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Seen and Not Heard

Jill

From the LA Times:

Women may make up 51% of the population, but actresses nabbed only 29.9% of the 4,379 speaking parts in the 100 top-grossing films of 2007, or so says a new study released by University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, which was conducted by professor Stacy. L Smith.

According to Smith’s study, 83% of all directors, writers, and producers on those films were male. Not surprisingly, the number of female characters grew dramatically when a woman directed a film — up to 44.6% from 29.3% if a man was behind the camera.

10 thoughts on Seen and Not Heard

  1. It seems exactly the same in theatre. Even at my high school, where only a quarter of the population is male (art school…) the theatre department routinely chooses to put on plays by writers like Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett, in which there are hardly or no speaking roles for girls. (I could comment on the woman-hating tendencies of those two, anyways, but I won’t.) There are probably twice as many girls auditioning as guys, every time, and still.
    I don’t think I’m asking too much, by saying it’d be nice to put up a show in which female characters actually play important/interesting roles, and aren’t defined merely as someone’s wife or mother….

  2. Most of the villains in films are male and virtually all of the henchmen/guards/mooks seen in films are men. It’s interesting that no one ever writes articles about that. The fact that the vast majority of “bad guys” are men is probably one of the causes of the low percentage of female speaking roles.

  3. Hannah,
    I ran into the same thing in high school and it’s frustrating as heck. Not all blame can be placed locally on teachers and directors, though. Just like there are fewer speaking parts in movies as a whole, well-known plays as a genre tend to be very male-centric. Unlike Hollywood writers and producers, drama advisors don’t have the luxury of tailoring their projects; most have to go with a play that they’ve heard of and can get rights to. Some will compensate by writing or adapting their own shows (we did “Much Ado About Nothing” with a female Leonato), but the lack of good roles remains a systemic problem.

  4. Heck, with Beckett you could cross cast and not really wreck anything. That’s the beauty of Absurdism. *snort!*

    We had the problem of finding enough boys in my high school to put on really any main stream play — by a couple of years after I had graduated, the Drama Club/Theatre dept. was almost all girls. Apparently it had stopped being cool for boys to be in plays. Or choir. They cast a girl to play the lead in “Godspell”. 🙂 It worked great.

  5. Female visibility and audibility on TV is just as lacking. Watch TV ads, how many have women’s voices? How many have women’s voices to set out the problem and men’s to solve it? How many women are there in scenes representing business people, teams of doctors and other professionals?
    Then go on to documentaries. Again, how many men’s voices do you hear and how many women’s? How many experts called are women? (Yes, I get that these are not actors, but it all goes to underepresent women in the media).

  6. I suspect it’s even worse than that. Even when women have speaking parts, they get vastly less screen time and lines. I’d love to see a study of the proportion of words spoken in those same top 100 movies, and also time with face on-screen.

    Someone should undertake this study…

  7. Hannah – I work on Broadway and know a great deal of people within the industry, and actually theater is WAY ahead of film in this regard. Most of the 58 Broadway theaters are currently running a show where of the top 3 roles, it is as likely 2 are female as 2 are male – Wicked, Chicago etc (it’s almost never 3:0). I cannot think of a single Broadway show right now that hasn’t got female characters with agency in it. Where 2/3 of the major characters are male the chorus will tend to be more female to even it up. Partly it’s just more visually and aurally interesting to have a range of voices and bodies.

    Mostly, it’s that women buy over 70% of Broadway tickets. Indeed the other day my agent was telling me about a conversation she’d had with several of the most powerful men on Broadway asking her if she knew of any good scripts with women leads/major roles or that had stories that women like, because, “Shows have to appeal to women or they can’t survive.” (I duly sent one in via her). You NEVER hear that in Hollywood (where I have also worked), where you have to justify any character who is not white and male. Anecdotally I estimate that younger execs and creatives are about 1/3 women now and it’s getting better. What is true on Broadway is true at lower levels and regionally.

    That said, your experience is happening for two likely reasons. One is material selection. Older plays (any written before women could be on the stage) have fewer good roles for women. Cross-casting is the way forward, and showing new work and doing musicals is another. The other reason is around 80% of aspiring performers are female (probably for the same reason young black men are overrepresented in sports, because it’s socially acceptable for them, and because an ambitious young white man has easier, more immediately lucrative options, like the professions). So even if a woman is twice as good, she’d only get half as much work if there were parity of roles.

    As far as film, the article’s stat of 29.9% is actually an improvement for Hollywood. It used to be 25%, true of bit parts and of leads. 29.9 is not great, but it’s actually a nontrivial step forward.

  9. From the perspective of a male involved in the arts, with very broad tastes, I can make a few points of my own by looking at my favorite movies from last year and not much else.

    There was a horror film I rather loved in limited release called Grace, with a very feminist mindset (as much of the better genre entries of the last decade have had). Heavily maternal, I could talk about it for hours. But I won’t.

    Where the Wild Things Are was next on my list, and I’m pretty sure its appeal doesn’t need any elaborate discussion.

    I love Away We Go. It’s about a guy and his wife, and the people in their lives, whom they just don’t need. It’s a beautiful film.

    I loved The Princess & the Frog, and don’t believe its use of the “Classic Disney formula” refutes its very modern strengths. At its core, it’s about an ass of a prince and a hard working woman, and takes great enough liberties with the Disney structure to not really fit all that well with the stuff they’ve put out in previous decades. As a standalone film, it’s great.

    I loved Up.

    I was one of the few who saw Crank: High Voltage, being a fan of the original. I enjoy these films because at their core, they serve as essays on excess. The first film was scoffed at by most socially-minded parties, but under its surface there’s a serious hatred and scathing criticism for the type of material it so outlandishly presents. The same can be said of the sequel. It’s been an interest of mine for the past few months how the only way to so savagely criticize violence and sexism in wide release these days is to push all of it to an previously unimagined extreme. Just something I’ve been thinking about.

    Star Trek was super.

    Brothers was an important film for me, not just for the obvious fraternal elements but for the very real responsibility Jim Sheridan took in developing a wholly beautiful and estranging love story. Natalie Portman’s character is the strongest in the film for the most part, and I can say that even if I more closely empathize with Jake Gyllenhaal’s.

    I’ve seen Inglourious Basterds three times so far, and it gets better every time. I can see some hangups from a feminist mindset, but in the spirit of art I look at everything on a point-by-point basis. And most importantly, if asked whether the way Inglourious Basterds depicts its female characters could weaken a man’s sense of respect for women in modern culture, I’d say far less than in most Hollywood movies being made today, and only if you’re a fucking idiot to begin with. Tarantino, as a human being, respects women. Always has. Tarantino, as an artist, gives them some of the most thought-provoking and (occasionally), empowering roles being written today. That’s something I believe very resolutely.

    I loved Half-Blood Prince.

    I saw Avatar twice. James Cameron, like Tarantino, has more or less made it a career point of interest to give women very endearing roles. Whether or not you agree that Sarah Connor is a sensibly-minded woman (I still can’t give a solid answer to that one), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s role in The Abyss is someone I can really, truly care about and root for. If you’re going to go hunt it down, shoot for the Special Edition, as the Theatrical Cut has a good half hour of critical character and plot development taken out of it. On the subject of Avatar, I don’t really have anything to say on its depiction of women, just that it was a fantastic film in its own right.

    A Serious Man was great. It fits in this discussion because it was great solely because it was told completely from one man’s point of view, and was about how that’s a very desperate and confusing reality to live in. Any discussion of why there aren’t more Great Female Roles in film has to take into consideration that not every film calls for them. That’s a very serious point for me.

    Funny People, I can’t even really talk about. It was just a painful film for me, but suffice it to say, that was largely because of how much I felt like Adam Sandler’s character, and how horrible that made me feel.

    Being an avid Sam Raimi fan, I had seriously massive expectations for Drag Me to Hell, and he didn’t disappoint me. I could talk about it for hours, and have, and the discussion would fit in with this post, but I’m not gonna overload it (as I already have).

    The Lovely Bones, I haven’t read. But the film stood on its own, in a way I really can’t discuss on a blog comment. I was a wreck after it.

    My number one of the year was Antichrist. After I saw it, it didn’t leave my mind for a solid week. I went in not knowing what to expect, and after that week of thought, I decided that I did not find it at all hateful of women, but of history and humanity in general. If all you know of it is what you’ve heard, I urge anyone with a remote interest to try and see it. Though I can honestly say I was not the same person when I left the theater as I was when I sat down. It’s a painful experience, and from my eye, an honest one.

  10. @Tas – I don’t think that accounts for it. A lot of the guards/mooks often don’t even have speaking roles. And the vast majority of protagonists are also still male, as well as their own sidekicks, collaborators, advisors, mentors, sub-plot antagonists, heroes, hench[men], random encounters, and comic foils.

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