. Where are their role models like the ones I had when I grew up? Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball--those big, formidable presences who were important people in their films."
Despite the popular image of the old studio moguls as boors, they had far more respect for women than today's better educated executives. One of the first movies that Louis B. Mayer produced was directed by a woman, Lois Weber, and he entrusted important positions to women at MGM. The crass Harry Cohn, similarly, relied on several women to help him make decisions at Columbia. Perhaps because they harbored no doubts about who had absolute power, these men weren't threatened by strong women. And they were just as interested in stories about women on the home front as they were in tales of men at war or cowboys on the range.
Of course, their confidence in the audience helped them to create a rich cross section of movies, and the studio contract system meant that the moguls spent just as much time nurturing and promoting their female stars as they did merchandising the men. They had an investment in all their players and they didn't discriminate on the basis of gender. Budgets were modest, and so were studios' expectations for most of their movies. A women's picture might cost $1 million to produce, and if it took in $5 or $6 million, it was a smashing success. If Stella Dallas or Woman of the Year or All About Eve had had to gross $75 million to break even, film history might have been different.
In those days, the diversity among the female stars was extraordinary, and writers had a chance to imagine every conceivable kind of woman's role. There were the down-to-earth comediennes like Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Rosalind Russell; the patrician Katharine Hepburn and the ethereal Audrey Hepburn; the sexy tarts like Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe; the tough career women Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck; the exotic imports Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; the versatile musical performers Ginger Rogers and Judy Garland, just to name a few.
We can't boast of the same variety today. Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, and Julia Roberts are all variations on the same type--sexy-but-vulnerable kittens, with an endearing pout but without a lot of brainpower. Of course there are many gifted actresses with different qualities, but they haven't had the opportunity to create a memorable persona in film after film. It's a chicken-and-egg question as to which comes first, the actresses or the roles. But the stable of stars today is not remotely comparable to the dazzling galaxy that graced the movies 40 or 50 years ago.
It was in the '70s that women virtually disappeared from the screen. The great teams of the era were couples like Newman and Redford, Hoffman and McQueen, Sutherland and Gould. For several years during the 70s, it was difficult to find five women to nominate as best actress. Women who essentially had supporting roles, like Valerie Perrine in Lenny, were nominated as best actress because there was no other way to fill the category. In 1975 Louise Fletcher won an Oscar for a relatively small part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because the competition was so slim. To fill out the roster, the Academy had to travel abroad. The other nominees of 1975 included Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H and Glenda Jackson in a film version of her stage performance in Hedda. There were more European actresses nominated in the 70s than at any time in film history, and it wasn't because Hollywood had suddenly become cosmopolitan in its outlook.
The '70s represented a turning point on several counts. That was the era of The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, when studios realized that huge action pictures could deliver grosses never before imagined possible. That discovery coincided with the rise of the women's movement. Probably the male executives were fearful of the growing militancy of women, but they were also genuinely confused about what kinds of female characters to create. If they presented a heroine who wasn't a suitable role model, they might find themselves under attack by angry women's groups. Feeling besieged, many producers decided that the path of least resistance was simply to eliminate women altogether. As Molly Haskell wrote in her book From Reverence to Rape, "The growing strength and demands of women in real life, spearheaded by women's liberation, obviously provoked a backlash in commercial film: a redoubling of Godfather-like machismo to beef up man's eroding virility or, alternately, an escape into the all-male world of the buddy films from Easy Rider to Scarecrow."
In a way Hollywood never recovered from that decade of silence and evasion. The situation is slightly less dire today. It isn't quite so hard to come up with five American nominees for best actress (though ten would be a serious challenge). But Hollywood still seems baffled by the changing roles of women in society and continues to waste some of its most gifted actresses. After the success of When Harry Met Sally..., Meg Ryan was given her own production company to develop movies. Not one of her own projects has yet made it to the screen, and Ryan's last appearance was little better than a walk-on--the embarrassing role of Jim Morrison's mindless, masochistic common-law wife in The Doors.
Some producers have decided that one way to improve the lot of women in film is to cast women in roles that traditionally have gone to men. Thus Sigourney Weaver has scored a considerable success playing a machine-gun-toting superhero in the Alien series, and Jodie Foster is an FBI agent matching wits with a psychopath in The Silence of the Lambs. Goldie Hawn has practically built her career in the last decade by playing a woman in a man's world--the army (Private Benjamin), an aircraft factory (Swing Shift), Washington power politics (Protocol), and high school football (Wildcats).
These movies are often engaging as novelty items, but the solution to the problem of women in film is not to cast more women in genre pieces that have typically been all-male. Women can be involved in many of the same conflicts as men, but they also have unique concerns about family and romantic relationships that simply aren't being addressed in contemporary movies. Shirley MacLaine raised a pertinent criticism when she said recently that the goal of actresses should not be to strive to beat the men on their own turf of action-adventure movies. "Who in her right mind is interested in going out and killing 30 million people in the first two minutes?" MacLaine asked. "The problem is less the number of roles available to women than the film industry's discomfort with projects involving relationships, feelings, communication--the kind of things women are more likely to go into than men."
Hollywood does occasionally try remaking an old-fashioned "woman's picture" like Stella Dallas, but the filmmakers have trouble updating these stories. That doesn't mean, however, that the genre has lost its relevance. Television finds variations on these classic women's movies that do have a contemporary urgency. For example, a recent television film called Our Sons featured Julie Andrews as a highly successful businesswoman whose life comes apart when she learns that her son's lover is dying of AIDS. She must come to terms with her own unresolved feelings about her son's homosexuality as well as her fears for his life. Andrews, who has spent most of her career as a movie star, went to television for the first time because she couldn't find any role of comparable depth on the big screen.
Would it help to bring in more female executives, producers, and directors?
Hollywood's employment record is abysmal in this regard, but I wouldn't be sanguine that more female players behind the scenes would produce a dramatic improvement in women's roles. Women in power would probably be so nervous about their positions that they would give the big boys what they think they want--a steady diet of macho fantasies. Gale Anne Hurd has specialized in producing action-adventure pictures, Dawn Steel put herself on the line backing Casualties of War, Penny Marshall directed Big and Awakenings, and Sherry Lansing's last production was Black Rain, which had one ridiculous woman's role played by Kate Capshaw. There's no reason why women shouldn't make male-oriented movies if they want to, but aren't they going over-board in order to be accepted as one of the guys? As Meryl Streep observed, "There are a lot of women screenwriters and a lot of women in development, but I guess because those women want to make it past the glass ceiling, maybe they think they have to say, 'Do Die Hard 2'."
Some of the strongest champions of better women's roles have been men. It was Alan Ladd, Jr., when he was running 20th Century Fox, who effectively put an end to the cycle of male buddy movies when he made Julia, 3 Women, The Turning Point, An Unmarried Woman, Alien, and Norma Rae within a three-year period in the late 70s. And Ladd is also the executive who backed one of the new movies with strong women's roles, Thelma & Louise.
Because they can't always count on other women to find them rewarding roles, several actresses have become producers them-selves. But they have continued to face tremendous resistance. Bette Midler says that Disney, with whom she has a long-term contract, wants her to keep churning out light comedies in the vein of Down and Out in Beverly Hills or Outrageous Fortune. When she tries to veer from that familiar image, her bosses frequently balk. "You want to be trusted after all these years," Midler sighs. "It's not as if I just got off the bus. But it's still a struggle to do any movies in a different style."
One of the movies that Disney rejected was For the Boys, a musical drama about USO performers that Midler managed to set up at Fox. The problem, says Midler's partner in All Girl Productions, Bonnie Bruckheimer, was that musicals, especially those set in the past, are expensive. "Disney did not want to do a musical of this size," Bruckheimer says. "They'll spend a tremendous amount of money on a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis, but not on a musical built around a woman."
Midler and Bruckheimer have pushed harder than most to make movies with strong female characters. Sally Field has also been quite aggressive, even taking the unusual step of producing a movie for a younger actress, Julia Roberts, who stars in Field's production of Dying Young. However, some actresses who have had the clout to develop and produce their own movies haven't always created meaty women's roles. Jane Fonda developed On Golden Pond as a vehicle for her father, and in Old Gringo, another Fonda production, her role as the tremulous observer was far less magnetic than the parts played by Gregory Peck and Jimmy Smits.
One problem may be that actresses who now have power are frightened of playing the kinds of hard-edged roles that Davis, Crawford, and Stanwyck played with relish. "I don't understand actors who don't want to play unsympathetic characters," says Ellen Barkin, who says she loved playing the completely heartless moll in Johnny Handsome. "Villains are often the best roles. I would play an abusive mother because I think people will learn some-thing from it if they see it. Maybe some actors don't want to see themselves that way. Or maybe the studios are afraid they will make $2 million less on that kind of movie."
The best women's roles of the last decade have all had an edge. In Body Heat, Kathleen Turner played a femme fatale far smarter than the man she snares to help her kill her husband, but the character was not exactly a candidate for humanitarian awards. Jodie Foster won well deserved accolades for her performance in The Accused, as a rape victim who was far from completely innocent. Meryl Streep had a wonderful role in A Cry in the Dark, playing a mother who gets herself into grave trouble because she doesn't have the expansive, nurturing nature that mythical mothers are supposed to have. These characters weren't always lovable, but they had intelligence and dignity. Clearly it's not impossible to create marvelous roles for women.
Some feminists may imagine a conspiracy that is stifling women in film, but in fact, the paltry number of vital female roles stems from a multitude of causes, including fear, confusion, hostility, neglect, and benign ineptitude. If there were one simple reason for the problem, it would be easier to correct. But over the last two decades a powerful male-driven engine has taken control of the industry, and it will not be easy to derail. Still, every successful woman's movie chips away at the monolith. Little by little the world on screen will begin to reflect the lives of the forgotten half of the population. The audience is clearly ready, pressing at the doors of every octoplex in the land.
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Stephen Farber wrote "Nothing New Under the Sun" in our June issue.