The skinny on Hollywood

I’m searching for body fat in Hollywood. It’s the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and judging by the standards of the youth-obsessed network’s magenta carpet, blubber, let alone curves, or even softness is out of fashion. Girls -- and I mean girls, given their lack of womanly heft, glide by. Jessica Biel, in a loose black mini-dress. Jessica Alba, with sylph-like arms rising above her red puffy mini-dress. Cameron Diaz, at 34, the veritable grandma of the bunch in a black micro-dress, only inches longer than a bathing suit.

Not one woman won an award that night, but the few female presenters hovered like ethereal specters over such giant, solid, male movie stars as Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell. Host Sarah Silverman, in a parade of girlish dresses, presided like the tiny, squeaky voiced, mean girl from every high school nightmare.

It’s no newsflash that women are skinny in Hollywood -- by far skinnier than the 66% of Americans who qualify as overweight or obese. But are they getting skinnier? Or do we just read a lot more about them as an endless stream of celebrity rags and fashion mags chronicle their corporal exploits, alternately castigating and holding them up for public ridicule when their bones stick out (Attention: Kate Bosworth! Mischa Barton! Nicole Richie!) and celebrating the personal resourcefulness they exploited to lose excess poundage.

Some believe that yes, women in Hollywood are shrinking, even more than in previous decades. Amid the attention given recently to the finding, published in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, that obesity is “contagious” -- that people tend to get fatter when the people they consider friends get fatter -- these days Hollywood is giving ample evidence that the reverse is true as well.

It makes sense: Social norms affect a person’s weight. When a woman’s most successful peers have protruding bones, she’s going to feel pressure to head in that direction as well..

One person who’s noticed that Hollywood women are skinnier than ever is casting director Joseph Middleton, who has cast an array of youth-oriented films such as “American Pie”, “Go” and the upcoming “Jumper.” “The girls that are considered the ingénues of the day are getting thinner,” Middleton says. “You can tell, because the first year that you [audition] them, they come from Chicago, Ohio and Georgia, and they’re really pretty girls who are healthy.

“A year later, you read them and they look like slimmer Hollywood versions. I can’t tell you how many times producers and directors have said, ‘Well, she’s a little heavy for camera.’ I don’t think they’re saying, ‘We want these girls to be unhealthy,’ but they sure like that thinner version.”

The competition diet

Us editor in chief Janice Min, another close observer of Hollywood’s mores, agrees that extreme thinness “has definitely become an issue.” Min says for many actresses, it has come to seem like a question of survival. “Obviously, being a female celebrity, you’re in constant competition whether you want to believe it or not. You’re competing for roles, parts, male attention, and it’s a competition primarily involving looks. It’s a system of rewards, and you are rewarded for being the most beautiful, the sexiest, and the competition has almost extended to being the thinnest.”

The rest of us, meanwhile, have gotten so used to it that we’ve stopped seeing it. “On the red carpet, people used to wear outfits with sleeves and necklines that went up to their necks,” Min points out. “There’s been such a movement to show more and more and more, and it seems inevitable that the pursuit of the most perfect body you can achieve has consumed actresses. You don’t want to be the one actress whose photo is taken with two skinny actresses and you look like Shrek. Everyone’s eye has adjusted to the new reality that doesn’t reflect reality in the least.”

One major costume designer says that when looking for clothes for actresses, she can hardly find any in size 0 -- “They’re all sold out.”

“Look at the cast of the TV shows, they’re not even 0, they’re double 0,” says Min. “The competition to be thin, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of Hollywood’s readjusted eye that whenever an average-size woman -- a Jennifer Hudson or an America Ferrera -- bursts into the limelight, there’s the predictable magazine frenzy over robust women who still manage to be successful, who are not going to commit hari-kari over being a size 10. Of course, in the cases of Hudson and Ferrara, their curves were specific to the roles they broke out in -- in fact they became a shorthand for their character’s feistiness, for their willingness to defy the expected norms of their environments.

I remember seeing a costume exhibit of red-carpet gowns in the lobby of the ArcLight theater and realizing the experience was not that different from seeing period clothes from previous centuries in the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I realized with a shock that whoever could wear those tiny black Valentino and Armani gowns must be really, really small -- as diminutive as the presidential wives of centuries gone by, and the French aristocracy, circa the age of Marie Antoinette. With a little hemming, the clothes would look smashing on the largest-size teddy bear available from Build-A-Bear. In 100 years, one can imagine, people will look back at the whittled, hipless female celebrities of today as victims of a cultural definition of beauty as strange as those Renaissance women who plucked the hairs from their foreheads to extend their hairlines onto the tops of their heads.

Why are Hollywood women shrinking? We’re certainly not in any heyday of women’s power, as behind-the-scenes female power players increasingly disappear from the ranks, including onetime studio honchos such as Sherry Lansing, Gail Berman and Nina Jacobson. In front of the camera, it’s the same story. In a review of movies dating from June 2006 to June 2007, there were 185 films that featured male leads and only 47 that sported female leads -- meaning that there’s a lot of competition for parts.

It’s unclear what female star, if any, can truly open a movie, given that Julia Roberts, the undisputed box-office queen of the last decade, hasn’t appeared corporally in a movie since 2004. It’s true that TV is lately providing a font of great roles for women, even Oscar-winning actresses who have come to be perceived as box-office nonentities. Still, according to the Screen Actors Guild’s latest statistics, in 2004 men dominated the TV landscape too, with 84,108 roles to women’s 56,603.

Real actresses have curves

It’s not, of course, universal. Casting director Joanna Colbert, who used to run casting for Universal, notes that the women she auditions -- real actresses as opposed to MAWs (model actresses whatever) -- don’t look “underfed. They just look like they go to the gym all day long. It’s just something that is pervasive in any business that has to do with how you look.”

At least one top manager points out that those who compete most in the weight realm appear to be the same ones who live in the tabloids. “There’s a difference between that iconography and the working actors. Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Amber Tamblyn -- they all have very lovely, appropriate body types. They don’t look like they’ve come out of a prison camp.”

The skinny-minnies tend to be “the pop celebrities in the axis of fashion and celebrity. Instead of the fake boobs of 15 years ago, there’s a whole generation obsessed with being thin.” And there have been other shifts in the last 15 years that put more pressure on actresses to be thinner. As more and more actresses sideline officially or unofficially as fashion models, more appear to adopt the aesthetic of the modeling industry, which prefers stick-like female figures because they highlight the clothes better.

Party girls also tend to have access to certain drugs that are known to cause weight loss. When Lindsay Lohan was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, police said they found cocaine in her pocket. Paris Hilton recently told Larry King that she takes Adderall for attention deficit disorder. Both of these drugs are often used by women hoping to lose weight. Eating disorder expert Carolyn Costin, who has treated many Hollywood actresses and runs the Monte Nido treatment center, says she’s seen a rise in “the drugs used for attention deficit being crumpled up and snorted,” as well as more abuse of caffeine-related diet drugs. .

Min, who makes no apologies for making weight loss and gains a staple of Us magazine, points out that anyone would go a little nuts if pictures of themselves flooded the Web 24/7. “Being a celebrity is a form of narcissism in itself. If you saw pictures of yourself any time of the day where you could study your body, wondering, ‘Is it toned enough?’ -- it could lead you to insanity. In the same way that psychologists often describe celebrities as a bottomless pit of need, the desire to be thin is part of that. You can never have a perfect body. There is always one more part you can Botox, laser, tone, or do lipo.”

A comfortable age

Jodie FOSTER has noticed that when she’s asked to do photo shoots and the stylist brings her sample size clothes -- a 4 or a 6 -- they all fit her pretty well. “I’m 5 foot 3,” Foster says. “How can I wear the same size as a 6-2 lady? Does that mean that a 6-foot-tall person weighs the same as me?”

At 44, the double Oscar winner tends to be able to escape the tabloid glare and doesn’t pay much attention to the rage to be thin. That’s somewhat the prerogative of talent -- but also of age. Foster knows she’s past what Hollywood considers the sell-by date for women. “I’m 44. Nobody cares about me,” she says matter of factly. She notes that the whole idea of Hollywood has changed, from the center of the motion picture arts and business, to the center of fashion, beauty, and commercialism. “It’s the whole ‘I’m wearing this’ thing,” Foster says, mimicking the line actors toss out to reporters on the red carpet, plugging whoever made their dress, usually obtained gratis.

To Foster, the plentiful designer swag and the actresses who double as fashion plates are part of the same trend, which she labels “the person as accessory” phenomenon. Coming out of the ‘60s and the feminist revolution, Foster says, she can’t imagine going “down that route. You wouldn’t want anyone to think they owned you or want someone to only talk about your body. That would be humiliating. This new generation is not of that era.”

Dangerous territory

According to experts, true anorexia nervosa affects only 0.5% of the female population, but the spectrum of eating disorders is believed to afflict 3% to 5%. UCLA professor Michael Strober, an expert in the field who has dealt with a raft of Hollywood figures, says that for anyone with a predisposition to eating disorders, coming to Hollywood is like a drunk trying to live inside a bar -- extremely challenging.

Characteristics of anorexics include fear of change, difficulty with self expression, a need for order and routine, a strong need to accommodate. “That temperament is a challenge for people who exist in the industry,” says Strober. Bulimics too exhibit the extreme insecurity and self-doubt that make Hollywood a rough environment, Strober says, but there’s “more compulsivity, more obsessional concern with detail. They feel very, very needy, and they crave attention and are very appetitively oriented. They need cigarettes. They need alcohol.”

To put it mildly, no one in Hollywood is looking out for these girls. “It’s just, ‘Can you get to the next audition?,” Strober says. “If somebody has this illness, once they start to lose weight, they’re on this slope that’s very slippery. It’s like an alcoholic who continues to have a drink here or there.” While experts debate how much the culture affects the prevalence of eating disorders, few deny there is some correlation. Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that eating disorders are more prevalent in industrialized societies. In 1999, Dr. Anne Becker, who runs the Eating Disorder Clinic at Harvard Medical School, released a now-famous study showing what happened on the island of Fiji after TV was introduced in 1995. Three years later, there had been a dramatic rise in eating disorders. In the study, some 74% of Fijian girls said they felt “too big or too fat” at least occasionally. This in a culture in which “You gained weight” used to be a compliment.

“I still think, just like with cigarettes, we are still to blame,” says eating-disorder expert Costin. “If you talk to girls today, they will tell you. I don’t think they know what it is like to live in a world where magazines show people of all different sizes and Academy Award-winning actresses didn’t just lose 20 pounds.” Among her Hollywood clients, “they will say that they are often told, ‘You would look better if you lost a few pounds.’ That is just a sort of standard comment an agent would say before they go out on an audition.”

Costin also points out the “contagion” factor among working actresses. “When they get on these TV shows where there are a few females on the show, one of the leads starts to lose weight, and then the other ones do too. It’s very easy for the person to say, ‘All my fellow actresses are not eating. They are losing weight, so I want to lose weight too.’ Sometimes they show each other the tricks.”

Indeed, one show notorious for skinny actresses was “Ally McBeal,” whose cast included Calista Flockhart, who always denied having an eating disorder, and Portia de Rossi, who went public with her eating issues. The “Desperate Housewives” all seem improbably sylph-like. At least Felicity Huffman has talked publicly about her battles, discussing an eating disorder she had in her 20s.

Once an eating disorder takes hold of someone in the public eye, the barriers to change are enormous. If an extremely thin person begins to gain weight, everybody starts discussing it, which Costin says is traumatizing. “The worst thing is the paparazzi taking photographs of them eating. I have been working with people who are horrified to walk out of a frozen yogurt store or a pizza place and have people taking pictures of them like it’s scandalous. It used to be they would take pictures of them coming out of hotels with whoever they just had sex with.” As of late, more attention has been paid to the dark side of Hollywood’s extreme thinness, mostly, Strober says, because people in the public eye -- namely two Brazilian models -- have died of anorexia nervosa, and the European fashion houses are trying to set minimum standards of BMI, or Body-Mass Index. “Any time somebody dies, the level of attention will increase,” he says. “When somebody is taken off a show, the level of concern and attention will increase.”

Still, the media attention works both ways. Says trendspotter Marian Salzman of the JWT Worldwide advertising agency: “On one side, we like ticking off models on the runway for their BMI being too low. But we talk about it being negative with a smile. ‘It’s awful about Nicole Richie’ -- wink, wink.

Salzman also points to a new kind of scrutiny given to the weight of women who are well into their 40s, such as Demi Moore or Sharon Stone. “They don’t look middle-aged, and one thing we praise them for is the physique, essentially their thinness,” she says.

Where will it end?

“There’s that old line that you can never be too thin or too rich,” Salzman says. “That probably still prevails with some caveats. Dying over money or weight isn’t in vogue.”

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rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com

Times staff writer Andrew Hiltzik contributed to this story.