April 24, 2005
Hollywood's New Old Girls' Network
By NANCY HASS
Correction Appended
LOS ANGELES
NOT long after the talent manager and television producer Brad Grey was named the new chief of Paramount Pictures this year, he did something that has become almost routine in Hollywood: he put a woman in charge of the show.
Last month Mr. Grey - who succeeded Sherry Lansing, 60, in Paramount's top job - named Gail Berman, a respected television executive, to lead the studio's creative team. As a woman deciding what gets to the world's movie screens, Ms. Berman becomes the latest player in a quiet revolution transforming a business that until recently was regarded as a male preserve.
Four of the six major studios have women in the top creative decision-making roles, as Ms. Berman joins Stacey Snider, chairman of Universal; Amy Pascal, chairman of Sony Pictures; and Nina Jacobson, president of Walt Disney Company's Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group. Earlier this month, Ms. Snider announced that Mary Parent and Scott Stuber, would be stepping down as vice chairmen at Universal to become producers on the lot; their replacement is Donna Langley, the Universal executive who oversaw "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" and "In Good Company."
Though men still figure most prominently in the corporate echelons of the media companies that own the studios, and talent agencies like William Morris and Creative Artists Agency are still male dominated, these women, who over the years have fought and fostered one another as part of a loose sisterhood, have finally buried the notion that Hollywood is a man's world.
So striking is the change that some now see Hollywood as a gender-balanced model for the rest of corporate America. "It's astonishing," said Elizabeth Daley, dean of the film school at the University of Southern California. "You don't see that kind of progress in any other industry."
Women have come to predominate in Hollywood at a time when less than 1 percent of chief executive officers in the Fortune 500 are female, and none of the nation's top 100 publicly held companies have a female chief. According to the National Association of Law Placement in Washington, 87 percent of the partners in law firms are male, although for two decades more than 50 percent of law school graduates have been female.
It's true that women have yet to own studios - there is no female Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone - and that executives like the Sony Pictures chairman, Michael Lynton, and the Walt Disney Studios chairman, Dick Cook, outrank their studios' female executives. But the power to buy scripts, hire directors and even to greenlight films has become so thoroughly vested in a generation of women that the very notion of a female power ranking, like the one done at the end of the year by The Hollywood Reporter, has been deemed quaint.
"That kind of thing may be vaguely interesting in other businesses, but at this point, here, separating the genders is, well, pretty silly," Ms. Snider said.
While it's true that women have been kicking around - and getting kicked around - behind the scenes in Hollywood since the beginning, mostly as story editors, they only began to infiltrate the power structure in the mid-70's. The names from that era are near legendary, from Marsha Nasatir (executive producer of "The Big Chill"), a New York book editor who came to Los Angeles at 40 and became vice president at United Artists, and Rosilyn Heller and Paula Weinstein who rose to be vice presidents at Columbia and Warner Brothers respectively.
Ms. Weinstein recalls the competition among them as "incredibly intense." While women in the rest of the country were having their feminist consciousnesses raised, she said, Hollywood was "quite retarded."
"A lot of the women had a sort of 1950's hangover," she continued. "They got together at Ma Maison and talked about engagement rings."
By the mid-1980's, as women were gingerly entering the executive ranks throughout corporate America, two female powerhouses emerged in Hollywood: Dawn Steel and Ms. Lansing. (Ms. Steel, who was president of production at Paramount and then president of Columbia, died of a brain tumor in 1997.) Lucy Fisher, a producer, said one reason that the two women were allowed to rise was Hollywood's "immigrant, outsider ethos."
"Here," she said, "if it makes money and you're a gorilla, you're in."
The competitive ethos among women seemed to have reached its apotheosis in the 1980's; to this day, few in Hollywood will mention Ms. Steel and Ms. Lansing in the same breath without quickly adding - as if the pugnacious Ms. Steel were eavesdropping on them from above - that both staked a claim throughout their careers to being the first woman to run a studio. (Ms. Lansing was the first to land a spot as president of production, at 20th Century Fox, in 1980; Ms. Steel became the first female studio president when she took over Columbia in 1987.)
By then, more women were making their way to Hollywood. They had grown up during the auteur 1970's, when Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola made films that set cinephiles' hearts on fire, and the Ivy League universities, with their newly minted film studies departments, proved a particularly fertile breeding ground. Studio jobs, with their unusual combination of high pay, glamour and artiness lured graduates away from more traditional career paths like investment banking and law, said Ms. Fisher, who made her way to Los Angeles soon after graduating from Harvard. She became vice chairman of Columbia during the mid-1990's before leaving to produce such films as "Stuart Little" and the coming "Bewitched" with her husband Doug Wick.
The roles of producer or of executive attracted women, she and others surmise, because they held the promise of a steady paycheck and a chance to work on a team. It was alluring, Ms. Fisher said, "to those of us who didn't have the heart for the all-consuming horror that is a director's life, but wanted to be intimately involved with movies."
Many of the women gravitated toward Warner Brothers, where Ms. Weinstein was a vice president, including Ms. Fisher and, later, the daughter of the puppeteer Jim Henson, Lisa Henson, who went on to become president of Columbia in 1993. Vanity Fair memorialized some of them in a photograph in the mid-1980's as "The Warner Sisters." By then, there were enough women around to spawn a more collegial attitude, said Ms. Fisher, who added that her own attitudes were shaped by Ms. Weinstein's generosity.
But it was not only women who nurtured the new generation of female executives. Two men at Warners, Peter Guber and his partner, Jon Peters - the producers of "Batman" - proved to be unlikely mentors. Although known for slash-and-burn machismo, Mr. Guber and Mr. Peters, who both eventually moved to Sony, regularly filled their staffs with tough, talented women.
"These guys loved women, in the wrong way maybe sometimes, but also in the right way," said Laura Ziskin, who worked for Mr. Peters in the 1970's and credits his tutelage for helping her become the founding chairman of Fox 2000 in 1994. "Jon Peters was a hairdresser, you know? These men had a tendency to get into fistfights with other men. They were less threatened by women."
Mr. Guber, who over the years hired Ms. Heller, Ms. Snider, Ms. Pascal and Ms. Fisher, said he saw in the young women an obvious temperamental advantage, especially when it came to the core of a producer's job: handling actors and directors. "Most men at the time, including me, just roughed people up, they had no governor on their testosterone," he explained in a recent interview. "These women used their power elegantly. And it turned out they were right. That's why they're on top now."
If there was a moment when the accumulated force of women in Hollywood began to show itself, it probably was during the spring of 1993 on the macho terrain of the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City.
As swashbuckling executives and producers including Mr. Guber, Mike Medavoy and Jonathan Dolgen clashed over Arnold Schwarzenegger's ill-fated, high-budget "The Last Action Hero," a cadre of ambitious female executives was massing. The women included Ms. Henson; Ms. Pascal, who was a newly minted vice president; Ms. Snider, who had come to work for Mr. Guber and Mr. Peters; and Laurie MacDonald, who later led DreamWorks SKG's movie division with her husband Walter Parkes. There was also a powerful stable of female producers on the lot, including Lynda Obst ("Sleepless in Seattle"), Wendy Finerman ("Forrest Gump") and Christine Peters ("How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days").
As the men sweated and screamed over Mr. Schwarzenegger's gold-plated action extravaganza, some of the women worked on a modest project that came to symbolize the new order: "Little Women." Made for $19 million and shot in Canada with a female director, Gillian Armstrong, and producer, Denise DiNovi, it made nearly $50 million in the United States, virtually the same amount that "The Last Action Hero," which cost $60 million, a fortune at the time, was able to eke out in the domestic market.
"I didn't realize it at the time, but those two films really represent the beginning of a real shift," Ms. Pascal, 46, said. "At that moment, the female talent at the studio was just amazing."