Felicity Chaplin

In recent years, Hollywood has been forced to take a long hard look at itself. Since Alyssa Milano popularised the hashtag #MeToo in 2017, and the Time’s Up movement was launched in 2018, women in the film industry have been sharing their stories of sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Film critic Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood is not the first attempt at a revisionist history of the Hollywood film industry. Several books have appeared that reread Hollywood through a feminist lens: Laura L.S. Bauer’s Hollywood Heroines: The most influential women in film history (2018), Jill Tietjen and Barbara Bridges’ Hollywood: Her story, an illustrated history of women and the movies (2019), and Naomi McDougall Jones’s The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside our revolution to dismantle the gods of Hollywood (2020). They share the view, as O’Hara’s opening observation puts it, that ‘the Hollywood dream has not been open to everyone and, with a large majority of roles and senior jobs going to men, its scales have often been tilted against women’. Hollywood is – or has been for a long time – a ‘rigged game’.

Women have been active in Hollywood from the beginning, and O’Hara recognises that early Hollywood was very ‘women friendly’. By the 1930s, however, women were already being ‘written out of film history’. This began with the studio system, which had its heyday from the 1920s to the 1940s, when female directors and executives ‘were replaced with female-friendly directors and executives’. The studio system also saw a rise in incidents of sexual harassment and assault as well as forced abortions for women who wanted to secure roles. These were largely facilitated by the economic rationalism of the studio system, which, intentionally or not, favoured men. Women stars were often forced into the role of ingenue or ‘love interest’ and had their contracts suspended if they bucked the system. The situation was worse for women of colour. Nonetheless, some women resisted; particularly those actresses and directors who had enough visibility to shake the system. The book is full of such stories: women standing their ground for better contracts (Olivia de Havilland) or using their suspensions to study the art of directing or editing (Ida Lupino), all of which helped inspire women to persevere in the industry. O'Hara also offers a compendium of neglected films directed by women for the reader to discover or to rediscover with a new appreciation.

Women vs Hollywood rightly rejects the inherently patriarchal claims that women neither were good enough nor wanted to succeed as much as men did. Hollywood, she says, ‘shut them out’, sometimes deliberately. The burden of this book is to show when, how, and why this intentional or ‘conscious’ suppression took place. When? The end of the silent era. During the studio system that followed, women played a less prominent role; until the 1970s, almost all executive positions at major studios were filled by men. How and why this happened is more complicated. It was, according to O’Hara, a situation not so much ‘engineered’ by men as ‘born of patriarchy’. Men may not be strictly to blame, but they certainly benefited from it. O’Hara points to systemic issues, unconscious bias, and the prevailing idea that women’s stories were deemed less important or interesting than men’s.

The book moves in a broad sweep, taking in 125 years of cinema. It is not, however, just a history of women working (or not) in cinema; it is, more importantly, a critique of Hollywood as an institution and certain ancillary structures and discourses that have been hostile to women. O’Hara considers women pioneers of cinema such as Alice Guy and Lois Weber, the male-dominated studio system, the Hays Code, auteur theory, the ‘extremely male’ New Hollywood, feminist film theory and the male gaze, ‘the movie brats [who] became the grand old men of cinema’, the franchise and blockbuster phenomenon, the #MeToo movement and gender pay gap, and the ‘industry’s gatekeepers’ (festivals, critics, and awards bodies).

O’Hara writes in a lively, journalistic style filled with quips and puns and irreverent digs, but with a commitment to her serious subject matter. There is a narrative logic that holds the reader’s interest. O’Hara uses contemporary analogies to give the reader with little knowledge of early Hollywood reference points (think of Chris Hemsworth if you don’t know Douglas Fairbanks) and draws parallels between eras to establish continuity (the ‘casting couch’ of Joan Crawford’s day prefigures the Weinstein affair). To ground her argument, she also draws on film historians, academics, and interviews with women directors.

At times, O’Hara engages in speculation and shies away from analysis in favour of statistics and anecdotes. However disheartening, these are interesting and enlightening. She makes no secret that this book is a polemic, and a traditional feminist polemic threatens to run aground on the rocks of intersectionality. O’Hara is more than aware of this; indeed, it soon becomes clear that the word ‘women’ is really a metonym for the Hollywood subaltern (women, yes, but also, non-white, trans, disabled, and LGBTIQ+) and that the word ‘Hollywood’ stands in for the white, cis, able-bodied, hetero male.

Overall, O’Hara is optimistic about the future of Hollywood, proposing ‘a new New Hollywood, one that actually opens its doors to diverse voices’. While this review was being written, the Oscars were announced. For only the second time in history, a woman, Chloé Zhao, received the Best Director Award for Nomadland. If, as O’Hara concludes, Hollywood is ‘on the brink of change’, this just may be a sign that this change has arrived. g

A rigged game

Hollywood’s long history of misogyny

Felicity Chaplin

Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film

by Helen O’Hara

Robinson $32.99 pb, 354 pp

Felicity Chaplin teaches in the European Languages program at Monash University. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: Transnational and transmedia stardom (Manchester University Press, 2020) and La Parisienne in Cinema: Between art and life (Manchester University Press, 2017).