Pamela Anderson is to star as the feminist campaigner Gloria Steinem while Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a veteran politician in a supposed new film, The Birth of Feminism. Or so says a mock poster demanding “Equality now!” by a protest group called the Guerrilla Girls who this week have stepped up their campaign to highlight the lack of women behind the cameras in the film business.
The Guerrilla Girls, who describe themselves as “culture’s favourite masked avengers”, have been plastering stickers across Los Angeles and New York complaining at the scarcity of female directors, producers, cinematographers and screenwriters. According to the stickers, no woman has ever won an Oscar for feature film direction, cinematography or sound, and 94% of the writing awards have gone to men.
The stickers also say that a range of major production companies – Miramax, New Line, Artisan, Sony, Screen Gems, Paramount Classics, Fine Line, Dimension, USA Films and the Shooting Gallery – released no more than one film directed by a woman last year. In some cases, it was none.Only four of last year’s top-grossing 100 films were directed by women, reads another sticker – “even the US Senate”, the sticker says, is “more progressive than Hollywood”. The group’s film statistics are taken mainly from research done at San Diego State university.
The Guerrilla Girls were founded in 1985 as a reaction to an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art which featured the work of 169 artists of whom only 13 were women.
Discrimination
Since then, wearing gorilla masks and calling themselves “your cultural conscience”, they have staged stunts on the issue of discrimination against women and minorities in the arts.
To maintain anonymity, they use the names of dead women in the arts such as the painters Frida Kahlo of Mexico and Georgia O’Keeffe of the US, and the French writer Anais Nin. They say they are feminist counterparts of the Lone Ranger and Robin Hood. “We could be anyone,” they say on their website.
They have produced around 70 posters on different themes, the latest being the mock film poster for The Birth of Feminism which shows Pamela Anderson, Halle Berry and Catherine Zeta-Jones in bikinis with the slogan: “They made women’s rights look good. Really good!”
Anderson is billed as playing Gloria Steinem and Berry and Zeta-Jones as feminist politicians Flo Kennedy and Bella Abzug. The Guerrilla Girls said of the poster: “Women producers have been trying for years, without luck, to convince movie and television studios to make a film about the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. We think they’re lucky Hollywood hasn’t gone for it.”
The film statistics on the stickers are backed up by a new study carried out at San Diego State university which analyses the jobs women did in production of the 250 top grossing films in the US. Looking at all executive producers, producers, directors, writers, cinematographers and editors of the films released in 1999, the study found that 17% were women. For cinematographers specifically, the figure was 4%; for executive producers, 15%; and for writers it was 12%.
“It is impossible to look at these numbers and claim that discrimination is a thing of the past,” said Martha Lauzen, a professor at the university’s School of Communication where the latest survey was compiled.
A key reason for this imbalance, she argued yesterday, was the film industry’s ignorance of its extent: “I don’t think this is part of a grand conspiracy,” Professor Lauzen said. “I don’t think all the men in the business get together once a year and say ‘let’s not hire any women’. It’s more of a lack of awarenesss.”
But she did not believe hiring decisions would change without pressure. She cited the campaigns run by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People which protested last year at the shortage of parts for actors from ethnic minorities in prime time television.
“The reason we don’t see more women speaking out is that they want to go to work next morning,” Prof Lauzen said. “It’s great that the Guerrilla Girls are doing what they’re doing.”
Fear of open protest
The study also looked at television where 40% of all prime time characters are female; for those behind the scenes the figure is 23%. Women fared best as producers and worst as cinematographers.
One box office success last year, What Women Want, starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, was directed by a woman, Nancy Meyers. It told the story of a man who was able to read women’s minds, clearly not a skill that Hollywood’s male studio executives have yet acquired.