Women in Film

Here is a question Hilary de Vries, typically astute Times journalist, put to cover subject Cher in the Nov. 3 Calendar (which also contained an extensive article about director Penelope Spheeris):

“You’ve said that Hollywood is not about women and by all accounts it doesn’t seem to be getting any friendlier.”

A select accounting of credits culled from movie ads in your paper in only the last few weeks shows 23 women producers, eight executive producers, six writers and five directors.

When “women in film” stop whining and admit that Hollywood has been practically handed to them on a platter in the last few years, that not a screenplay by male or female in this town gets produced without the “creative” fingerprints of women development executives all over it, they may then have to ask themselves a far more soul-searching question:

Why is the quality of movies now unarguably worse than at any other time in the entire history of the medium?

JOHN CHARD

Hollywood