Opinion: Women in the Workplace

By Jonathan Fisher, September 8th, 2009

A few years ago, George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana and delivered the smuggest of all acceptance speeches. Clooney wallowed and swooned over Hollywood's role as progressive thinkers. "We were talking about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular... this Academy, we're the ones that gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theatres." Clooney's speech was so smug that the South Park boys even included his speech in an episode about 'smug', a substance not unlike smog that threatened to accelerate "global laming".

There's one little hole in Clooney's rant about just how darn great and progressive Hollywood is, and it's one that people don't talk about or notice nearly enough. In other sectors, gender equality has been gaining traction for decades. Of course it's still not perfect -- men are still promoted earlier and with more regularity, and if you look at the recent summit of international leaders in response to the Global Financial Crisis, 99% of them are men. There is still certainly a culture of sexism that exists, even if it is passive and inadvertant.

There are few industries in which this passive sexism, or at the very least gender inequality, is more obvious than the film industry. A woman has never won an Academy Award for Best Director. Only three women in the Academy's 82-year history have been nominated for that award (those women are Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola).

Matters are different on the acting side of the industry, but it is much harder for an actress to gain attention for being a fine talent rather than a good-looking young starlet. This problem is not really so for men -- Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and countless other fine actors have broken through and gained respect with indifference to their lack of looks. If a woman with spades of talent but not so much 'typical' beauty does become successful, you can bet that her looks will be the butt of many jokes. I think of Glenn Close, a fine actress, being mocked on the admittedly puerile show Family Guy: "I don't care what anybody says about her, Glenn Close is a handsome woman."

The fact is, the women that only really break through must have a balance of both looks and talent. Amy Adams and Zooey Deschanel both have a plethora of talent, and are both good-looking young women. They will go far. Nikky Blonsky, the wonderful star of Hairspray, does not fit into Hollywood's perception of beauty, and what has she been in since Hairspray?

It's easy to say that things are this way because it's what audiences want. Audiences want to ogle Megan Fox in tight clothing in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Audiences don't want to spend their leisure time staring at someone who isn't eye candy. I reject that notion, primarily because Hollywood has been telling society what they do and don't want in movies for decades. There are plenty of movies out there that have been sleeper hits with little to no eye candy on show. It comes down to the old adage -- sex sells. It's much easier for Hollywood to perpetuate their lop-sided industry than to fix it, because doing so would be a risk, and risk management is what Hollywood runs on.

This risk management is also a reason why female directors aren't as prominent as they could, and probably should be. As a director, it is probably easier for a woman to be appreciated for her merits, because when she is behind the camera her looks are taken out of the equation. But studios are still squirmish about entrusting women with large budgets.

When was the last time you saw a big-budget popcorn flick helmed by a woman? My recollection is Mimi Leder's Deep Impact. That was eleven years ago. Nowadays, blockbusters are made by the boys, for the boys. Can you imagine Iron Man (a movie this critic loves, by the way) being placed under the purview of a female director? NPR wrote an interesting article on this very subject, having this to say: "When women direct, they’re in control. And major Hollywood studios cannot exactly bask in their legacies of female empowerment: Historically, female directors tend to work outside the traditional studio system."

This fear of women having control over the movie industry is what threatens and frightens studio heads. They're happy for women to produce, write or star, but directing is something else. Nia Vardolos, star of the hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding and now director of I Hate Valentine's Day, describes being a first-time female director thusly: "It's like jumping into an orgy while you're still shaving your legs. One day my focus puller turned to me, and he said, 'As a female filmmaker, you have one shot, and if you go over budget, that bond company will be here in a second, breathing down your neck. So you're right to keep everyone on schedule."

It's also a ridiculous fallacy that female directors can't direct action. Certainly, female directors bring something different to the table than male directors, but the tired cliches we associate with women directors (that they're good at drawing relationships and displaying empathy) aren't always true. One of the best movies of 2009 is The Hurt Locker, an action thriller set in Iraq and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the fascinating director of Point Break and Strange Days. The Hurt Locker, like all of Bigelow's films, is action-focused. Bigelow brings us directly into the everyday lives of soldiers in Iraq and reveals more about them through a series of action set pieces than heavy-handed dialogue ever could.

To look at Bigelow's CV is to assume that she has cracked the big-time, and ranks alongside the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, M. Night Shyamalan and Spielberg as Hollywood system power-houses. Once again, it is not so. All of Bigelow's movies have been critically and financially successful, but all of her films have been financed independently before being picked up by distributors. Hollywood is still unable to surrender a big budget to a woman, even to a safe bet like Bigelow.

How can this be changed? I can't see it happening for quite some time, unfortunately. There needs to be a cataclysmic shift in Hollywood's perspective like the ones George Clooney talked about in his Oscar acceptance speech. What frightens me is the last line of Clooney's speech: "I'm happy to be out of touch."