With the Weinstein scandal/affair/gate/catastrophe still ricocheting through Hollywood and the world, attention has turned to those around him: men whose mea culpas for not speaking up are becoming more specific by the day. George Clooney and Matt Damon have both rushed to say that while they knew he was a jerk and a sexual hustler, they, well here’s Damon:
“I knew he was … a womaniser … I wouldn’t want to be married to the guy. But … the criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought … was going on. Absolutely not.”
Others have been even more giving with Quentin Tarantino saying he “didn’t do enough” knowing what he knew — which he also limited to harassment and “shakedowns”, not the rapes of which Weinstein is now accused.
To judge from all this, you’d think Hollywood was as it was in 1955, powerful men and would-be starlets. But that is one of the curious things about this ever-widening cultural chasm, separating past and future. Hollywood, far from being a male bastion, is an industry where women have reached executive status in great numbers.
Thus, the Elle magazine 2015 power list of women in Hollywood has the following studio heads:
- Stacey Snider, co-chair, 20th Century Fox
- Kathleen Kennedy, president, Lucasfilm
- Nancy Utley, co-president, Fox Searchlight
- Elizabeth Gabler, president, Fox 2000
- Terry Press, president, CBS Films
- Hannah Minghella, president, Tristar
- Diane Nelson, president, DC Entertainment
- Sue Kroll, president, marketing and distribution, Warner Brothers
- Megan Colligan, president, marketing and distribution, Paramount
- Donna Langley, chair, Universal
This is not merely one or two inclusions in a male field, nor is it a recent thing. Many of the major studios are led by women, and have been for a decade or so. These are all women whose power would have been equal to, or greater than, Weinstein’s. They, like the many male power figures who gave Weinstein a free pass, are plugged into gossip through agents, casting directors, etc. Many of these studios co-produced with Miramax. Snider, ex-CEO of Dreamworks, worked directly with Weinstein. Minghella was a former PA of his. Terry Press, who led the charge to have him expelled from the Academy, told The New Yorker that the toxic, bullying work culture of Miramax (Weinstein’s earlier company) was known to all.
Perhaps we can assume that none of them knew anything about Weinstein’s activities. But talking in more general terms, how would it come about that an industry with many female power figures might be as remiss in dealing with predation as a male-dominated one?
The answer is about class, scarcity and power, not gender. The supply of young actors, male and female, vastly exceeds demand. In screen media, expressive talent — beyond a certain competence — is not an essential. Those who can do that, come from far and wide. It can be reasonably supposed that many of them will do a lot more. Those that won’t, will talk, but not report. It’s absurd to blame female actors for not stopping Weinstein; he had great power over their careers — all the more so, because it was clear to hopefuls that no one was stopping him. But he ran a small studio, comparatively; he would have been powerless against collective action by the majors.
But if there is no scarcity of actors, there is of hit-makers, and for many years, Weinstein’s hit ratio was too good for other studios to ignore him. In an industry where “nobody knows anything”, and assessing how a movie has to be made or reshaped is an art that can’t be formalised, someone with the gift of it can write their own ticket. Weinstein didn’t make much money, relative to his peers, but he got Oscars and prestige — for himself and co-producers and people around him.
Major studio heads — male or female — rely on such figures for the difference between success and failure. It’s very interesting indeed that Weinstein has come crashing down, after his golden touch appears to have evaporated, with a string of underperforming movies. Was he safe as long as he was successful? He may be the most monstrous figure in all of this. He may not be the most ruthless, or the most dissembling.
Of little importance in the scheme of human affairs, the Weinstein issue at least alerts us to this. The division of power and class is the real one. Gender solidarity against oppression is something of a hopeful construct. Appeals to broad and simplistic notions of patriarchy, often mask other power divisions, in an often self-interested way. The suggestion that Weinstein couldn’t have got away with it if women were in charge of Hollywood is obviously false. Women are in charge of a great deal of Hollywood, and he and others did, and do, and will. Is that due to the nature of that industry — or a wider truth about where real power lies?
Mate. I’m so old I remember Thatcher; I gave up on “gender solidarity against oppression” 40 odd years ago. BUT there is advantage in having more female bosses because, you know, they tend not to rape you. In the absence of a more successful class victory, that helps atm
Guy, it is worthwhile to reflect that gender divisions overlap with other social relations of exploitation and oppression but, why claim, quite wrongly, that our social world has inherited old social relations between husbands and wives that involved sexual exploitation and oppression of women. It is, after all, less than a hundred years since women got suffrage in the UK. These relations are falling apart in our modern world at a pleasing increasing rate, though they have not disappeared.
I can remember the way my life began with shared assumptions about the way women were there for men and had no authority behind their views. Gradually, I was reconstructed by myself and others, helped along with a good dose of love, after I grew up in my late twenties (not everyone grows up at the point they become adults and some never manage it, with Trump a good, immensely worrying case).
Yes, many women identify primarily with their class position, regardless of whether this also depends on a man, but this does not alter the fact that they have to fight through the remnants of the patriarchy to assert their part in there system by which society is governed.
The recent rise of women to positions of power in the media world is to be welcomed as part of the ongoing breakdown of patriarchal relations but deplored to the extent that bolsters the world that Chris Mitchell saw as his task, filling the world with images of inevitable power struggles and dominance by a few.
One day that world will start to fall apart in earnest too but this foes not stop my taking pleasure in seeing that women will increasingly become treated as equals and with respect, partly as a result of the outing of Weinstein.
A “not” should go before “inherited” in line three, while a “there” should read “the” and “foes” should read “does” .
Harvey Weinstein could come back from this. He just has to come out as Donald Trump’s number one fan ever. America’s definitely weird enough to wear that sh*t now – it’s totally sussed that the women’s ‘rights’ movement is ultimately actually about privilege.
I cannot understand why the bigger issue, abject obedience as the norm throughout society, is not being discussed.
“We are all Weinsteins”?
Good lord. This is amazing cherry picking, and shows Guy Rundle either doesn’t know how to google or that he is deliberately distorting the picture. To take one example: Megan Colligan is indeed the President of Marketing and Distribution at Paramount. She is also the ONLY woman in a team of 19 executives, as a cursory look at the Wikipedia page demonstrates. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Paramount_Pictures_executives In 21st Century Fox there are five women of 23 executives. (I couldn’t be bothered to google the rest). As a whole women now comprise 17% of all positions in Hollywood, from executive producers to writers, producers, directors etc. Of course we know that class plays into this picture – there is this little known thing called “intersectionality” that’s about how different things factor in to structural inequities. Unless you believe that 17% women means equal female power in Hollywood, it seems to me that gender does indeed play in this picture.
At what percentage do the women that have executive positions stop dealing with someone who was apparently widely known as a serial rapist within Hollywood?
I assume Rundle is also happy with the fact that the publishing industry is full of women while the vast majority of books reviewed continue to be by (and reviewed by) men. I also note that he fails to mention the number of films actually written or directed by women.