June
19
Women in Hollywood: Obst Decries Femme Decline
Producer Lynda Obst has always been a top-notch writer and she waxes eloquent at New York Magazine about the declining status of women in Hollywood today:
It’s true that the women still in charge are among the best and most entrenched studio heads the town has seen for decades. No one wants to do anything about Amy Pascal or Stacey Snider but raid them. Beloved by their bosses, each trailing scores of hits—made for every gender—thank God for them, they make the very idea of a long-term future possible for many women still struggling in the trenches. There are terrific women running studio indies and ferociously talented female execs on the rise at major studios as well, many smart enough to have had husbands and babies on the way.But this is the other big thing: It’s a Darwinian grind, and there is a huge dose of attrition killing the most normal of these women, as a superhuman kind of desire is necessary to deal with the hours, the lying, the incredible and increasing difficulty of putting a movie together—mixed with the apparently singularly difficult proposition of having both a life (and even sex) along with a big career. So the frequent bonding conversation among some of the best of the singles is that in the “glamour capital of the world,” they’re getting the short end of the stick.
It's a fun piece that hangs on the Carla Gugino agent character in Entourage, who also made me feel good and bad at the same time. But are things in Hollywood really that bad? I don't think that the fact that a number of women have left their power posts really means anything. Thanks to DreamWorks' Stacey Snider, Nina Jacobson will be able to produce better movies than the ones she was stuck making at Disney in its current family friendly guise. Gail Berman turned out to be more comfortable with TV than movies and that's where she will be productive going forward. Snider herself gave up running a major studio (which I do have mixed feelings about), but she is able to contribute more quality movies in her position at DreamWorks, which is only a good thing.
The other problem that Obst addresses is the way that movies have gone literally to the dogs, to the dumb male side of things. That's all too true. But it has nothing to do with how many women are running things. More women will rise to power positions again, because they're good, and can play the game with the best of the men. Always.
[Illustration for New York by Christopher Sleboda]
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Nice posting. I'm with you -- what's crazy in Hwood isn't that it's a boy's club, it's that it's an insane-person's club. You have to be something of a lunatic to get anywhere, anywhere at all. Which means that the movies the business sells to us are all made by people who are, to say the least, somewhat abnormal in terms of their ambitions, energies, etc. This shapes movies more than is generally recognized, it seems to me. Let's have more movies from a femme p-o-v, sure, but let's also have a few from a normal-person's range-of-behavior too.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard | June 20, 2007 at 02:58 PM
Now that Lynda Obst no longer has Sharon Waxman to channel her self-serving whines into the New York Times (Waaah! They won't let me remake 'Adventures in Babysitting') she apparently has to do the job herself. This silly piece builds to a climax in which Ms. Obst wonders why Hollywood can't have more Spencer Tracys to go with its many Katharine Hepburns (Ms. Obst obviously counts herself as one of them). Has Ms. Obst ever seen a Hepburn-Tracy comedy? They invariably end with Hepburn humiliated and put back in her place -- cooking for her man in the kitchen.
Posted by: Carl La Fong | June 21, 2007 at 07:38 AM