Hollywood’s Lost Generation of Women : A wealth of talent goes unchallenged and unappreciated as the film industry gives today’s actresses few meaty roles

In “Pretty Woman,” Julia Roberts plays a minty-fresh hooker who finds true love with her wealthy john. In “Miami Blues,” Jennifer Jason Leigh’s hooker is a perky, girl-next-door type who yearns for homespun married bliss with a psychopathic trick. In “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” Jason Leigh is a tough-tender streetwalker who lures unsuspecting galoots to their doom.

What does it say about Hollywood that, of all the roles being offered actresses right now, these three are probably the juiciest? Women are such an endangered species in the movies that the vamp has become high concept.

There have probably never been as many gifted actresses in America as there are right now, but their gifts have been allowed to flourish almost exclusively in the theater or on television. On stage, performers like Mercedes Ruehl (“Other People’s Money”) and Joan Allen (“Burn This”) and Patti Lu Pone (“Evita”) are electrifying. On television, you watch Annette O’Toole in “The Kennedys of Massachusetts” in a state of rapt admiration. When these same actresses show up in films, it’s likely to be in scrunched-up bit roles: Ruehl had a dismally strait-laced cameo as a sympathetic shrink in “Crazy People”; Lu Pone was shoehorned into “Driving Miss Daisy”; Allen was an extended blip on the screen in such films as “Tucker” and “In Country.” O’Toole was harrowing as a distraught wife in “Love at Large”--for all of her 10 (count ‘em) minutes of screen time.

Even the actresses well known--honored--for their past film work are likely nowadays to be playing blurry back-ups to the male lead. In “Bird on a Wire,” Goldie Hawn appears to have entered a boodie-shaking contest with Mel Gibson. (Worse, she loses the contest.) Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler are the female stars with the greatest clout, but Streisand is just now about to begin filming her first film in three years, and Midler has turned into a weepy self-parody. Even her silly, wiggly walks lack spring.

It’s heartbreaking to scan the pool of great (or potentially great) actresses out there: Not just the famous ones, like Jessica Lange and Debra Winger and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the scores of the less renowned--Maria Conchita Alonso, Bridget Fonda, Joan Cusack, Joan Chen, Pamela Reed, Lena Olin, Natasha Richardson, Anjelica Huston, Christine Lahti, Dianne Wiest, Laurie Metcalfe, Ellen Barkin, Kathy Bates--to mention only a handful. The embarrassment in this embarrassment of riches is that these actresses, all primed for major careers, are entombed in Hollywood’s development-deal dungeons. An entire generation of female performers is being squelched by an industry that finds no percentage in accommodating their talents. And by repeatedly going buddy-buddy or solo, an entire generation of male performers is being squelched, too.

Things were not always this bad. Until the past several decades, women were as integral to the movies as men; female stars were as hallowed as their male counterparts. Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess were equally revered. Greta Garbo hogged as much of the glory as John Gilbert. The goddesses, like Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, were, in their heyday, as big a box-office draw as the gods, like Gable and Bogart. Their salaries were commensurate, too; money is always a tip-off to what Hollywood thinks of you. The roles of Hollywood’s Golden Age goddesses may not have been any more complex or advanced than the roles offered today’s top stars (although many of them were), but at least there were far more of them, and the characterizations, because they were designed to fulfill people’s fantasies, meant something special to audiences.

The old studio system was responsible for many travesties, but most of the memorable movie goddesses, from Garbo and Dietrich through Gardner and Monroe, were creations of that system. The studio’s stable of writers and directors and cinematographers and costume designers were allowed to work up intensely creative partnerships with performers. The studio machinery was geared up for the long run of an actor’s career. Aging beauties were eased into more “realistic” roles.

Today, an actress who has passed unrecognized into her 30s stands almost no chance of making it, because in that age bracket the roles just aren’t there for her to be discovered. And even the actresses who do achieve success in their 20s and 30s often find they’ve been put out to pasture later on. The vital female stars of only a decade or so ago, like Jill Clayburgh and Ellen Burstyn and Cicely Tyson, are, for all intents and purposes, in a state of involuntary semi-retirement from the movies. Like their younger counterparts, the ones without movie work, they reserve their occasional successes these days for the stage or TV. It’s as if their movie careers never happened.

The free-agency of the current, post-studio-system era has not been kind to the creation of movie stars. Left to their own devices, many stars choose projects that are almost comically wrong for them (like Jane Fonda’s spinster gringa in “Old Gringo,” or Dustin Hoffman as Sean Connery’s son in “Family Business”). But male stars at least have a surplus of decent roles to fight over, since virtually all of the “important” movies, and most of the unimportant ones, are written expressly for them. With women, what’s left after Meryl Streep goes shopping?

The movie business is increasingly being driven by the blockbuster mentality, and blockbusters are almost always action epics in which women are relegated to a status position somewhere between the hardware and the special effects. The true partnership in these films is between man and machine. The production costs are rising --”Total Recall” and “Die Hard 2,” for example, both reportedly around $60 million. At a time when foreign markets are becoming almost as lucrative as domestic ones, it makes commercial sense to stock these films with American stars who have international appeal. And that invariably means male action heroes. Don’t count on seeing “Batwoman” any time soon (particularly after the smashing success of “Supergirl”).

For women in the movies, their heroism is reserved almost entirely for the emotional arena, where the triumphs are less photogenic--i.e. less saleable. Occasionally you get something like Sigourney Weaver as an intergalactic Mother Courage battling aliens, but most female action heroines are simply women recast in standard male scenarios, like the lady cops of “Blue Steel” and “Impulse.”

The scant supply of meaningful roles for women isn’t only a product of the blockbuster mentality; it’s equally linked to Hollywood’s avoidance of what is disparagingly referred to as “women’s issues.” The conflicts of contemporary women don’t fit neatly into the standard Hollywood story lines, and in today’s Hollywood, neatness counts. The disarray of modern relationships is confusing and threatening--that is to say, uncommercial--to studio heads. And these days, with the demise of most of the small independent companies, the studios are practically the only game in town. Since the new conflicts are not readily marketable, and the old conflicts, in a contemporary setting at least, are moldy, the studio solution has been to can the conflicts altogether.

On television, where projects can move into production faster and where there is less at stake commercially than in the movies, one is much more likely to see honest depictions of women’s emotional lives, even the messier aspects; one is also much more likely to see, especially in the never-never-land of the soaps, the kind of old-fashioned romantic scenarios that thrived in the ‘40s and ‘50s. There’s something for everyone, and if the TV shows are no good, there’s still the great old romantic movies on view on cable TV, a spectral reminder of what once was.

It’s no accident that virtually the only movies to offer full-scale roles for women these days are the ones either set in the past, like “Enemies, a Love Story” and “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Driving Miss Daisy,” or else in some dream-time present, like “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” which draws on our romantic notions about the past as filtered through the movies. The pastness of these movies functions as a kind of shield from contemporary concerns, and yet, because many of them feature a real avidity for sexual and emotional conflict, they seem more alive, more in the present tense, than many of the contemporary movies. (“Enemies,” set in 1949, is a lot more vital than, say, the modern-day “Stanley & Iris” or “Stella,” both of which might have emerged from the ‘30s.)

The truly contemporary movies that attempt to show off “modern” conflicts often end up schizzy and retrograde. “Baby Boom” proffered an impossible fantasy; it said women could be CEOs and homemakers and land Mr. Right, all at the same time. “Working Girl” featured a heroine, Melanie Griffith’s Tess, who was both ditz and whiz; she reaches the top because of her business smarts but also, although the film doesn’t point it up, because (unbeknown to her) she sleeps with the right guy.

Of course, the weirdest hybrid fantasy around is the aforementioned “Pretty Woman.” If you bother to take this retooled “Pygmalion” seriously, you might balk at the dubiousness of its dual protagonists: Julia Roberts’ Vivian, the happy hooker with a heart of gold, and Richard Gere’s corporate raider with a heart of gold. Cliches old and new, both crocks. The film is a smash hit, but it’s also provoked more vehemence from moviegoers I’ve heard from than any other current film I can recall. It confirms a dirty little truth: retrograde fantasies still hold sway.

Vivian could have been something else besides a prostitute and the film would still have fulfilled its fairy tale aspirations. And yet, in the current movie climate, it makes perfect sense that she is one. The film solves the problem of how to create a modern romantic relationship by making it strictly cash and carry (at first). The film is like a reversal of those gold-digger comedies where Marilyn Monroe cajoled the Corporate Man into loving his millions--in order, of course, to lavish them on her. In “Pretty Woman,” Vivian shames her john into looking beyond his millions (while still reaping their benefits). “Pretty Woman” functions as a warped Prince Charming fantasy for women while, for upscale men, it offers the reassuring life lesson that women aren’t just after them for their money.

I don’t mean to imply that actresses should only play “politically correct” parts. As a matter of fact, most roles worth playing are politically in correct. Who would argue with Jane Fonda’s performance in “Klute”? Or, for that matter, with Julia Roberts’ amazing work in “Pretty Woman,” or Jennifer Jason Leigh’s in her two current films. But the sudden influx of these roles is, I think, part of a long-term industry-wide retreat from feminist concerns. At the root of these concerns is the old male bugaboo: Can women be trusted--as business associates, as sex partners, wives? As equals? The answer usually takes the form these days of a brutal put-down. The implication of a film like “Pretty Woman” is that Vivian is a hooker not because of degraded economic necessity but because she chooses to be one--because she deserves to be one.

In the immediate post-World War II era, women who had entered the work force during the war found themselves cast out and replaced by returning veterans. Hollywood responded to the problem by concocting fantasy goddesses--the pneumatic, walking, talking pin-ups who reached their apotheosis in Marilyn Monroe. Their cheesecake glamour, totally without threat, was a kind of antidote to the anxieties of the times.

In today’s sexually confused society, Hollywood’s response to feminism can’t be as blithely concocted as in those va-va-va-voom days. As a result, there are very few, if any, “pure” sex sirens on screen today, certainly none who are major stars (Madonna probably comes closest). Male stars, because their appeal is more simplified and comprehensible, have even taken over the pin-up function from women. The latest films of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy practically dispense with female co-stars altogether. They’re self-infatuated swoon-a-thons.

The dynamism of many of Hollywood’s legendary actresses, like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, often carried a threat even when their roles didn’t. And it’s often been the case in the past that men, more so than women, responded to these stars. Men don’t usually go for the ladylike types; paradoxically, they seem to want more of a challenge from their female stars than do the women in the audience.

But the only dynamic, threatening women in the movies right now are the crazies. Their conflicts may develop from a realistic base, like Glenn Close’s spurned avenger in “Fatal Attraction” or Kathleen Turner’s miserably unhappy wife in “The War of the Roses,” but invariably these characters spin off into a self-immolating, horror-flick rage. Even a “role-model” heroine like Sigourney Weaver’s Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in the Mist” is made to seem inhumanly obsessed with her mission. Her heroism comes across as lunacy.

Everybody recognizes that the movies reflect shifting attitudes in society, but that doesn’t mean that those attitudes automatically show up in the movies. At least not right away. There’s a built-in time lag in the way Hollywood confronts social upheavals--look at how long it took to get Vietnam on the screen--and never more so than in these dog days of the bottom line. Hollywood’s solution to the “woman problem” may yet result in a compensatory avalanche of strong, complex, smart, funny female portrayals. In the meantime, this waiting game is excruciating.