Silenced By Hollywood

Despite public perception that women’s voices are now being heard in the film and TV industries, the price of speaking out can still be steep

- Amanda Fortini

In 2012, actor, writer and producer Naomi McDougall Jones set out to make her first feature film, Imagine I’m Beautiful, a psychological drama about the friendship between “two interesting, complex female characters,” in her words. She and her female co-producer began having conversations with investors and producers — primarily though not entirely male — who would often make comments like “Well, girls, you know you’re going to have to get a male producer onboard at some point just so people will trust you with their money.”

“Literally, it was this never-ending refrain of ‘Yeah, but nobody wants to see movies about women,’ ” recalls McDougall Jones, whose book, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, was published in February. “ ‘You really have to think about making something else.’ Or ‘Is there a lesbian angle you could explore?’ or ‘Could you have more blood?’ I was like, Oh, my God, what the fuck is happening?”

Around that time, Stacy Smith, a professor and researcher at the University of Southern California who had been tracking gender and diversity in top-grossing films since 2007, noted in a Hollywood Reporter article that of the top 100 films of 2013, two of them — two! — were directed by women and that women claimed less than a third of all speaking parts.