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Author:
Mollie Gregory
Mollie Gregory is a writer - of scripts for non-fiction film producers, screenplays and novels and books, one quite notable here - Women Who Run The Show. She also produces, teaches and has held various offices with P.E.N. West, Women in Film and the WIF Foundation.
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For Women Who Run the Show, How A Brilliant and Creative New Generation Stormed Hollywood (St. Martin?s Press), Mollie Gregory interviewed 125 women in almost every level of film and television, from trainees to studio heads. ?We are indebted to Gregory for committing to history those who would underestimate their own gains . . . how a band of sisters crashed the all-boys party that was Hollywood.? Los Angeles Times Book Review.
She began her career as a documentary film writer--Songs from the Fourth World, Off The Edge, India Speaks, Discovering the Art of Korea--and as a writer-producer--Cities are for People, E. R. A. and the American Way, Welfare: Exploding the Myths, and many others.
Gregory was a past president of Women in Film, a past president of P. E. N. West, the international writers? organization, and a U.S. Vice President of the International Quorum of Motion Picture Producers. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America and a trustee of the Women in Film Foundation where she helped originate its Film Finishing Fund competition and the WIF History Preservation Plan.
She is the author of seven published novels, among them Equal to Princes, Triplets, Birthstone, Privileged Lies. She?s been interviewed for or appeared on E! Entertainment, EXTRA, Bloomberg Radio, CNN, The Washington Post, and PBS?s To the Contrary. She?s a frequent speaker at book and film festivals, for universities and organizations on aspects of the entertainment industry ("Hollywood, Sex Discrimination and the Law," "Writers and the Blacklist," "Pioneers in Film," "The Global Conversation of Film and Television").
A graduate of the Cinema School of New York University (BA, MA), she has taught in the film schools of University of Southern California, San Francisco State University, California State University Northridge--screenwriting, documentary film writing and production, and the course she created for San Francisco State, "Movies as Role Models.? She also taught ?Film Financing and Distribution,? a course that drew on her extensive documentary experience, as did her first book, Making Films Your Business. The Los Angeles Times dubbed it "a cogent and impressively thorough book [which] may become as indispensable as your film, tape or talent."
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ON THE ROAD WITH WOMEN WHO RUN THE SHOW
In the 1970s, you could count the women who produced films or television shows on one hand. By the 2000, there were hundreds. What happened? That's the dramatic, firsthand story told in my book Women Who Run the Show: How A Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood. I interviewed more than 125 women, and some men, in virtually every segment of the entertainment business. They came from all over the U.S., from other countries, and from every level of society. The book is their account of the Hollywood workplace from the 1970s to 2000.
The untold story is this: when the book was published, I was asked, "What surprised you when you were writing it? What surprised you about people's reactions to it? What did you learn from the women you interviewed?"
Those lively questions caused me to re-examine the experiences women related in the book and audience reactions to them?that's the untold story of On the Road.
Part I - Surprises
I interviewed women, and some men, from 1998 to 2002. The women surprised me by saying more than I expected. The force of their memories astonished me. I soon learned that when I telephoned women to ask for an interview, told them the book dealt with their experiences at work as women, it triggered instant emotional recall. The first time it happened, I was frantically scribbling notes to get down some of the passionate flood, for she had launched into a story ten or thirty years in the past, an incident that lingered like an ache. I was just calling for an appointment; I hadn't asked any questions. Sometimes when this happened, they kept talking, spilling out memories like a fountain. I realized that most women had not been asked to think about or relate events in their lives as women at work. The next surprise came during the actual interview when I asked them about the incident they'd spoken of when I'd first called. "Oh, that . . ." It had been expiated, purged. The old score had been settled. Sometimes I coaxed them into describing it again, but it never had the same intense color and detail.
I was surprised at their candor, at their emotional vigor. I was surprised how many women were single mothers, virtually or in fact. And I admit it?I was surprised that women tell such great stories, most of them on the record. I was not surprised how much they love their work.
Another early surprise came as I began organizing the work. I collected on- and off-the-record comments or stories under various headings?the joy of work, sexual harassment, first job, cultural influence of movies/TV, the differences of women and men at work, and so on. These categories came from questions I asked in every interview. By then I knew that men's and women's reactions to women's experiences could be quite different, so I showed a few pages of collected quotes to my brother, a college professor, and later to other male friends. Some were wonderfully funny stories, and it was good to see that guys, too, were laughing out loud. But I was amazed when they came to other pages loosely collected under the rubric 'obstacles/barriers at work.'
"She was attacked in his office?!" or "She was asked to do what?" My brother was appalled; it was unthinkable. Another guy kept shaking his head, saying, "It's just hard to believe what women go through." These men weren't sheltered or naïve; they were sophisticated professionals, but these incidents were way outside any experience they'd had. I showed the same pages to a few women friends in film or television and in other fields. They just nodded.
After the book was published, I spoke at programs and book signings, on panels, on TV and radio from West to East. Anxiously, I hoped that the scope of the book would extend beyond Hollywood, that what women said here about their work would strike a chord with other women in other jobs. But would it?
Yes! No matter the audience?students, seniors, stockbrokers, lawyers, filmmakers?or the location?Atlanta, Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C.?the challenges women relate in the book, their solutions, frustrations, and their joy resonated. Women don't have to be anywhere near Hollywood to understand.
At book signings, I was surprised when readers told me that an account of women's experiences was, "a great service," "it's our history," and "a history about us? Wow!" One woman leaned toward me and said softly, "We just don't have a lot of history of ourselves, do we?" A woman in New York had bought the book a few days before and brought it with her to have it signed. She was jovial, energetic, about thirty. She'd underlined sections of the book in dark blue marker pen. I was strung out between horror and pleasure. In Malibu, a woman asked me to sign a book to her daughter. I asked where her daughter worked. "She's four," she said. "I want her to know what we went through so it doesn't happen again." A man in Atlanta bought copies for his three daughters, in their twenties. He wanted them to learn what it had been like. He thought it would "help them cope, give them answers."
A neighbor sent a copy to his 84-year-old mother in Chicago. She had worked in small businesses all her life, not in film or TV. She told her son that when it arrived two of her friends were visiting. When conversation flagged, she pulled out my book and started to read aloud from it. "That happened to me!" one of her friends snapped, then related an experience at work 50 years before. My friend's mother went on reading, then stopped. "That one happened to me," she said. "That boss called me the white bitch and the other supervisor the black bitch." A few months later, during visits, they were still dipping into the book. She summed up: "We laugh and we cry."
And, it wasn't all 'history.' In Washington, D.C., at a program in the National Women's Museum of the Arts, sponsored by several women's organizations including Women in Film & Video, a man in the audience asked, "What can men do to make things better?" So many answers came to mind. I had spoken briefly about the number of women who'd told me about not being heard. Ilene Kahn Power, a producer, called it "Mother Deaf." I said to him, "Listen hard." I added, "Hire women." I felt that was weak, but fortunately the program's moderator, Phylis Geller, a former WIF president who was on stage with me, said, "If you're asking the question, you probably don't need to ask."
The subject of women not being heard was good on the road because it's an experience all women have met. "How many times have we said the one thing that turns the meeting in the right direction," said Judith James, film and stage producer. "And then a man re-states it, and five minutes later they're harking back to his re-statement, congratulating him on turning the meeting around? Hundred, thousands, millions of times!" By now the audience is groaning and laughing. "It's like when they hear it from men, it's been given import!" Applause. "I have great hopes that guys who need to re-state everything will get comfortable enough to hear a female voice deliver a comment that turns the meeting around." Whistles.
In Los Angeles, at Show Biz Expo, I related two lines from a producer: "I was working for my harassers. Most women did." At the back of the room, a woman stood up and shouted, "You got that wrong! Most women do!"
I was surprised by the muscle of well-worn phrases like, 'sex discrimination, 'sexual harassment,' which, when mentioned in a mixed crowd of men and women, the room sometimes became very quiet, and occasionally, a man would say that he thought 'all that was over and done with.' Did these words in mixed company bring up emotions, guilt, hidden incidents? Who knows? A couple of times, even the word "equality" had negative punch, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
For some women, I was amazed by the continuing power of the word 'fuck.' At my first book signing, I included a hilarious and provocative story of director Karen Arthur, which I related to paint the difference in attitudes about women from the 1970s, compared to today. Karen asked a friend at Universal if he could get her some directing work on a TV show. He went to bat for her, spoke to an executive on the show and strongly recommended her as a director for an episode. "You don't have to hire her," the executive said, laughing, "just fuck her." A well-known producer sitting in the front row of that first book signing jerked backward in her chair as if I'd stabbed her. In real life, women at work are not politely protected, and I still don't understand what was really going on when I quoted anyone who used 'fuck,' instead of the less potent 'screw', though each time the women were repeating what men had said, not women, as in the famous 'mumblefuck' sequence related by attorney Mary Ledding in Women Who Run the Show.
I was on a daytime talk radio show in New York City when a call came in from a young woman who said she was calling on behalf of female writers on The West Wing. Apparently, four of them had just been fired, and she said, "What would you suggest they do?" I asked something like, "Why were they fired? Were men fired, too?" What would you ask on the air? I think a break came, and I was able to talk with her briefly off the air. But I've never forgotten the call, always wondered what happened.
Some people in audiences spoke of incidents in their work lives, sparked by quotes I'd read out loud. One woman, who had worked in a municipal government department, told of a work experience with a real bastard co-worker and how she'd handled it. She calmly went about documenting it, showed her record to the high guy on the tree, and wrote down the number she expected to win in court or as a settlement. "Or," she said, "you can fire his ass." She acknowledged that either way she won.
Not everyone related to what I had to say on the road. I spoke to graduate classes at films schools in Los Angeles and New York where men were always?still?more vocal than the women. That surprised me. Sometimes they took me on. One guy, in his early twenties, didn't seem to believe much of what I'd said, and seemed to think the notion of equality or equal opportunity was a crock, because basically the concept took jobs away from men.
The most contentious time I had was on a late-night talk radio show in Tennessee or Missouri when callers assailed me for speaking about things that had nothing to do with anyone in 'these parts!' A furious man claimed that what I'd said wasn't true, practically insinuating I was godless, that it gave women the wrong idea, that 'real people' had more important things to do than listen to tripe about women in movies. That night, I felt I had come to another planet. I scrambled for ways to chat about something less incendiary, like the influence of movies on all of us. In 1980, on a train in Italy, I'd been assigned to a six-berth roomette with five men?two Iranians, two Italians, and an Israeli, all politically angry at Americans. Somehow, we staggered into the one experience we had in common?American movies. They go everywhere! One Iranian was nuts about Fred Astaire! Talking about our favorite movies saved a very uncomfortable situation.
But on this radio talk show, I could find no footing at all. Another caller, a woman, seemed irritated because the book I described was about women working in glamour jobs. "We don't have jobs like that." She hung up, but amazingly she called back and started talking about her job in a store or office. By that time, I figured I had nothing to lose so I asked about equal pay and sexual harassment. Those realities seemed familiar to her, though she was very reluctant to go there. She did speak about a woman who'd been fired after, I think, refusing to 'give in' to a manager. It was hard to tell if she meant sexual or on-the-job politics but she related to the subject at hand all right. Had we been alone, instead of on the air in her hometown, we might have had a good talk.
From that radio show, I learned that what we think we know in Los Angeles or New York may seem, on the surface, to have everything or nothing to do with other peoples' lives in the heartland. But if we and they can get past that assumption, a big road block, we are dealing with the same issues because in many ways the lives we lead as women cross boundaries of time and place and circumstance.
All writers meet surprises as they work on a book or go on speaking tours with it. Some of the surprises in this piece recurred to me as I wrote it?like snapshots. But mainly, I mined the notes I made while I wrote the book and later on the road. The reason I kept track of them, I think, was to expand the stream of history told in the book by tacking into other vantage points, audience reactions to it, which cast more light on the often unspoken, out of sight experiences of women, then and now.
© Gregory 2006 All Rights Reserved
A grateful note from Mollie Gregory:
The Women In Film Foundation and the board of Women In Film provided the first funds to make the initial research possible. In fact, the idea of, and the need for the book first came to me when I was in a WIF Foundation meeting, glancing rather dully around the table, when I suddenly realized that though I knew the women there directed, produced, or wrote, I had no idea how they'd succeeded making long careers at a time when I was sure it had been difficult for women. Moreover, in Foundation meetings very few of us spoke at any length about the projects we were working on, the highs, the lows, the pitfalls or delights; we all got down to business, the task at hand, which, I learned later writing the book, is what most women do in meetings. That night, Nancy Malone, a director, was there. I invited her to dinner and asked her about her experiences at work. Three hours later, I knew a book had to be written. Nancy Malone and Women In Film had a great deal to do with how this book began and they gave ongoing support, contacts, and key interviews.
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