Investing in Women: Why Hollywood Won't Do It

OK, so the character is never chased to the edge of a cliff or anything, but plenty of successful movies exist with mediocre stakes. 

Was anyone ever truly emotionally invested in whether Owen Wilson got it together in “Wedding Crashers”? It could be argued that the stakes of our movie were at least as high as learning to act like a grown man when you are one, so what gives?

Where that movie is held up as a standard for fresh, profitable comedic material in the industry, a similar story about women freaks everyone out. 

Because of mentality like this, women suffer a severe drought of entertainment that speaks to us, in terms we have prescribed. The majority of the representations of women in film come from the minds of male directors. What we have reflected back to us are images of women filtered through the psyches of people who admit they are unable to comprehend them. 

We have executives whose entrenched expertise leads them to give audiences as little credit as possible; And so they pass on, or change to fit their needs, many of the projects that could really serve to shift the status of the women in cinema for the better. Those are relegated to the small, independent sphere, where very few people will access them, so their success can count as an example against making more movies like them. 

I have heard veteran women in film advised that they could get their project financed if they were willing to swap the lead and supporting roles -- Because no studio can (or isn’t willing to try to) convince any actor who is big enough to open a film to do it supporting a woman. And this is to speak nothing of the countless times I have heard requests to change female protagonists so they’ll seem less threatening.

We have male critics telling us that shows like “Sex and the City” are garbage because they question whether these are relatable characters (but fail to recognize that many of its episodes are written and directed by men). 

And perhaps worst of all, we have female writers who, in order to write something they can sell, invent ludicrous, hyper-emotional versions of women whose sole obsession is settling down with the right man, having the picture-perfect, White-Dress day they have been dreaming of since they were five, and are reduced to acting like insipid psychopaths in pursuit of this goal. 

This is what we’re projecting as the most recognizable image of a woman.

Luckily, there is evidence of a changing landscape.

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