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"  Somewhere, in a Hollywood utopia, women are writing, directing, and producing action flicks, comedies, chick flicks, dick flicks, dramas, animation films, million-dollar-budget films (with gazillion-dollar grosses), art house films, and studio franchises. Boys and men sympathize with female protagonists and live vicariously through their adventures\u2014and vice versa. Women are given as many opportunities as men to show they are powerful, gusty creatives with tremendous vision and follow-through. However, sadly this utopia is far from the current Hollywood reality.  Though females make up more than half of the world&amp;#039;s population, women in Hollywood aren&amp;#039;t close to achieving a 50-50 spilt in key behind-the-scenes roles. Jennifer Todd, producer of Memento, Austin Powers, and Alice in Wonderland, explains this discrepancy: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re just chipping away... [We&amp;#039;re] there in the sense that there are women at every studio. [We&amp;#039;re] there in that it&amp;#039;s not the club it used to be...we just haven&amp;#039;t quite gotten there yet.&amp;quot; Todd&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; resembles what most women want: a Hollywood that gives ample opportunities and financial support to both sexes.  Last Academy Award season, Kathryn Bigelow made a gigantic critical leap when she became the only woman to reside within the company of 83 men (some dead, of course) and win the Oscar for best director. She is also only the fourth woman ever to be nominated for the category. Of Ms. Bigelow&amp;#039;s triumph, Martha Lauzen, the executive director at the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, observes: &amp;quot;It may change things for Kathryn Bigelow. She may now have more opportunities and access to larger budgets, if that&amp;#039;s something that she wants. But in terms of changing our entire belief system of what women are capable of, that&amp;#039;s a tall order.&amp;quot; Though it was a well-deserved win for Bigelow and for women, during that same year, the number of working female directors in Hollywood was down by 2 percent.  If women and men in Hollywood want to reach a 50-50 world, there is still a 30 percent gap that needs closing. Of the top 250 highest-grossing films of 2009, women held a mere 16 percent of key &amp;quot;behind the scenes&amp;quot; roles. In 1998, the number was a percentage point higher, at 17. Over the past few decades, women have lingered in this marginal role. When narrowing the scope to look at specific jobs (for example, female writers, producers, cinematographers, and editors), the numbers of women working in these roles hit a high at 23 percent (for female producers) and an absolute low at 2 percent (for female cinematographers). Even more staggering, female directors accounted for only 7 percent\u2014or rather, 17 women to 232 men. Men have notoriously dominated Hollywood since the golden era of female filmmaking ended in the 1930s, when women held an almost equal number of key roles as men. As persistent as women might be, today they are still battling against archaic perceptions and gender stereotypes that will die only when the people who believe them do (or at least, retire). Karyn Kusama, director of Aeon Flux and Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body, weighs in: &amp;quot;I definitely feel that the issue of women having to prove themselves\u2014to a standard that often times comes out of the woodwork when there was no standard before\u2014is a big issue for women [in Hollywood].&amp;quot; Kusama, when responding to the idea of women are seens as uncertain expresses, &amp;quot;this idea that there&amp;#039;s some kind of safety with a male director and somehow there&amp;#039;s less safety with a female director is completely insane.&amp;quot;   Producer Suzanne Todd (Memento, Austin Powers, Alice in Wonderland) explains the fear of the unproven female as more of a catch-22 issue: &amp;quot;Fear drives an executive to make a decision about something that will feel safe. Because the balance has been so off for so long, if you put down the 10 r\u00E9sum\u00E9s that you are considering, inevitably nine of those r\u00E9sum\u00E9s will have more credits, and those are the men. And then there will be one who is extremely qualified, but she&amp;#039;ll have five credits instead of 15.&amp;quot; The issue then becomes that producers or studio executives (also predominately male fields) feel that they are taking a gamble if they choose the woman.   Maybe this is because there is also the perception that women are bad at the box office. Lauzen speaks to the issue: &amp;quot;Every time a female-driven film succeeds at the box office, there is a sense of surprise expressed throughout Hollywood.&amp;quot; Based on the study &amp;quot;Women @ the Box Office,&amp;quot; which analyzed domestic box office, international box office, opening-weekend box office, and DVD sales, Lauzen finds that &amp;quot;when women and men have similar budgets for their films, the resulting box-office grosses are also similar. The gender of the filmmaker does not determine what the box office grosses; it&amp;#039;s the size of the budgets. Films with larger budgets make larger profits.&amp;quot; And men traditionally hold the key positions on films with larger budgets.  There&amp;#039;s an enduring myth that women don&amp;#039;t want the key roles on the big-budget studio projects. Lauzen states that &amp;quot;for many years, we heard, well, women don&amp;#039;t want to work on studio films, which I believe is a total lie. Who would turn down those resources?&amp;quot; While it is true that some women prefer to avoid the studio experience and make independent films, which allow them greater control over their voice and vision, even some of the women who traditionally work in independent film would like a shot at a big-budget studio genre film.  Mary Harron (writer and director of American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page) says, &amp;quot;I would love to do a [studio] action movie... I think I would have to really like it, though, because a film is a big commitment\u2014and it&amp;#039;s a year of your life. But I&amp;#039;d be up for anything that I really liked.&amp;quot; Jennifer Todd offers this: &amp;quot;From a creative standpoint, I made a lot of masculine films [Memento, Austin Powers, Boiler Room] that are not female-driven films. Yet when I was in a company with my sister, we were sent an extraordinary amount of very difficult to make female films. No one would ever give me Transformers. No one would ever bring anything masculine in any way. The bigger kind of male-driven stuff wouldn&amp;#039;t be sent.&amp;quot;   Even when women do get a chance at the bigger-budget projects, there are more battles ahead of them. The most surprising appears to be the historic one: equal pay for equal work. Jennifer Todd again explains: &amp;quot;I have seen men in our positions be treated differently in terms of power and money. I have friends who are male producers who are somewhat at the same status that I am in Hollywood. If you took the movies I&amp;#039;ve produced and the money they made at the box office and then the fees we were paid for the movies, you would directly see that they&amp;#039;ve made more money than I have. They have been paid more on the front end and the back end on the movies. Men still do better in the deals.&amp;quot;  If you&amp;#039;re feeling riled, good\u2014but in terms of a battle plan, there is no studio castle or Hollywood regime to overthrow. The perception that Hollywood studio executives are 100 percent male and make 100 percent of the decisions is false. Conversely, there are hundreds of people making decisions that impact content\u2014agents, studio executives, producers, directors, writer, casting directors, etc.\u2014 and only roughly 15 percent of those are women. For the 85 percent that are male, they are not all conspiring in some cigar-smoke-filled room discussing how to keep women out. Instead, more commonly, it is the unconscious omission that leaves women out of the picture.  But change is happening. Maybe not in waves, but in ripples. Kirsten &amp;quot;Kiwi&amp;quot; Smith, writer of 10 Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde, and The House Bunny, speaks of many men who positively influenced her career. &amp;quot;Mark Vahradian, an executive at Disney, bought our script, and he&amp;#039;d bring us into his office and we&amp;#039;d have four-hour notes meetings, and he&amp;#039;d brainstorm with us and put in a good word and spread the word about us and our abilities to other people. Anytime someone takes a chance on you, that&amp;#039;s a huge deal.&amp;quot; She continues, &amp;quot;when they say yes to you\u2014every time someone says yes \u2014you feel empowered and that you can do anything you want.&amp;quot;  Similarly, the work of Mason Novick (producer of Juno and Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body) shows an important departure in the seemingly gender-biased Hollywood climate. He says, &amp;quot;Since I&amp;#039;ve been out here, I&amp;#039;ve never known the business to not have a lot of powerful women in it.&amp;quot; Novick also helped a very powerful woman, writer Diablo Cody, make her way into the Hollywood community and continues to serve as a producer on her films. He explains his thought process: &amp;quot;I love working with writers. I&amp;#039;m much more into finding and breaking in new writers.&amp;quot; Novick seems geared toward good material rather than gender: &amp;quot;All the movies I&amp;#039;ve made have one thing in common. They started with good scripts.&amp;quot; Additionally, Novick made a move uncommon in the Hollywood climate but not seen as exceptional to him. On the film Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body, he put a female director (Karyn Kusama) on a project written by another female (Diablo Cody). Though it is very common for a male director to be hired on a project written by another male, the double female pairing rarely happens in Hollywood (unless the director is also the writer, as in the case with writer-director Nancy Meyers).  Though the percentage of women in the business is small, even their smallest inputs have changed the Hollywood landscape significantly. Linda Woolverton (writer of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Alice in Wonderland) was one of very few women in the room when she started at Disney and noticed a pattern in Disney&amp;#039;s female protagonists. &amp;quot;Disney was still living in the old-school victim/heroine world. [That] means she suffers, she takes abuse, and through it all she smiles and talks to little forest creatures. Through it all, she&amp;#039;s pretty and she sings. This is a victim/heroine to me. [And] I have to say it&amp;#039;s a point of view of women.&amp;quot; Woolverton spent four years hammering out the character of Belle of Beauty and the Beast, desiring a different path for her. &amp;quot;Every moment, everything that Belle did, was a choice. She has to make things happen. Make things occur. But it was a very difficult thing to do.&amp;quot; Woolverton worked with the animation team to ensure that Belle would be reading books, working with maps, and not baking cakes. In the end, Beauty was the first animated film to be nominated for best picture.  Although the percentages of women working in key roles hasn&amp;#039;t budged significantly in the past four decades, the amount of women helping other women is extraordinary. Organizations like the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media, USC Film School&amp;#039;s Women in Cinematic Arts, and the networking group Next Gen Femmes are a sampling of the different groups with aims to nourish female filmmakers and unrepresented voices. Additionally, on a more individual level, women in Hollywood, like producers Jennifer and Suzanne Todd, writer Kirsten &amp;quot;Kiwi&amp;quot; Smith, and director Mary Harron, look not just forward, but backward to help and mentor women just starting out in the business. In essence, with more women behind the scenes in key roles, we should start to see an increase in the number of females in the ranks and females in the leads.   Suzanne Todd echoes the desire for more female content with an industry outsider&amp;#039;s perspective. Todd says, &amp;quot;I had an interesting experience lately. I went on a trip, with a bunch of girls my age...and of course all they wanted to know was why Hollywood doesn&amp;#039;t make any movies that they want to watch. And I said, `Oh that&amp;#039;s interesting, what do you mean?&amp;#039; And they each kind of individually over the course of the week told me they have in their iPad or they&amp;#039;re watching over and over again It&amp;#039;s Complicated. They all told me they had watched it 10 times. They said there are new movies every week\u2014why do we get only a movie every six months? Can&amp;#039;t we get It&amp;#039;s Complicated 2, the sequel?&amp;quot;   Lauzen continues to subscribe to the Field of Dreams notion &amp;quot;if you build it, they will come.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Women are so thirsty for great female-driven stories. And even when they&amp;#039;re not great, if you see one or more female protagonist, I&amp;#039;ll go see it just because I&amp;#039;m so hungry for that.&amp;quot;  But until powerful women behind the camera, like Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Mary Harron, and so many others working above and below the line in Hollywood, are seen as the rule and not the exception, they will continue to fight an uphill battle\u2014and will continue to display their formidable talents, as well as their resilience. Dawn Hudson, the executive director at Film Independent, says that when confronting any of these diverse challenges in the film industry, her battle cry is: &amp;quot;Yeah. Okay. So what? Let&amp;#039;s go!&amp;quot; Click here for our list of 15 female trailblazers who really make the movie magic happen &amp;amp;gt;  Ashley Terrill is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, and was part of the production team behind the 2009 Academy Award-nominated and 2010 Primetime Emmy Award-winning documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon). "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a11445/reel-world-women-power-in-hollywood-514517/>