Women in Film Winners Note Hollywood’s Opening Doors

A studio chief, a TV sports producer and three actors representing six decades of film making were honored at the Women in Film Crystal Awards luncheon, and all five winners expressed optimism that the barriers women face working in Hollywood would continue to fall.

“Women in films are still being discriminated against,” said actor Edward James Olmos, an Academy Award nominee this year for his role as an East L.A. teacher in the film “Stand and Deliver.” “Roles are not being written for them yet. I think that will continue to change into the year 2000.” Olmos was equally sanguine about the prospects for minority actors and film makers in Hollywood.

Olmos was honored at the luncheon Friday by the 1,500-member Women in Film organization along with Columbia Pictures President Dawn Steel; actress-dancer Leslie Caron, remembered for such films as “An American in Paris” and “Gigi”; Fay Wray, best known for her portrayal of a screaming heroine in the 1933 thriller “King Kong”; and Susan Stratton, producer and director of sports programming for KHJ-TV Channel 9.

“No doubt women will have to write the scripts before they get the great parts,” said Caron, who is currently soliciting funds for a film that she wrote and plans to direct. “They will also have to learn the business end of it. But I’m amazed by the changes I’ve seen.”

“Yes, there’s discrimination,” said Stratton, best known in the industry for directing telecasts of L.A. Lakers basketball games. “But I don’t think women in the business have to be so concerned that they lose sight of what their first priorities are.”

Added Steel: “I like to think there is no discrimination.”

Wray also had something to say about the issue: “Women are wonderful. Men are too. You can’t have one without the other.”