So the studios have always had jobs for women: vamp, mother, sidekick, B-girl, dowager empress. The catch is that nearly all of them were roles—jobs in front of the camera. Hollywood is always ready to make some woman a goddess. But just let her try to become a director. Or a producer. Or a studio chief.
It takes more than talent and energy for a woman to make movies. In a town that values breasts and behinds, it takes cheek. Even actresses are finding it hard these days. Male stars are now in greater demand—and command much higher salaries—largely because more than half of a film's box office gross comes from foreign audiences who go for action. The language of love may require translation, but "bang bang" and "oof" are the Esperanto of moviedom.
In 1990 Julia Roberts was the only actress to make the list of Top 10 box office attractions. The year before only Kathleen Turner made it. In a speech last year to the Screen Actors Guild, Meryl Streep ticked off the dismal numbers. By 1989 women were performing only 29 percent of all roles in feature films and earned just 40 to 60 percent of what actors make—a pay gap that begins at the age of 10. "From birth through age 9," she noted tartly, "a girl can make a pretty fair living." Every actress in Hollywood is waiting to see whether the situation will improve now that Ghost and Pretty Woman, hits driven by female ticket buyers, outmuscled movies like Total Recall and Die Hard 2 to become the two top-grossing films of 1990. Meanwhile names as familiar as Jessica Lange, Goldie Hawn and Sally Field have to form their own production companies to search out decent roles.
For women behind the camera, the situation is somewhat different. It used to be terrible. Now it's just not so great. Women executives in the studios are numerous, but they are clustered at the level of vice president—which means that not one has the power to "green-light" production of a film. Women make up nearly one-fifth of the 9,000-member Directors Guild, but just a handful find steady work. Yet despite the obstacles, just enough women are making it that no one is surprised anymore that Ghost and Pretty Woman were produced by Lisa Weinstein and Laura Ziskin, respectively. That Caroline Thompson wrote Edward Scissorhands. That Jodie Foster has just directed Little Man Tate. It may not be parity, but it's presence.
That presence is built on a legacy left by the women who got there before them. For much of Hollywood history, it was rare for any to rise above the level of script girl. The most influential women in the business, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, were actually in another business, newspaper gossip. But their power to make or break a movie career rose off the page like a toxic fume. Just three mentions from Louella, and one screenwriter saw his salary go from $500 to $2,500 a week. Hedda spearheaded the attacks on Charlie Chaplin's promiscuity and leftist politics that helped drive him out of the U.S. She used to point to her spacious home and boast, "That's the house that fear built."
Moguls like Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner gave the front offices an atmosphere of cigar smoke and 5 o'clock shadow. And on the back lots, the legends, if not the norms, were established by brawlers like John Ford and John Huston. Even the fan's imaginings pictured the director in the mold of Erich von Stroheim or Otto Preminger: the riding crop, the tantrum on the set, the clink of the iron heel. Where were you going to find a woman with a dueling scar?
Yet from the first there were a few who got the top credits. During the silent era, the picture business was still a wide-open field, a place with more visionaries than accountants. Lillian Gish directed her sister Dorothy in a comedy when D.W. Griffith was too busy. Anyway, he told her, women were good with production hassles. Mary Pickford parlayed her tremendous success as an actress into even greater power as cofounder of United Artists. Anne Bauchens went from studio secretary to a lifelong job editing the pachyderm dramas of Cecil B. DeMille.
Lois Weber's career typifies the path that brought women to Hollywood from all over, raised them to unimaginable heights, then sometimes dropped them into oblivion. After working as a social worker and preaching the Bible to prisoners, she took up a new kind of missionary work onscreen. Though the film industry was already wary of anything that smacked of politics or controversy, Weber succeeded in making a series of pictures about political graft (against), temperance (for), capital punishment (against) and birth control (for). She caused a sensation with The Hypocrites, an allegorical assault on politics, business and religion that also managed to work in a naked girl playing the figure of Truth. By the time Weber turned to marital comedies in 1918, she was making $5,000 a week, one of Hollywood's top salaries for a director. She stayed with light material until her career petered out in the late 1920s. By then she had divorced her husband, who had become an alcoholic, and the production company they founded together had gone bankrupt. Many of her films are lost today.
Anita Loos had a different kind of arc, frothier, but some of the bubbles lasted. As a teenager she began sending scripts to D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company, most of them comedies of modern manners. By 1915 Griffith's studio had bought over a hundred and produced the greater part of them. In time she was there herself as a salaried writer and in-house funny bone. She made up for the witless acting of chiseled profiles like Douglas Fairbanks with her own witty inter-titles, the onscreen words that silents used to convey information. In 1926 Loos published her minor masterpiece, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the fictional diary of a Dixie gold digger named Lorelei Lee. The novel, and a later stage adaptation, made her rich enough to retire briefly—until the stock market crash of 1929 forced her happily back to the typewriter. Thereafter Loos churned out talkies by the dozen, including, with Jane Murfin, The Women, a wicked adaptation of the Clare Boothe Luce play.
Loos was one of the lucky ones. It's ironic that as Hollywood grew larger, it had less room for women. By 1920 filmmaking was already the nation's fourth-largest industry. But during Hollywood's Golden Age, in the 1930s and '40s, women were pushed mostly to the margins. Even so, they did some exceptional work there. Dorothy Jeakins, Irene Gibbons and Edith Head whipped up memorable costumes. Margaret Booth edited Mutiny on the Bounty. The agent Minna Wallis dragged the young Clark Gable from one studio to another and eventually found somebody to agree that even if his ears were too big, the boy had star quality.
But in the high-power jobs of producer, director and screenwriter, the ranks of women dwindled. In her book Popcorn Venus, the film historian Marjorie Rosen points out that in 1928, 52 of Hollywood's 238 writers were women. By 1940 they accounted for just 64 out of a total of 608. For most of the '30s and '40s, Dorothy Arzner was the sole woman director getting steady work.
Much was said in those years, some of it by women themselves, about how more women filmmakers were needed to bring a "feminine" perspective to Hollywood, something to appeal to the gentle instincts of the female audience. ("I may miss some of what the men get," Lois Weber once remarked, "but I will get effects they never thought of.") In fact when they got their shot, women writers and directors were just as likely to make movies with titles like Hell Drivers and Hard, Fast and Beautiful. Frances Marion, one of the most prolific screenwriters in movie history, tailored some of her best scripts for Wallace Beery, the ultimate pug. She wrote him his Oscar-winning fight film, The Champ, where tears and blood flow in about equal measure. And even when women turned out domestic weepies, there could be a message between the lines. In Craig's Wife, a marital melodrama with Rosalind Russell, Dorothy Arzner made obsessive housekeeping look about as wholesome as the opium trade.
To avoid the charge that they were sacrificing their "femininity" when they picked up a megaphone, women directors would tippy-toe around the set. Arzner was famous for never raising her voice above a whisper. After Ida Lupino took up directing in the late 1940s, to soothe male egos she sometimes played dumb about what might be the best way to play a line or set up a shot. "Men hate bossy women," she explained. "Sometimes I pretend to know less than I do."
Though a handful of American women managed to direct films outside the Hollywood system, Lupino was the last to do regular work behind the camera for some years. The '60s and '70s were the worst of times. One of the few women to make a name for herself was the New York-based film editor Dede Allen. Her breathless cutting in Bonnie and Clyde, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon gave those movies a velocity that has pushed along every car-chase movie since. And with her work on Paul Newman's Rachel, Rachel, she became one of the first editors to get a cut of film profits. Every few years another woman's name would surface with a major project. Joan Micklin Silver directed Hester Street and Between the Lines. Joan Tewkesbury wrote Nashville. Verna Fields won an Oscar for editing Jaws. But for the most part, Hollywood was Boys' Town again.
Then in the next decade, some of the most powerful jobs in town were occupied—and abandoned—by women. Sherry Lansing was named president of Twentieth Century Fox in 1980, where she stayed for three years before leaving to become an independent producer. Dawn Steel skipped from the peaks of one studio to the next. A onetime employee of Penthouse magazine—where she conceived the idea of marketing designer toilet paper—she joined Paramount as director of merchandising in 1978. Six years later she was chief of production, guiding Footloose, Top Gun and The Untouchables to the screen. She left in 1987, amid rumors of friction with her boss, Ned Tannen, president of the studio's motion picture division.
Soon after, Steel was named president of Columbia Pictures, the highest studio position ever held by a woman. After shepherding Casualties of War, When Harry Met Sally and Look Who's Talking, among other titles, she departed that job last year, just 43, pleading exhaustion, disillusionment and existential dread. "You don't resign from these jobs," she said. "You escape them. I feel like I've been let out of a cage."
In the new Hollywood, it's the rare exec of either sex who occupies a top position for long. At Columbia, Steel replaced David Puttnam, whose regime lasted just 18 months. If women keep shying away from the top of the career ladder, it's also a sign that for many of them, the long hours and total preoccupation with work is not their idea of job satisfaction. After Sherry Lansing left Paramount, she joined with partner Stanley Jaffe to produce Fatal Attraction and The Accused. "I realized," she says, "it was the producers who really had the most fun."
She's wrong, of course. Directors have the most fun, and between 1949 and 1979, women had almost none of it. During those years they directed just a small fraction—one-fifth of one percent—of all films released by the major studios. But all through the '70s they were spilling out of film schools, crowding the film institutes and trudging around the festival circuit with their first reels. Sometime over the last decade, Hollywood discovered that it had a sizable complement of women directors. Though probably not one of them had a dueling scar, quite a few got work. They did all of the things men had done. They made jewel-box movies, behemoths, stinkers and gems. They made pictures that were sharp as knives, like Donna Dietch's Desert Hearts, and movies that were blunt instruments, like Amy Heckerling's National Lampoon's European Vacation. They could bomb on a grand scale—Elaine May's $50 million Ishtar scored the titanic losses that once only male directors could aspire to. And they could make the turnstiles spin like propellers—witness Heckerling's Look Who's Talking.
So here's to the future. If it takes cheek for women to make movies, then here's to cheeky times. Here's to every aspiring woman in Boys' Town who still can't get her phone calls returned—unless it's from a studio exec trying to hustle a date. Because throughout the industry, women are gathering into a critical mass, making an end-run around the system, putting their names on the director's chairs and the executive suites. In some of the most powerful offices in Hollywood these days, it's a woman who won't return your phone calls.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
