The Demand Is Weak for Strong Women on Screen : Movies: A Writers Guild panel says that ‘Murphy Brown’-types are the minority and film executives still shun believable women’s roles.

It takes an enlightened man and a brave woman to write women characters who are not sex objects, ornaments or victims, said “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English, speaking on a panel at the Writers Guild.

Despite the creation of some strong female characters on television and the box-office success of such films as “Beauty and the Beast” and “Thelma & Louise,” film executives are still hesitant to create strong, believable portrayals of women in the movies, according to top film and television writers speaking on the panel Wednesday night.

Television shows have been able “get away with more” because of quicker production time coupled with desperation by networks to salvage falling ratings, panelists said. Participants in the discussion, “How to Write Strong Roles for Women,” included English; Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator of “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade,” and Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated animated film “Beauty and the Beast.”

Even with the strides made in creating the characters on “Murphy,” which stars Candice Bergen as a tough, successful TV anchorwoman, and “Designing Women,” which features four successful businesswomen, those representations of women represent a minority, panelists said.

“As those shows air, we are still counterbalancing the 11 other women on 11 other stations who are being raped or clinging to a man saying: ‘Please don’t go off on an adventure and leave me,’ ” Bloodworth-Thomason said.

Yet it remains easier to get positive female representation on TV sitcoms, panelists agreed. “Women rule the (TV) dial,” said English, whereas men have more say in which movies their families or their dates see.

“Women will see movies about women or men, because they want to understand men,” said Carolyn Shelby, co-writer of the 1991 film “Class Action.” “Men will generally only see movies about men.”

Shelby said that there are only a few female stars who guarantee box-office success, in comparison with a large number of profit-guaranteeing male stars.

“Julia Roberts is about the only actress guaranteed to make a hit,” Shelby said. “Writing anything with a lead woman character becomes about finding a male star to play opposite her.” During the five years and 25 drafts it took to complete “Class Action,” Shelby said she and co-writer Christopher Ames were constantly told to “tone down” the female lead, an attorney played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and to make her more likable and less aggressive.

While Woolverton, the first woman to write an animated feature for Disney, has received an overwhelmingly positive response to her creation of Belle, the heroine in the film, she said it was difficult at times to persuade the studio to keep Belle strong.

“There was no precedent,” she said. “We had to walk a line between making her too aggressive and harsh and too soft. I still think she cries one too many times.”

Despite the strength and independence of the women in Oscar-nominated “Thelma & Louise,” a film about two women fighting the male-dominated system, the cartoonishness of some of its male characters can make the female point of view dismissible, panelist Ames said. “You don’t create strong female characters by putting them up against paper tigers,” he said. “That plays right into the hands of anti-feminists. When the women are perfect and the men are cardboard cutouts, it’s easy for them to say, ‘That’s not realistic, so nothing else about it is either.’ ”

Women in miniseries and TV movies have fared even worse, said John Robert Bensink, who has written several TV movies. He said TV producers are very image conscious, and that the story and character are often the least important aspects of a project.

“A woman (on a TV movie or miniseries) can’t be too angry, too bitchy, too negative,” Bensink said. But, he said, things are changing for the better.

“The audience is getting smarter,” he said. “And also there aren’t any more woman-in-jeopardy stories left to sell.”