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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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WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE WOMEN I INTERVIEWED Part 2 of ON THE ROAD
In the first episode of this two-part article, as I hit the road with Women Who Run the Show, I was asked, what did I learn from the women in the book? That question, from attorney Beth Kennedy, stopped me. She had arranged a program at the National Entertainment & Media Law Institute at Southwestern University Law School. I came up with a few answers, but afterward, Beth and a friend of mine in the audience, an organized producer, said, “Make a list.” Like my reassessment of ‘surprises,’ this new view of ‘what I learned’ reshaped the discussion from then on. Here are some quotes from the women I interviewed, which struck such deep chords in my audiences:
“Most women have three jobs: wife, mother, worker.”
One interviewee said it this way: "Men's and women's value systems are different. I still think more is expected of women, or they have to do more, or work harder on different levels. I have three jobs. I'm a producer, I'm a mother, I'm a wife. Those three things take time. And there isn't enough time to do all of them well. So you're always . . . pulled in all these directions."
Many women described their terrifically complicated lives, for which I came to have a whole new respect. One drew the bottom line: “You can’t have it all at the same time, but you must try or you’ll never make up the years you lose.” Luckily, women are celebrated for their multi-tasking skills, but the truth is we can’t do it all every day, which may be one reason women are not stampeding into high-level jobs with 24/7 work schedules.
I found myself interviewing a number of single moms.
Janis Diamond, writer-producer, exploded. “We were told by the generation before us that if we got divorced or whatever, we can go out and work! Did anyone try this out before we did it? I can tell you it was hell. What was everyone thinking?”
On a related note, at a Mothers in Film lunch, someone asked producer Barbara Boyle, not a single mother, “What do you do when you’re about to walk out the door and your 3-year-old child says, ‘Mommy, mommy, don't go to work.” Barbara asked her, “What do you do?” She replied, “I say I have to.” Barbara never said that. “I always said to my child, 'I want to. Just like you want to go out and play or go to the playground--this is what I want to do.’”
“If you work hard, you will be rewarded.”
I heard that one a lot in interviews. I also heard a lot of opinions about why women don’t get rewarded, which relates to how women handle credits and praise. Both men and women have trouble getting credit for work they’ve done, but I learned that women have trouble taking credit and then holding onto it. Women tend to give away their credits. One producer told me that she’d seen women fail to speak up when someone else grabbed credit for a job she had done.
A studio executive told me:
“Women have this trait—taking credit or gaining recognition seems less important to us. I think it is one reason women aren't more publicly successful in higher profile jobs. That's changing. It was much worse in the '80s. It took me years and beaucoup therapy to be able to say, 'This is what I want and this is what I think I deserve.' If you don't ask, you don't get. Women don't take credit. They let it get buried, hoping the right people know who's really responsible. They depend on that. They should not depend on that.”
The hard truth is that you have to speak up for yourself. It can be done without making enemies.
Which relates to . . .
“What we don’t say will be forgotten,” whether it’s our own history or what we’ve accomplished.
Which relates to . . .
“Women don’t brag or share the good news often enough.” You have to be your own marketing exec. Keep track of your achievements, not your failures.
Which relates to . . .
“Many women are scared to invest in themselves.” Don’t we think we’re worth it?
Which relates to . . .
“Women are much better team players than anyone thought. They want to get the job done.” But some are also willing to give away the credit they deserve to keep the enterprise, the job, the project, going.
Full circle.
“Women cannot make a mistake.”
This came up many times in interviews, particularly about women in production—directors, producers, and below-the-line. I’ve also heard it from female stunt coordinators, and I’m sure they’re right—unlike the guys, they’ll be fired if someone gets hurt. I think “can’t make mistakes” is connected to a bundle of issues that apply mainly to women. Lily Tomlin described one aspect of it:
“I listen to guys doing deals or guys in trouble on something, who say, 'Hey, help me out on this, buddy.' It's like a contractor who’s really screwed up, needs someone to fix it, and he’s able to say, 'Help me out on this one, will ya?' It means cover for me, help me out of this hole. I remember a guy who's now prominent in the business but then he was a producer or something. He did not make a success of it, the movies he made basically failed, he was going to be replaced or fired. At certain levels, guys never get fired, they get some other deal, save face, and they save each other's faces. This guy literally said, 'You've got to bail me out of this.' He was going to lose everything, like maybe he was worth $10 million then and today he's worth $800 million but back then he said, 'You can't let me be ruined.' I can't imagine women doing that, or not many women. We don't think that way. I think women have another notion of morality, and in my experience women are more willing to take the punishment for whatever mistakes or misjudgments they make. Of course, it's well known that I've never understood the politics of business here.”
In another way, ‘can’t make mistakes’ relates to missed opportunities, ‘we don’t get to fail,’ and ‘same job for less money.’ Producer Debra Martin Chase said:
“Women are always under scrutiny, so we work harder. We have to be better. To me, that applies to being black as well. People have preconceived notions and as a practical matter you have to work to overcome them. Early in my career, Bill Duke told me (he was speaking from the black perspective): 'We don't get to fail.' A not-so-exaggerated example is a young white guy who directed a couple commercials and the next thing you know he's got a $50 million movie. We don't get that kind of opportunity as women or as minorities. So every time, you need to give whatever chance comes your way your best shot. That's just the reality of it. And you've got to do it for less money. I know I've been paid less for the same work.”
Performer-director, Liv Ullmann, sees it this way:
“I do not understand why men who are not that talented get to do one film after another. They always get new chances. It’s not like that for women. Over a certain age, it’s so much tougher and women don’t get hired. The only reason I’m working in Denmark and Sweden is that I’ve been an actress and am still a name. Age is against women. The producers are younger, they want to work with the people they know, who are mostly men. If they want to work with a woman they find one they know no matter how little experience she might have.”
“Many women help other women, and they hire women.”
“Women absolutely support each other,” producer Gale Anne Hurd says. “The whole idea of cat-fighting is the biggest crock. When I needed a leg up, the people who supported me were women. Dawn Steel gave me a production deal at Columbia. I didn't know her; she wasn't my girlfriend doing me a favor. Sherry Lansing was at Paramount where I was based for six years so I absolutely feel that women support other women.”
“Women hold other women to higher, tougher standards.”
Well, hey, not all women are alike—it’s a new concept. One executive pointed out that she’d found women study resumes “with a microscope and don’t propose anyone until they’re absolutely sure, but men recommend other men with alacrity.”
On the road, I often read out Dr. Martha Lauzen’s statistics, which she has prepared twice a year since 1994. Most audiences know nothing about the percentages of female to male producers, directors, writers, editors, etc., in both motion pictures and television. Sometimes, instead of giving the usually paltry percentages of females, I reversed it, reading only percentage of male writers (76%), directors (92%), and so on. Either way, the numbers are startling, and that relates to one woman’s comment about women’s careful recommendations: she suggested it was our subconscious awareness that fundamentally women don’t have the same kind of support or network they can count on. Experienced or just starting out, if you’re a man and have a broad-based brotherhood of 70 to 98 percent of the creative or executive community, mistakes or misjudgments are not as crucial compared to being in the female group that comprises only 2 to 36 percent, depending on the job category. Maybe, you have to be sure when you recommend or hire a woman that they don’t make mistakes.
It’s a numbers game and numbers count in a primal way.
Producer Marcia Nasatir said that “what really happens in the studios is the influence of one person and the influence of numbers. It’s the reason women had no influence and now have some. Each person in a meeting makes a contribution. Each contribution creates an incremental step toward change. If women are going to make any difference, we have to believe in what we’re doing and stand up for it.” She was emphatic about that because many people don’t stand up for anything. “There is no one thing in this equation of change we’re all in,” she went on. “It’s usually not about men or women, it’s not about one but each person in the group who make the decisions about which movies we will see—that’s what makes the real difference.”
“Women don’t understand what they’re worth in terms of money. We have a different scale.”
This is one of the many different ways men and women approach their work. I learned that for some women the value of the story seems to be of greater worth than the financial reward. Producer Debra Martin Chase said, “Women tend to approach their work differently. Among my male friends, my peers, some are concerned about doing 'good work,' but they're just as concerned about the deal. I had to learn to do that. And I'm a lawyer. My tendency has been to tell a story that's important to me, that is a contribution. If I have to take less money for it, that's okay. The guys I know say, 'Screw that, pay me what I'm worth.'”
“Women are judged by one standard—they’re women.”
One executive I interviewed for the book, a man, told me in a frank, the-joke’s- on-me tone that in the 1980s if women were in an office or on a set, it spelled ‘trouble.’ That was his attitude and he said it was the attitude of the men he worked with. I am sure it’s not his attitude today. He was forthright, competent, experienced.
But how about today? To me, beneath all the changes that have occurred, it seems more like, ‘women are different,’ and who would you rather work with—someone who’s like you or someone who’s different? It’s well known that most of us prefer working with people we know.
“I realized, as a young producer [on The Terminator],” Gale Anne Hurd said, “that I had to be stronger, better prepared, and less emotional so that I wouldn't be judged or dismissed as a female. I observed the way men interacted--tough, forceful and firm. If they got emotional, they didn't cry or apologize. A lot of men weren't prepared but because they were men, because they knew the lingo, because they were part of the boys club, they could get away with it. As a woman, I could not.”
“Get a mentor and/or partner.”
This broad advice was no surprise to me before I heard it from many women I interviewed. As one said, “The entertainment industry is a collaborative process. You can’t do it alone.” But . . .
“Advice from men about what to do in a situation doesn’t always translate that well for women.”
Be aware of it. It’s not as stark as it was, but it’s still true. One writer, who had worked on a single show for several years, branched out to work on new shows in the 1980s. In a meeting with producers who wanted script changes she didn’t agree with, she wondered how to respond and decided to follow the advice of her male mentors, who always said, protect the material. She stood up for the material, didn’t give in without a discussion, and didn’t jump on the desk or scream, but got the reputation of a trouble-maker anyway. What men can do among men does not necessarily apply to women.
A screenwriter said, “I felt I always had to be mindful of, I hate to say it, male egos. I felt producers or executives just didn't want the guys in the scripts to be bad guys. What seemed to me to be a stirring scene they felt was strident. We really had different views on the work.”
The Qualities of Success
“An attitude of optimism and good humor goes a long way.”
Audiences were intrigued by the qualities women said helped them succeed, such as screenwriter Treva Silverman’s, “I always feel that terrific things are going to happen, it was just a question of time and I never dreamed of getting discouraged.”
Producer Marcy Carsey said that what helped her was “Courage. It hurt me too but it mostly helped me. Not being afraid of being fired, not being afraid of what my boss thought of me, not being afraid of making a mistake.”
Or Barbara Corday, “Confidence is the true, secret ingredient to surviving well.”
Persistence was high on the list of qualities that helped women, and everyone needs it, but women really need it because they won’t get—you guessed it! The same number of chances.
“Perseverance is everything,” says performer-director Joan Chen. “I’m opinionated and I know that helped me believe in my own convictions.”
Producer Anthea Sylbert describes a five-year battle to get Something to Talk About made, which she produced with Paula Weinstein, Goldie Hawn and William S. Beasely. “I used to say when we started that project that I was a tall blonde who turned into this short, gray-haired woman. One thing that’s true about a lot of movies, they get done because someone wouldn’t give up.”
Short Takes
As I was on the road, I talked about every woman in the book at least once because I had learned from them and felt any audience would, too. I often started with women who’d worked in the 1970s and 1980s, early parts of the book, like Julia Phillips, who produced The Sting and Taxi. She couched a warning in her words that came from her own experience: “If you want a job that sucks, try pioneer.”
I quoted director Betty Thomas on discrimination, “If you make the money for them, there’s no such thing as any ‘ism.’ If you don’t make the money, every ism in the world counts.”
I quoted cinematographer Brianne Murphy, the first woman to join the cameraman’s union in Hollywood in 1973. Women instantly understand the wry humor in this story from Brianne’s news days:
A campaigning politician was shaking hands right and left as he's coming toward me. I'm running the camera and my sound man is next to me. The politician reaches us and says, 'Oh, excuse me, I didn't realize you were a woman.’ He looks at the camera on my shoulder. ‘That thing must be heavy, what does it weigh?' I said, 'I don't know, less than a kid.'
I quoted director Neema Barnette, who arrived on a set to direct a sit-com episode in the late 1980s:
When I went up to the assistant director, he said to me, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re the extra playing a prostitute. When are you going to get dressed?’ I replied, ‘What do you mean, get dressed?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re dressed, that’s funny. You better get over to wardrobe.’ You should have seen how red his face turned,” she said, “when the producer introduced me a little later as the director. And it wasn’t the AD’s fault. Nothing he’d ever read, seen, heard or experienced would have taught him that the director could possibly be a black woman.
I think her words go to the heart of why it’s crucial that women work in every level of entertainment.
“Why should we care if women work in movies or TV? Is it important?”
That’s a question I asked in interviews but some audiences didn’t quite see what difference women might make on a project. There still aren’t that many women producing or writing or directing film (take a long look at Martha Lauzen’s statistics). Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any change as the same huge fantasy explosions still rip across the screen whether a man or a woman produced. But I think there are substantive differences when women are involved: women often hire other women, add strong, independent female characters, often have a different take on a scene, and tell different stories.
That always reminds me of a small but lively example. Gail Parent was a comedy writer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She said she could pinpoint the moment women finally began to be incorporated into the comedy sitcom world in the 1970s.
I was at MTM when a woman came in—maybe it was Charlotte Brown—and suggested a story about how much it cost to be a bridesmaid. The producers, Allan Burns and Jim Brooks, and the staff looked at each other and realized they would have never come up with that story. That’s when I date the doors really opening for women. I give those guys real credit, too, for realizing that comedy could also come from experiences only women have.
What difference does that make?
When someone in an audience doubts that movies have any influence on us, I give them screenwriter Fay Kanin’s simple but loaded answer: “Movies are the people’s art form.” People in Texas may go to drive-ins, or, she went on to say, people in a small town in Spain watch a movie on a sheet hung up in a store. People everywhere watch movies; in theatres, on cable, on the Internet. They are our lingua franca, our common language (which worked for me on the train but did not work on the radio station). But for a century, they’ve been and still are half the people’s art form, according to most statistics.
How do movies influence us?
Entertainment attorney, Melanie Cook, said, “Movies and television are the taste meter and the trendsetter. They shape children’s view of the world, what’s right and wrong. Television, movies and music drive our culture, drive the world’s culture. Pepsi and jeans, it led to the fall of the Communist structure.”
When I asked Marcy Carsey about the influence of the media, she burst out: “Television is the single most powerful medium in the history of the world! It’s in people’s living rooms, it’s part of their lives and it’s worldwide! It couldn’t be more intimate and it couldn’t be more powerful!”
Producer Laura Ziskin summed up the influence of movies and women’s part in it:
Women have an extraordinarily unique opportunity. Men have built the cities, made and defined the culture, interpreted the world. At no time in recorded history have women been culture-makers. Movies are arguably the most influential, important medium in the world. They have a tremendous cultural impact. Because women are now making movies, then womens ideas, philosophy, point of view will seep into that culture. And thats never happened in history. Ever, ever, ever. We cant even see the impact of it yet.
All through this process, writing the book and being on the road with it, I learned that the premise of the book, women’s experiences at work, struck an emotional chord with the women I interviewed, and their stories generated reactions in audiences—about themselves, about a larger arena—women working in television or film—about the whole subject of ‘women at work.’ Why? Because ‘What’s your experience at work as a woman?’ is a topic women know like a second skin but is rarely spoken of in public. That’s why the discussions had ‘legs.’
There is a perception that everything’s equal now. It’s like a promotional chant, it’s in the air, it’s culturally accepted. The latest surprise to me is that in the few years since I began writing the book, and its subsequent publication, the promise of women’s continuing and increasing participation in the work at all levels has not been fulfilled. Based on my road experiences, we have not ‘come far,’ and yet—we have come a distance.
Women are executives and producers (the greatest gains so far), they run divisions or head studios, but in that capacity they are as subject as men to the same financial and marketing pressures. Though young women are perceived as ‘a market’ (compared to the 1990s), movies win profile and profits only with male stars in fantastic adventures crammed with glitz and heroics, which feed the international appetite. Female-driven movies do not serve that hunger. The state of first-rate female performers is heading downhill, and chances for female directors are still slim. Except in rare instances, the stories women tell have not found an audience of size. This is true whether women run studios or not.
But on the road with the book, armed with the stories women told, I saw that when people read or hear about women’s work experiences, positively or negatively, in the past or today, just being aware of the striking changes since 1970s, hearing the knowledge of their incrementally increasing positions, though much remains unchanged, made people open their eyes. Women related to the stories in my book because at work they’d had similar experiences, which I think we carry around like ghosts. Maybe some women in the audience could release a few ghosts from the shadows, and begin to own them. I’m glad my book had a share in this because it’s all part of the getting better process—the recovery: reading or hearing the chronicle of where we were, then facing where we are gives thrust to finding ways to improve the circumstances of where we will be or could be in the future.
Remember, thirty years ago there were five women VPs and another handful of producers; thirty years ago no women were, for example, agents-in-training; they were secretaries with no upward momentum. That’s changed, not just in talent agencies or in TV or film production, but in the military, in medicine, in politics, and in every enterprise except, perhaps, trucking and cinematography. So the soft changes have been made. The harder changes are yet to come.
© Gregory 2006 All Rights Reserved
A Grateful note from Mollie: 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.
Mollie Gregory began toiling at different jobs to get through Cinema Studies at New York University. She graduated, got a Masters, and wrote scripts for nonfiction film producers, such as, Songs From The Fourth World, Off The Edge, Discovering the Art of Korea, Welfare: Exploding the Myths. She also made her own documentaries, many on social issues. She was teaching a course on the knotty problems of raising money and making films when she decided to write a book. That turned out to be Making Films Your Business.
By that time, she’d moved to Los Angeles and had joined the Writers Guild of America. She continued to write nonfiction films, and to teach screenwriting and documentary film production at the University of Southern California, California State University Northridge, San Francisco State University, and a course she created, "Movies as Role Models.”
The first book led to a second and now there are more novels among them Equal to Princes, Triplets, Birthstone, Privileged Lies) and nonfiction. The most recent of those is Women Who Run the Show. She’s been interviewed for or appeared on E! Entertainment, EXTRA, Bloomberg Radio, CNN, Washington Post, PBS’s To the Contrary, the Writer’s Guild of America, Words Into Pictures, and Show Biz Expo. 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").
Along the way, she’s served as a U.S. Vice President of the International Quorum of Motion Picture Producers, as president of P. E. N. West, the international writers and human rights organization, and as president of Women in Film. As a trustee of the Women in Film Foundation, she helped originate its Film Finishing Fund competition and developed its History Preservation Plan. She’s still a member of the Writers Guild, still lives in Los Angeles, and she’s writing the next book.
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