TIFF 2014: Hollywood's silent women
CBC News | Posted: September 4, 2014 9:00 AM | Last Updated: September 6, 2014
Don't let the red carpet fool you. Hollywood is still a man's world, say industry insiders
Take a glance at the star lineup for the Toronto International Film Festival and you’d be forgiven for assuming that Hollywood’s leading ladies are a tremendously powerful lot, free to pick and choose from a plethora of meaty roles. But the reality for most actresses is far less glamorous.
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A recent study found that women represent just 30 per cent of all speaking characters in top movies — the same proportion as American cinema in the 1940s.
Despite the major box office success of female-led films like Gravity, Maleficent and The Hunger Games series, women made up just 15 per cent of protagonists in the top 100 movies last year.
Films with clear female leads are sprinkled across TIFF’s galas and special presentations (like Reese Witherspoon in Wild; Kate Winslet in A Little Chaos and Xavier Dolan’s Mommy to name a few), but the vast majority of Hollywood productions at the festival are dominated by men.
Getting female stories to screen
TIFF's artistic director Cameron Bailey insists it's not for a lack of trying. Festival programmers make a concerted effort to bring female stories to screen.
"We've been paying a lot of attention to how women are represented and how women filmmakers represent their own stories—the stories they want to tell—in the last few years," he explained. "[But] we have noticed despite all the efforts that were made in past years . . . there hasn't been a significant amount of change."
As the author and founder of the industry website Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein fights for gender parity across the entertainment business. But equality, she says, is a long way off with fewer than 5 per cent of all studio movies in the past years led by a female director.
"What is happening is that the vision of women is missing, and this is a problem because we need to have the experiences of women in our theatres and on screen so we can all benefit from them."
In the above video, Silverstein describes how Hollywood's relationship with the international market is contributing to the lack of female stories.