I'd Really Like To See A Diverse Hollywood, But I Don't Have My Hopes Up

How Hollywood Keeps Out the Stories of Women and Girls

The question is, what’s going on here? Paul Feig directed Bridesmaids, one of the most iconic films in recent memory told through the eyes of women, and imbued it with the thoughts and actions and lives of women. Feig tells the Weekly that leaders in the film industry have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to female-driven scripts.

After Feig’s TV series Freaks and Geeks ended in 2000, he says, “I’d try to pitch things with female leads ... and almost immediately get shot down. It was like, ‘Audiences won’t show up, guys won’t buy tickets, you can’t sell it, international audiences won’t watch movies with a female lead.’ ”

At first, Feig went with that. But the meetings with studio green-lighters began to rankle. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” he says. “’So, we’re just not gonna do anything? Even though women are more than half the population of the world?’ ”

Producer Jessica Elbaum (Step Brothers, Anchorman 2, Sleeping With Other People) says the thinking in Hollywood that results in stonewalling of women's stories comes from "narrow-mindedness and stupidity."

Elbaum recently launched Gloria Sanchez Productions, an imprint of Will Ferrell’s Gary Sanchez Productions, to focus on female-centric projects. “There is a fear that female filmmakers can only tell female stories,” she says of the values that grip Hollywood — “that women can only talk about their periods and cry.”

Actor Joy Bryant (Good Girls Revolt, Parenthood) openly discusses the hypocrisy of Hollywood executives’ refusal to bring in women — even as many of them persistently tout their progressive, Democratic Party values.

“I love the myth of Hollywood being this liberal place,” Bryant says. “Hollywood is not liberal.”

If the Big Six studios had kept pace with the times, Bryant says, “We would have more women and people of color in positions of power. Everyone is donating to the cause célèbre and the cause du jour, and we need that, but let’s not get it twisted — it’s just as sexist and racist [as anyplace else].”

A few years ago, not many actors would be so outspoken. Now, they’re less guarded.

(LAWeekly.com)