The Reel Deal

There are plenty of juicy tidbits in Rachel Abramowitz’s “Is That a Gun In Your Pocket? Women’s Experience of Power in Hollywood,” from the film financier who told director Martha Coolidge, “We must have naked breasts in this movie four times” to the owner of 20th Century Fox who used to call his female studio chief, Sherry Lansing, “dollface.” There’s former CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who explained to one of the first top female movie executives, Dawn Steel, that he defined success “by the size of my erection.” And director Peter Bogdanovich, who refused to drive his then-wife, art director-producer-screenwriter Polly Platt, to the hospital when she was giving birth to their second child because he was too tired from a location scout. And former Columbia Pictures president Frank Price, who explained to Lansing that he couldn’t make her the studio’s head of production because she wouldn’t be able to get a man to work for her.

But the organizing principle of this brightly written (but at times confusingly structured) book is not, in fact, that men are pigs. Abramowitz explains that sexism is a given in Hollywood, “like discussing the fact that the sea was blue.” Instead of writing a catalog of the slights women have suffered at the hands of chauvinistic males, Abramowitz wisely chose a more complicated task: assembling what she calls a “history of consciousness” of the town’s most powerful women that probes the often contradictory impulses underlying female ambition.

Abramowitz organizes her argument using the experiences of both Lansing and Steel. Lansing, a former Max Factor model who is now chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, comes across in a complex, sometimes even confessional portrait as a shrewd woman who has used her femininity to coax powerful men to do as she wishes. Steel, the one-time chairwoman of Columbia Pictures who died of brain cancer in 1997, is portrayed as a brilliant but rage-filled master saleswoman who conquered Hollywood by being one of the guys. (“She was perfectly capable,” the book reveals, “of walking into a bar and declaiming, ‘Look at the rack on that woman.’ ”)

Lansing and Steel, dubbed “the Geisha and the Ball Buster” respectively, coexisted in the industry for almost 10 years and were held up as the two extremes of how to make it as a woman. “One carried ambition as a battle-ax, the other as a carefully hidden stiletto,” Abramowitz writes. And it is to the author’s credit that her profiles of the two--and her emotional description of how they befriended one another at the end of Steel’s life--create a frame within which her sketches of more than a dozen other women make sense.

Abramowitz has covered Hollywood, mostly for Premiere magazine, for the last decade, and her access to name talent is extraordinary. The book synthesizes her conversations with, among others, Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Penny Marshall and Nora Ephron, not to mention the Oscar-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri (“Thelma & Louise”), the expert script doctor Carrie Fisher and the former super-agent Sue Mengers.

In Hollywood, as Abramowitz notes, personal and professional relationships are often one and the same. She provides a particularly intimate picture of Platt, who, after her much-publicized split from Bogdanovich (who left her for Cybill Shepherd during the shooting of “The Last Picture Show”), went on to be the creative force behind director Jim Brooks but never worked up the nerve to direct herself. We also get to know Paula Weinstein, a producer and single mom (and former agent and president of production at a studio), whose husband and producing partner, Mark Rosenberg, died of a heart attack on the set of one of their projects, “Flesh and Bone.”

In her introduction, Abramowitz admits that she intended to write an oral history but quickly abandoned the idea, opting instead to look at the big picture by giving weight to her subjects’ interpretations of events. For the most part, she has succeeded, though one wishes she had placed a little more emphasis on her own interpretations. In the end, the book is long on description, short on analysis.

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Statistics are dutifully included, and some of them are doozies. Between 1983 and 1992, for example, women directed just 81 of the 1,794 features released by movie studios. Just two women have ever been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Director, and none has won.

But Abramowitz doesn’t say much about what’s lost for both men and women when such sexism succeeds. Why--for all the rise of women production executives in Hollywood--are there not more women in power on the real money-making side of the business, in the major studios’ movie distribution system? And why--when women often decide what movie a household will go see--do their tastes not dictate more of what’s produced in Hollywood?

The entertainment industry is probably no more chauvinistic than any other male-dominated profession in which aggression and perseverance carry the day. Here the feminists are marginalized, while many successful women would prefer to be seen as professionals without being categorized by their gender. Regrettably there seems to be no middle ground, which of course has significant implications. If what is made in Hollywood affects American and global culture (and clearly it does), then Hollywood--by not giving women their due, by keeping them from the seats of artistic and commercial power--has abdicated any leading role it might play. Forget breaking stereotypes. Often, studio movies don’t even attempt to show reality. Abramowitz, for her part, often seems less interested in these issues than in studying her subjects’ complex relations with their overbearing mothers.

She writes a great profile, so these sections are often hard to put down. Armed with wonderful material, her descriptions of even the most well-known people are original and dead-on, as when she calls Disney chairman Michael Eisner “tall, preppy, with features that looked as if they were made of Silly Putty.” But Abramowitz’s flair for profiles creates other problems.

Abramowitz makes her points mostly by juxtaposing different women’s stories. Sometimes that works well, as when a passage on the casting of Foster as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 “Taxi Driver” is followed with a passage on the relentless sexualization of Lansing throughout her career. Scorsese particularly liked Foster’s androgynous, child-like quality (not to mention the titillating association many Americans still had of Foster, at 4, posing in the famous Coppertone ad with a puppy pulling down her swimsuit). A few pages later, we learn that Lansing’s comfort with her sexuality resulted in her being accused of sleeping with every man she’d ever worked with, as Lansing says, “[m]arried, unmarried, gay, whatever.” Without any explication, the pairing of these stories prompts the reader to ponder both the tangled roots of sexism in a sexualized culture and the role of movies contributing to, and commenting on, that culture.

But often, the book’s attempt to slice up its many subjects’ stories and arrange them thematically results in confusion. For one thing, the themes Abramowitz chooses aren’t always clear. For another, she runs into chronological difficulties. One moment, we’re reading about Foster in the mid-’80s, after the John Hinckley stalking fiasco, then we’re watching Steel in 1979 pitch “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” to a bunch of potential merchandising licensees.

Unlike the page-turner “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood” by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, which deliciously chronicles the goings-on at Sony Pictures through the exploits of just two men, “Is That a Gun” attempts to sum up all women’s experience of power in Hollywood. The result: A chapter on agents Toni Howard and Elaine Goldsmith feels a bit tacked on, as if the author felt the book would be incomplete without a glimpse at the infighting of the industry’s big three talent agencies.

In at least one key case, Abramowitz’s broad scope leads her to include a woman she hadn’t interviewed: screenwriter Elaine May, the only woman to direct a studio movie between 1966 and 1979. Because May almost never gives interviews, Abramowitz had to assemble her profile from other journalists’ work, making do with a clip-job that--though competently done--sticks out like a bad haircut next to the book’s more carefully honed portraits.

And even in the best-told sections, Abramowitz sometimes relies on secondary sources--magazine profiles written by others, for example--that beg for independent verification. (Did Ephron really deliver a part-funny, part-mean-spirited toast at Mike Nichols’ wedding to Diane Sawyer that implied that to keep Nichols happy, Sawyer would have to be two things she is not: Jewish and a great cook? Vanity Fair’s Leslie Bennetts said she did in 1992 and Abramowitz repeats it here, but without comment from Ephron.)

But when Abramowitz is on the set of Foster’s “Nell,” or in the parlor of Mengers’ well-appointed Beverly Hills home or anywhere she can put her formidable descriptive powers to use, the results are both fascinating and moving. Describing a phone conversation she witnessed between Platt and Bogdanovich, Abramowitz writes, “The conversation has a ritualistic quality--all the habits of intimacy but no longer the trust.” In another graceful section, she describes arriving to interview an unusually muted Fisher, who greeted her with the disarmingly self-deprecating assertion, “Yes, I’m fat.”

“She seems exhausted, cosmically so, her speech slowed,” Abramowitz writes. “Her patter has been described in countless interviews as turbopitched comedic spew. . . . Yet now, while the wit continues unabated, the fizz is absent, almost as if a 45 record is being played at 33.”

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The book repeatedly asks whether women in Hollywood help other women to rise and cites several examples in which the answer--particularly among the most ambitious--has been no. Steel is said to have never cultivated a female friend until the age of 26. And though Lansing is called a humane boss who encourages underlings of both genders, she’s not portrayed as a particular champion of women’s projects.

Abramowitz rightly questions Lansing’s assertion that “Fatal Attraction” is a feminist movie and tells a revealing story from 1981 when Streisand, the biggest female star in the world, pitched Lansing the movie “Yentl,” about a rabbi’s teenage daughter who masquerades as a boy in order to study the Torah. Lansing, like many male studio executives before her, turned Streisand down. “I left the office in tears,” Streisand recalls in the book. “I couldn’t believe that a woman wouldn’t understand how universal this story was.”

The message is clear. As Ephron says at one point, women haven’t helped her more than men in Hollywood, and it would be foolish to think that they could. Though Steel suggested that Ephron direct, it was Joe Roth (then head of 20th Century Fox) who green-lighted her directorial debut, “This Is My Life.” Ephron’s conclusion: “If you’re not helped by men, you don’t get anywhere in this business, because they run it, women don’t.”