A Few Good Women

By RICHARD CORLISS

When is a majority a minority? When the majority (of the U.S. population) is women, and the medium is movies.

The folks behind this week's Academy Awards ceremony tried hard to make Hollywood seem a haven of equality. They devised a special tribute, "Oscar Celebrates Women and the Movies." But the salute only underlined the plight of women in movies. Something has gone deeply wrong when Hollywood, which built its worldwide appeal on boy-meets-girl, needs affirmative action for women.

"That Oscar theme is a joke," says film critic Molly Haskell, "because men are now playing all the roles. They get the macho roles and the sweet- sensitive roles, and they play the sexual pinups too. The best woman's role of 1992 was in The Crying Game, and that was played by a man."

At this stag banquet, the pickings -- or leavings -- for women were slim. They got to play wives and invalids, to judge from this year's five Oscar nominees for Best Actress. Oh, yes, Mary McDonnell in Passion Fish, Susan Sarandon in Lorenzo's Oil, Emma Thompson in Howards End, Catherine Deneuve in Indochine and Michelle Pfeiffer in Love Field all played strong, exemplary idealists. The actresses all received critical plaudits. But what is the sound of two hands clapping in a nearly empty theater, when other rooms in the multiplex are filled with crowds cheering for teenage turtles and the righteous Marines of A Few Good Men? The five Best Actress films have earned only $36 million total at the North American box office -- less than the cheapo comedy Encino Man. The one "hit" in the quintet, Howards End, has grossed less in its yearlong run than Batman Returns did in its opening weekend.

To an extent, the Best Actress list is misleading as an indicator of women's drawing power in American movies. The Academy might well have nominated three actresses who gave terrific performances in high-earning movies: Pfeiffer, poignant and powerful as the mouse turned tiger (I am Catwoman, hear me roar) in Batman Returns; Meryl Streep, devastatingly funny as a star facing middle age in Death Becomes Her; and Sharon Stone, her sensuality a tantalizing blend of glamour and horror, in Basic Instinct. But Oscar, a gentleman and a liberal, prefers women's roles that are role models. He might feel uneasy citing actresses whose characters tread the minefield that separates traditional femininity and modern feminism. "The general feeling," says director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes), "is that if a woman is bright, aggressive and successful, she's got to be a bitch."

The movie industry's feminists might feel uneasy too. They look at the movie landscape and see a wasteland, where the meaty roles women get tend to be predators or sex kittens. "Hollywood is trying to resexualize its women back into submission," says Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the feminist buddy movie Thelma & Louise. "This whole idea that women are powerful because they're sexy is a crock. Sex isn't power. Money is power. But the women who do best in this society are the ones who are the most complacent in the role of women as sexual commodity, be it Madonna, Julia Roberts or Sharon Stone. If Stone hadn't spread her legs, would Basic Instinct have done as well as it did?"

And if Stone's character hadn't kept an ice pick at her bedside, would the thriller have been a hit? "We've got a lot of women as bad guys," says producer Lynda Obst (The Fisher King). "It's a reflection, I think, of men's fears about women." Basic Instinct, plus The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female, made 1992 the Year of the Killer Woman -- of the vixen, nanny or best friend who uses sex as the appetizer for destruction. And 1993 could be the Year of the Woman as Door Prize. In Honeymoon in Vegas, Mad Dog and Glory and the forthcoming Indecent Proposal, starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore, a young woman is the gift one man offers another. "You couldn't get away with this retro idea with any other kind of person," fumes Khouri. "Would Eddie Murphy star in a movie where he was a gift to a white person?"

Hey, Ms. Khouri, it's work -- and actresses aren't getting much of that, in good roles or bad. Writers and directors will still make room for women's roles if they fit the new conventions of "nurturer or shrew," as comedian % Ann Magnuson defines them in her new one-woman show. "Basically, I vacillate between those two roles," she says. "The dialogue boils down to either 'Fme' or 'Fyou.' "

Is this part of some diabolical conspiracy to reduce women to the sum of their private parts? No; the surface reason is simpler. "It's economics," says writer-director Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally . . ., This Is My Life). "Movies cost more than ever. What studios look for when they sink $20 million into a movie is some way to get their money back. So they put one of 12 male stars in it."

The studios also like movies that earn their money back quickly with a big gross on the opening weekend. And what group stokes those grosses? Young guys who, having nothing better to do with their Friday and Saturday nights, line up to be the first in their school to see a highly hyped action drama. It's the true revenge of the nerds. "The Ninja Turtles audience shows up," says Obst. "The women's audience doesn't -- not in bulk. And you need that bulk business for a picture to be widely released." In industry lingo, hit films can be classified by gender: action movies (Batman Returns) have immediate muscle; women's pictures (The Bodyguard) have long legs. As Ephron notes, "Teenage boys are driving the business because they'll go early and go back again. That's why it's easier to get a movie made about a man with a hangnail than a woman with a truly interesting problem."

And that's why there are, at the moment, no surefire female stars; Julia Roberts is on sabbatical, Jodie Foster had a low grosser (Little Man Tate) between two hits (The Silence of the Lambs and Sommersby), and Sharon Stone is not yet bankable. "It's been a long time," says Columbia Pictures chairman Mark Canton, "since women have had any reliable impact on big box office." Decades, to be exact. In the '60s women were the top-billed stars in eight of the yearly box-office champs: West Side Story, Cleopatra, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Hawaii, The Graduate, Funny Girl and Love Story. But since 1970 only one top-grossing film (E.T., an anomaly) has had an actress's name at the top.

In many hit "women's pictures" (Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes), the story was considered the star. And in most of them, the starring actresses were in Hollywood's pariah category: women over 40. "It takes 20 years to make someone a good actor," says SAG's Kathryn Swink. "And when women reach their potential, they're shut out."

So are audiences, male and female, who want in their movie diet something tastier and more varied than the raw meat of macho adventures and comedies. Filmmakers are kissing off half their audience on the assumption that men go out to the movies while women stay home and watch TV -- where women's and family issues tend to rule the sitcoms and movies of the week, and where aging screen queens (Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Candice Bergen and now Faye Dunaway) find a congenial home.

Well, women do get out of the house, as indicated by two surprise hits of 1992: Sister Act, whose star, Whoopi Goldberg, could earn a man-size $7.5 million for the sequel, and Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own. Now, says Obst, "it's easier for me to pitch movies that are close to my heart because I have more models I can point to."

For the sake of its own survival, Hollywood must believe what Canton says: "If we put women in good roles in good stories, female audiences will come." If Hollywood cinema can explore the full range of emotion and conviction -- which means putting more women on both sides of the camera -- then maybe next year Oscar will really have something to celebrate.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/Los Angeles