Everyone knows how I feel about the term “chick flicks” and the deep-rooted misogyny in our culture that puts female-centered media at a huge disadvantage in mainstream television, film, and publishing. Many female authors have had to use pseudonyms because publishers have found that otherwise men will see a woman’s name attached to the book and not give it a chance.
It doesn’t surprise me considering basically anything that comes out in theaters that isn’t about men going around killing each other or trying to get laid is considered a “chick flick”, which of course has a negative connotation. Meanwhile women still turn up in droves to see whatever lame ass Michael Bay flick is out this month.
Yet for all the obstacles women’s films have, the ones that do quite well don’t get their fair share of credit. Even after Juno, even after Twilight, even after Mamma Mia, even after Sex and the City, it’s still a huge uphill battle to get studios to greenlight films with female protagonists. And as Meryl Streep explains, it’s not just the studios, but also the theater chains who decide which films to carry.
“It’s always a shock to the studio,” Streep says with real firmness, “because men run the studios and live their own fantasies through them. It’s harder for a man to jump inside a woman character’s mind and imagine, ‘This could happen to me’ than it is for a woman to imagine herself as a male character.” But surely the profits count? “They see it and they understand that there is a market and it will make them an enormous amount of money, but we all respond to instinct and it’s their inner boy that jumps up and goes: ‘Yeah, I wanna see another GI Joe’.”
“Parts are rare,” Streep says, “the amount of product is rare. It’s a large machine that markets these films, that makes theatre [cinema] owners commit their theatres half a year in advance — that’s how it works. Are they gonna buy GI Joe or are they gonna buy Mamma Mia!?”
Mamma Mia! did great business, I say. “They’re still not sure,” Streep counters. “You need a good salesman. Those films have done well, yes, that audience is there, but it doesn’t go on the first weekend [which the industry nervously observes].”
In a separate interview screenwriter/director Nora Ephron weighs in on the problem as well.
When she was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 2007, Ephron said she took up directing because “90% of the men directing movies have no interest in women in any real way, except as girlfriends or wives. They don’t really want to make movies about them, and they don’t.”
They’re both absolutely right. With Mamma Mia and Sex and the City grossing over a billion dollars collectively worldwide, and Julie & Julia already grossing over $80 million on its way to 90 million one would really wonder why Hollywood isn’t clamoring to cash in on more women’s films. But as has been stated before, whenever a female film does well it’s always written off as a “fluke” or the the little film that could. But every time some mindless action film with some “hot chick” running around like a piece of meat needing to be rescued does well at the box office, it’s reason to make 20 more just like it.
New research reveals–not surprisingly–that female writers, directors, producers, etc. fare better in the world of indie films–though still make up only about 24% of the field.
On the heels of the release of Hilary Swank’s new Amelia Earhart biopic, which is 
