A decade ago, Stacey Snider was a production executive working at TriStar Pictures, with a script she believed in passionately.
The script told the story of a widower whose son goes on talk radio to try and find a wife for his dad. It was written by a woman who had earned a reputation as one of the best comedic writers in the business, but who had yet to helm a single movie. This time, she wanted to direct -- which made Snider's bosses very, very nervous.
"There was a real appreciation for her talent," Snider recalls, "but from some of the men I worked with, there was a resistance to the idea of giving a woman that much responsibility, that much money."
The studio's female executives differed. "It wasn't that the women at the company had this incredible vision or mandate," Snider notes. "We just knew that of course she could be responsible and handle that money, because we could and we did."
The studio finally took the risk, and the result was "Sleepless in Seattle," one of the biggest hits of the early 1990s, which helped propel Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to superstar status and made Nora Ephron a director to bank on.
And Snider is now chairman of Universal Pictures, one of three women running major studios' movie divisions.
By any measure, that is a huge leap forward. Just how huge becomes even clearer when one compares it to what happened a quarter-century ago, when the news that Sherry Lansing had become the first female production president in town (at Twentieth Century Fox) proved an event so cataclysmic that it triggered front-page headlines in newspapers around the world.
With Snider as chairman of Universal, Lansing as chairman of Paramount and Amy Pascal as chairman of Columbia Pictures, women have reached the highest position of power within the film business.
And they are not isolated: Throughout the industry, women are in pivotal posts. Gail Berman, entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting; Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000; Nancy Josephson, co-president of ICM; Laurie MacDonald, one of the top staffers at DreamWorks; Mary Parent, co-president of production for Universal; Nancy Tellem, entertainment president of CBS; Dana Walden, president of Twentieth Century Fox Television.
These women's effect on the film and TV industry is subtle but undeniable. While almost all of them insist their job is to make good commercial films or TV shows, regardless of their sex, they have inevitably broadened studio thinking.
Gabler, for one, talks of recently reevaluating several scripts and trying to reimagine them with a woman in the leading role.
"We have looked at a lot of our projects and said, 'Should we switch the gender of the lead?'" she acknowledges. "One project we are talking about now is '10th Justice,' a thriller about Supreme Court clerks. We have been looking for a way to revitalize the project, and one of the ideas we had was to turn the male protagonist into a woman."
Lansing similarly has a history of creating strong parts for women -- as her peers will be the first to admit.
"I think Sherry Lansing is a pretty unsung feminist," Pascal says. "She has been making movies about strong female characters from the time she was at Fox: from 'Nine to Five' to 'Fatal Attraction' to 'The Accused' to 'First Wives Club' to 'Double Jeopardy' to 'Tomb Raider.' Her movies always have very strong women who don't take [nonsense] from anybody."
This is a trait that is likely to increase as women continue to break new ground -- as they have done over the past year.
This year, Laura Ziskin, a pioneer producer, was named to produce the Academy Awards telecast, thereby becoming the first woman to do so on her own. And two women -- Valerie Harper and Melissa Gilbert -- became the front-runners in the race to be the next president of the Screen Actors Guild. (Gilbert took the title in early November.) In none of these cases was it ever considered unusual or even memorable that a woman was doing the job.
Talk to most of these women, and they will tell you that Hollywood has become largely oblivious to the sex of its employees.
"There are women producers, women directors, actresses -- Julia Roberts is getting as much pay as any man -- and I just feel we are moving more and more to a gender-blind business," notes Lansing, the grande dame of Hollywood's female executives, and one of the most consistently successful industry executives of either sex. "It is not perfect, but I can't help remembering what it was like when I started: No women were running studios, and it was very rare to find a woman director. Nobody even thinks anything about a woman in those jobs now."
Universal's Parent, relatively new to Hollywood's upper ranks, confirms Lansing's observations. "I have never looked at myself as being any different, from a work point of view, as a female," she says. "Maybe I am fortunate that there were women way ahead of me who faced obstacles and broke through them and, because of that, created a better atmosphere for people like myself." There is no question that, today, women such as Parent have opportunities they would have never had in the days when Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer were running the majors.
Yet, scratch the surface, and a somewhat more complicated picture emerges.
Martha Lauzen, a communications professor at San Diego State University, conducts an annual study of women working on-screen and behind the scenes in the film industry and primetime television. In September, she released her latest findings, which indicate that -- while the situation is far from what it was a decade ago -- things appear to have plateaued over the past three years, and women comprise considerably less than 50% of the Hollywood workforce.
"The past year has seen virtually no change at all," Lauzen says. Last year, she notes, "Women comprised 17% of all the producers, writers, directors, editors and cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing films. That percentage has not changed in three years."
In primetime television, women comprised 24% of producers, writers, directors, cinematographers, editors and creators of comedies and dramas for the 2000-2001 season. The year before, the number was 23.5%, according to Lauzen's research.
Equally troubling is women's relative absence in front of the cameras. "If you look on-screen," Lauzen says, "women's representation actually declined last season. They took 40% of all characters in primetime in the 1999-2000 season, while last season they comprised only 38%." That is a decline, but in statistical terms, it is not a significant one. However, Lauzen draws a worrying conclusion from it. "There is a perception within the community that women are making steady and perceptible progress," she notes. "But the numbers don't reflect that conventional wisdom."
Robin Swicord, a veteran screenwriter ("Little Women"), agrees with the point that there is a gap between perception and reality. If Lansing, Pascal and other women hold high posts, she argues, they actually have far less power than their male predecessors. "The job of being head of Paramount or Columbia is a different job today than 15 or 20 years ago," Swicord says. "They have much less power than the men who used to hold those jobs. And all of the women who are in these high jobs still have male bosses.
"There are plenty of female executives, lawyers, agents," she continues, "there are a lot of women who work in film, but there are not a lot of women who get their films made -- either writers or directors. And below the line, you can count the number of female DPs on one hand."
What is intriguing is the disparity between the evident progress of women in some areas and the lack of it in others. Take producers, for instance: In 1992, women constituted 13% of producers on the Top 100 feature films; by 2000, they were up to 22%.
In contrast, regardless of the successes of Ephron and other women such as Penny Marshall and Mimi Leder, women continue to find relatively few jobs as feature directors: They directed 5% of major movies in 1992 and only 7% in 2000.
As cinematographers, they have fared even worse: In 1992, they made up 0% of cinematographers on the top major studio films; last year, they were up to a mere 2%.
How does one explain the discrepancy between individual experiences of women in Hollywood -- the kind of positive outlook registered by Lansing and Snider and Pascal -- and Lauzen's statistics? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that change does not happen steadily, but rather in occasional leaps and bounds.
"If there's a quantum leap over a certain period of years, it then takes a number of years before the next generation is ready," says Ruth Vitale, president of Paramount Classics. "There is a delay factor, just like in the stock market: When you watch the stock market charts, they go up and down, but over the course of a lifetime, they get better and better."
If that is the case, then 2001, whatever its triumphs, will perhaps be remembered as a year of consolidation or even a year of incremental retreat on the whole. Indeed, while Ziskin was being named to run the Oscars and Riskin was chosen to head the WGA, other high-level women left the executive ranks.
Susanne Daniels from the WB, Betty Cohen from the Cartoon Network, Nadia Bronson from Universal and Jean MacCurdy from Warner Bros. Animation all exited their posts this year.
At the same time, the highest level of show business -- at that nexus with the corporate world -- remained curiously closed to women, who have yet to penetrate the ranks of the Sumner Redstones, Rupert Murdochs and Kirk Kerkorians.
"Imagine if half the entertainment companies were run by women," Pat Mitchell, president of PBS, asked in a recent speech. "Would there be a different reality on television? In the movies? Imagine if half the Fortune 500 companies were run by women. Would more doors be open to women returning to the workforce? Would men find it easier to take paternity leave? Would there be more women in the No. 2 and 3 and 4 jobs than there are now? Of course there would be. And that's the point."
Lansing believes women will reach those highest ranks, if and when they want to.
"My theory is: There will be some day when there will be a woman Redstone or Murdoch, just like there will one day be a woman president of the United States," she says.
The more important question now, she and other executives note, is to determine what can help women reach those positions -- and not just those, but any in the industry where they might be underrepresented. The way to do it, they say, is by expanding the available opportunities at the lower levels.
"One would want to see women encouraged to go into the areas that have proven to be the farming grounds for the guys -- music videos, commercials, film school," Snider says. "The reason there are a lot of women executives and producers is that women were traditionally encouraged to go into story jobs, which led to executive positions -- and they have done so for 50 years. If you look at our industry's history, we were encouraged to go into those fields. Now we need to encourage women to go into fields traditionally reserved for men. When Alicia Keys does her next video," Snider adds, "she could hire a female director. And who knows, maybe she'd find the next Brett Ratner -- Brenda Ratner, let's say."
When that happens to a significant degree, there will be no more need for issues such as these. But perhaps at that point, the need to address another vitally important issue will arise: How women can reconcile their professional lives -- in a society still skewed toward an almost compulsive workaholism -- with their domestic lives.
"Women have come to realize that the idea of having it all is not possible, and something has to give," says Terry Press, marketing chief for DreamWorks. "I love my job. I like coming to work, but ultimately I'm a mommy first. And I do think the events of recent times have crystallized that for a lot of people. People at high levels have to understand that women who invest time in their children are investing time in the future of the country. It is not time that is simply taking them away from their jobs."
Only when the men in the very highest ranks recognize this and acknowledge it, Press believes, work and society can become properly integrated.
"The irony of feminism is this," Press says, "I believe I got where I am because my mother was at home."