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- <text id=93TT1325>
- <title>
- Apr. 05, 1993: A Few Good Women
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Apr. 05, 1993 The Generation That Forgot God
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CINEMA, Page 58
- A Few Good Women
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>That seems to be the quota for females in film. And the number
- keeps on dropping.
- </p>
- <p>By RICHARD CORLISS--With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/Los
- Angeles
- </p>
- <p> When is a majority a minority? When the majority (of the
- U.S. population) is women, and the medium is movies.
- </p>
- <p> The folks behind this week's Academy Awards ceremony tried
- hard to make Hollywood seem a haven of equality. They devised
- a special tribute, "Oscar Celebrates Women and the Movies." But
- the salute only underlined the plight of women in movies.
- Something has gone deeply wrong when Hollywood, which built its
- worldwide appeal on boy-meets-girl, needs affirmative action for
- women.
- </p>
- <p> "That Oscar theme is a joke," says film critic Molly
- Haskell, "because men are now playing all the roles. They get
- the macho roles and the sweet-sensitive roles, and they play the
- sexual pinups too. The best woman's role of 1992 was in The
- Crying Game, and that was played by a man."
- </p>
- <p> At this stag banquet, the pickings--or leavings--for
- women were slim. They got to play wives and invalids, to judge
- from this year's five Oscar nominees for Best Actress. Oh, yes,
- Mary McDonnell in Passion Fish, Susan Sarandon in Lorenzo's
- Oil, Emma Thompson in Howards End, Catherine Deneuve in
- Indochine and Michelle Pfeiffer in Love Field all played strong,
- exemplary idealists. The actresses all received critical
- plaudits. But what is the sound of two hands clapping in a
- nearly empty theater, when other rooms in the multiplex are
- filled with crowds cheering for teenage turtles and the
- righteous Marines of A Few Good Men? The five Best Actress films
- have earned only $36 million total at the North American box
- office--less than the cheapo comedy Encino Man. The one "hit"
- in the quintet, Howards End, has grossed less in its yearlong
- run than Batman Returns did in its opening weekend.
- </p>
- <p> To an extent, the Best Actress list is misleading as an
- indicator of women's drawing power in American movies. The
- Academy might well have nominated three actresses who gave
- terrific performances in high-earning movies: Pfeiffer, poignant
- and powerful as the mouse turned tiger (I am Catwoman, hear me
- roar) in Batman Returns; Meryl Streep, devastatingly funny as
- a star facing middle age in Death Becomes Her; and Sharon Stone,
- her sensuality a tantalizing blend of glamour and horror, in
- Basic Instinct. But Oscar, a gentleman and a liberal, prefers
- women's roles that are role models. He might feel uneasy citing
- actresses whose characters tread the minefield that separates
- traditional femininity and modern feminism. "The general
- feeling," says director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes), "is
- that if a woman is bright, aggressive and successful, she's got
- to be a bitch."
- </p>
- <p> The movie industry's feminists might feel uneasy too. They
- look at the movie landscape and see a wasteland, where the
- meaty roles women get tend to be predators or sex kittens.
- "Hollywood is trying to resexualize its women back into
- submission," says Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the feminist
- buddy movie Thelma & Louise. "This whole idea that women are
- powerful because they're sexy is a crock. Sex isn't power. Money
- is power. But the women who do best in this society are the ones
- who are the most complacent in the role of women as sexual
- commodity, be it Madonna, Julia Roberts or Sharon Stone. If
- Stone hadn't spread her legs, would Basic Instinct have done as
- well as it did?"
- </p>
- <p> And if Stone's character hadn't kept an ice pick at her
- bedside, would the thriller have been a hit? "We've got a lot
- of women as bad guys," says producer Lynda Obst (The Fisher
- King). "It's a reflection, I think, of men's fears about
- women.'' Basic Instinct, plus The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and
- Single White Female, made 1992 the Year of the Killer Woman--of the vixen, nanny or best friend who uses sex as the appetizer
- for destruction. And 1993 could be the Year of the Woman as Door
- Prize. In Honeymoon in Vegas, Mad Dog and Glory and the
- forthcoming Indecent Proposal, starring Robert Redford and Demi
- Moore, a young woman is the gift one man offers another. "You
- couldn't get away with this retro idea with any other kind of
- person," fumes Khouri. "Would Eddie Murphy star in a movie where
- he was a gift to a white person?"
- </p>
- <p> Hey, Ms. Khouri, it's work--and actresses aren't getting
- much of that, in good roles or bad. Writers and directors will
- still make room for women's roles if they fit the new
- conventions of "nurturer or shrew," as comedian Ann Magnuson
- defines them in her new one-woman show. "Basically, I vacillate
- between those two roles," she says. "The dialogue boils down to
- either `Fme' or `Fyou.' "
- </p>
- <p> Is this part of some diabolical conspiracy to reduce women
- to the sum of their private parts? No; the surface reason is
- simpler. "It's economics," says writer-director Nora Ephron
- (When Harry Met Sally..., This Is My Life). "Movies cost more
- than ever. What studios look for when they sink $20 million into
- a movie is some way to get their money back. So they put one of
- 12 male stars in it."
- </p>
- <p> The studios also like movies that earn their money back
- quickly with a big gross on the opening weekend. And what group
- stokes those grosses? Young guys who, having nothing better to
- do with their Friday and Saturday nights, line up to be the
- first in their school to see a highly hyped action drama. It's
- the true revenge of the nerds. "The Ninja Turtles audience shows
- up," says Obst. "The women's audience doesn't--not in bulk.
- And you need that bulk business for a picture to be widely
- released." In industry lingo, hit films can be classified by
- gender: action movies (Batman Returns) have immediate muscle;
- women's pictures (The Bodyguard) have long legs. As Ephron
- notes, "Teenage boys are driving the business because they'll
- go early and go back again. That's why it's easier to get a
- movie made about a man with a hangnail than a woman with a truly
- interesting problem."
- </p>
- <p> And that's why there are, at the moment, no surefire
- female stars; Julia Roberts is on sabbatical, Jodie Foster had
- a low grosser (Little Man Tate) between two hits (The Silence
- of the Lambs and Sommersby), and Sharon Stone is not yet
- bankable. "It's been a long time," says Columbia Pictures
- chairman Mark Canton, "since women have had any reliable impact
- on big box office." Decades, to be exact. In the '60s women were
- the top-billed stars in eight of the yearly box-office champs:
- West Side Story, Cleopatra, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music,
- Hawaii, The Graduate, Funny Girl and Love Story. But since 1970
- only one top-grossing film (E.T., an anomaly) has had an
- actress's name at the top.
- </p>
- <p> In many hit "women's pictures" (Terms of Endearment, Steel
- Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes), the story was considered the
- star. And in most of them, the starring actresses were in
- Hollywood's pariah category: women over 40. "It takes 20 years
- to make someone a good actor," says SAG's Kathryn Swink. "And
- when women reach their potential, they're shut out."
- </p>
- <p> So are audiences, male and female, who want in their movie
- diet something tastier and more varied than the raw meat of
- macho adventures and comedies. Filmmakers are kissing off half
- their audience on the assumption that men go out to the movies
- while women stay home and watch TV--where women's and family
- issues tend to rule the sitcoms and movies of the week, and
- where aging screen queens (Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Candice
- Bergen and now Faye Dunaway) find a congenial home.
- </p>
- <p> Well, women do get out of the house, as indicated by two
- surprise hits of 1992: Sister Act, whose star, Whoopi Goldberg,
- could earn a man-size $7.5 million for the sequel, and Penny
- Marshall's A League of Their Own. Now, says Obst, "it's easier
- for me to pitch movies that are close to my heart because I have
- more models I can point to."
- </p>
- <p> For the sake of its own survival, Hollywood must believe
- what Canton says: "If we put women in good roles in good
- stories, female audiences will come." If Hollywood cinema can
- explore the full range of emotion and conviction--which means
- putting more women on both sides of the camera--then maybe
- next year Oscar will really have something to celebrate.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-