The Women: All-female cast spooked Hollywood
Jamie Portman
Canwest News Service
Monday, September 08, 2008
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – When it comes to Hollywood’s corridors of power, women still don’t count.
On the movie industry’s scale of priorities, it’s macho males under 25 who supply the box-office fuel. So why bother catering to females? Such is the view of many studio executives.
Filmmaker Diane English has been fighting against that philosophy for years.
As creator and executive producer of Murphy Brown, a groundbreaking television show about a modern, emancipated woman, she successfully waged battle with the guys in the boardroom to prove that a series like this could find an audience.
But she points out that Murphy Brown was only a single victory. Among Hollywood power brokers, male chauvinist attitudes still prevail. That’s why it took 13 years for English to realize her dream of doing a remake of The Women, a stage and screen classic from the 1930s. Now, with the movie finally opening Sept. 12, she can’t help feeling a sense of vindication.
Her mistake had been to assume it would be easy to get away with using an all-female cast.
“It hadn’t been done since 1939 and I just felt it was time to do it again,” she tells Canwest. “And of course I have a reputation as someone who champions women and writes a lot about women. I read in Variety in 1994 that Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan were thinking of doing a remake of it. So I just called my agent and said, ‘This has my name on it. Get me in there.'”
The original Clare Boothe Luce play, a Broadway hit in 1936, and the subsequent 1939 film version fascinated English because of the all-female casting. In writing an updated version of this story of a wronged New York wife and her circle of friends, English wanted to apply the same formula. In other words, no males in sight – not even the cheating husband whose behaviour triggers the main story line.
And this is why English immediately encountered roadblocks. Within the industry, there was incredible resistance to the idea of an all-female cast.
Ironically, there was more resistance now than there was back in 1939 when MGM, a studio notorious for its conservatism, embraced the idea of doing The Women with an all-female cast that included Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and Joan Fontaine. Today’s studio brass recoiled at the very idea.
“That’s the reason it took so long to get made,” English says. “The conventional wisdom is that women don’t go to the movies. Hollywood caters to one main demographic – males under 25. This is a movie that appeals to women and primarily women over 25 – and that’s a taboo demographic. The idea is that we don’t come out very frequently. We don’t want to spend money or find a parking space or find a sitter for the kids – all that stuff. So there was tremendous resistance to this film.”
During the decade that English kept trying to interest the studios in the project, she kept writing and fine-tuning her screenplay. She also refused to become discouraged.
And she finally found her saviour in Bob Berney, the boss of Picturehouse, a tiny satellite of New Line with a reputation for taking risks.
“Where other studio heads shied away from the movie because of the all-female cast, he is a marketing genius who thought this was the hook – the thing that could be used to sell the movie and market the movie.”
English found another surprising ally in Mick Jagger whose Jagged Films company also wanted to be part of the project. Britain’s Victoria Pearman is president of Jagged, and she was an early fan of English’s script and agreed to come on board as producer. Jagger was enthusiastic too and supported the project all the way.
Everybody made financial sacrifices in order to deliver The Women on a modest $16 million budget – and that included members of an all-star cast that included Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, Carrie Fisher, Cloris Leachman, Debi Mazar, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen.
“We were able to get our actresses to agree to cut their fees, and all the producers deferred their fees, and Mick essentially paid Victoria’s salary for five years to help us get this movie done,” English remembers.
Like its ’30s predecessors, The Women unfolds in all-female world. And the narrative centrepiece remains – the discovery by happily married Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) that her husband has been cheating on her and how she responds. It also examines female bonding, especially Mary’s relationship with her best friend, played by Annette Bening. But the sensibility of the new film is thoroughly modern.
“It’s the same story,” English stresses. “It’s just told with different emphases and a change in attitude. The original movie was really a poison pen letter to women.”
English says that playwright Clare Boothe Luce based the original stage comedy on her introduction to New York society following her marriage to Time Magazine founder Henry Luce.
“She was so appalled to be suddenly living among all these society women in New York after marrying Henry Luce. She found them to be catty and back-stabbing – the idle rich – and she wrote the play as a satire of those types of women.”
The 1939 movie had the same tone – and “that felt very odd to me,” she says. Besides, English adds, “so much has happened in 70 years – the woman’s movement, for example. So I moved my version of it into modern times so it’s more of a valentine to women. I tried to create a tapestry of different kinds of women to reflect what it’s like to be a modern woman right now.”
On the other hand, MGM got it right seven decades ago by going with an all-star cast, and English wanted to do the same thing.
“I just loved the full spectrum of seeing those great MGM stars all working together on screen. I was really wanting that because we’re in an era where women don’t really get the chance to play the meatiest roles, and they’re often relegated to the role of stock wife and long-suffering girlfriend.”
