Calling Susan Faludi

“We forget history so fast in this country,” a television writer named Dianne Dixon told Mollie Gregory. “Like water on a hot sidewalk, it evaporates before it’s recorded.” It’s a telling quote that captures the importance of Gregory’s recent book, “Women Who Run the Show,” an exhaustively researched, if not elegantly written, tome about how a band of sisters crashed the all-boys party that was Hollywood.

Gregory’s is encyclopedic oral history; the index alone refers to just about every woman who strode through the halls of network television and studio back lots over the last 20 years -- at least the ones I ever heard of and many I had not -- and it comes just in time to record a history that seems in danger of seeming trivial. “I don’t think there’s been a women’s movement in a decade. Is that dangerous?” a former business affairs executive is quoted as saying. Good question, well worth answering.

“Nobody seems to know what post-feminism is, but we are definitely in it,” Gregory concludes. “Scholars have defined it as cultural constrictions favoring those men in power.... It points to struggles that were won, and they’re over.” Definitely over, but won? True, women producers are now commonplace, and three studios are run by three remarkably gifted women. This would have been unimaginable a brief 15 years ago despite their undeniable talent.

But there are fewer women directors than 10 years ago, and nowhere near parity in writing in film or television. But most troubling is the increasing attrition of women in the middle ranks because of exhaustion. Of late, it has become a kind of status to leave your high-paying job to stay at home with a late-life child or for marriage to be the goal of middle-management development-girls, as it used to be for dental assistants. While signs of extraordinary change are omnipresent, most women sense ambivalence from their bosses when dealing with a pregnancy. That reaction creates conflict matching a woman’s own internal ambivalence. It’s this internal ambivalence that troubles me.

Gregory’s book reveals the chasm between then and now, more like an eon than a mere 20 years. To wit, Paramount Chairman Sherry Lansing, the foremost of the great dames of Hollywood, recalls her expectations at the beginning of her career: “[I]f we sought careers,” she tells Gregory, “we could become a nurse or teacher. They are wonderful professions but they were practically the only ones open to women. I sort of accepted the fact that a woman would never run a company.” Now she has run Paramount for an unprecedented 10 years and is still standing. Yet women all over Hollywood are in retreat.

Pop culture indicates that this is not just a local backlash -- indeed, it is endemic to the culture at large -- but like everything else in Hollywood’s value system, it is most bald and cravenly unapologetic here. I first noticed the sea change when I read Drew Barrymore -- a woman I know to be smart and ambitious -- deny with horror that she was a feminist. The word suddenly had an icky old-fashioned quality that she took for granted. It stunned me.

Where is Susan Faludi when we need her? Why is no one calling this by its real name: backlash? But this is a female-driven backlash from formerly driven women or their proteges, all under the approving gaze of the men in power, denouncing the life of the Big Career. These are the newly chic stay-at-home mothers who shine at their children’s schools’ fund-raising but are free enough for a manicure in the afternoon.

Women in Hollywood are dropping like flies. Off to the suburbs to bury the hatchet of the dream career and erect the white picket fence we once saw as jail. Say goodbye to striving for success. Say hello to striving for status, for safety, for the comfort of the husband’s financial umbrella, so that only he will feel the tremors and dread of the fray. We’re off to redecorate, to wax -- the floor, whatever. It was far more horrible out there than anyone led us to expect.

Where have all the brave women gone? Off to try out new painful cosmetic surgeries? Doesn’t anyone remember how painfully poignant it was to grow up with a brilliant mother stuck in the suburbs with nothing to do? Doesn’t anyone else see Betty Friedan around the corner? Why does Donna Reed suddenly look more glamorous than Mary Richards?

This backlash is powered by disappointment with the realities of work and the difficulty of balancing family and career. This backlash is anti-mentor, anti-superwoman, pro-girly girl. It is -- as we know by watching Christina Aguilera -- OK to be a slut. It is not OK to break into a sweat out of the gym. About five years ago, I started noticing that the development-boys were the less entitled ones, the male interns doing the heavy Xeroxing on the weekend, unable to take their historic gender advantage for granted. But I fear the girls are too busy on Saturdays now, yoga and all. Sadly, we are no longer able to reap pleasure from the novelty of and gratitude for the job. Gregory’s book remembers the moment that we were. Once we were the men we wanted to marry. No longer. Sorry, boys, that we took your jobs. What were we thinking? You can have them back now.

The generation Gregory has documented fought for a baby-friendly workplace. This is the world the late Dawn Steel experienced at Paramount in 1986: “Everything changed with the pregnancy,” she is quoted in “Women Who Run the Show.” “Maybe they had changed beforehand and I wasn’t aware of it. But they didn’t like me anymore. Period.” Now it is the unwritten prerogative in the movie business for both genders to leave work for a parenting occasion, no matter how small. But Steel -- the first woman (one of the first two -- with Lansing -- that is) to run a major Hollywood studio when she was named president of Columbia Pictures in 1989 -- founded day-care centers. Today, work and family seem more irreconcilable than ever, and it is common to question whether or not the whole enterprise is remotely worth the effort.

I wonder whether the women mentored by these pioneers dare to reach out to young women. If so, where are the young execs and producers to show for it? Are we breeding new leaders to succeed the ones now reigning? The women whose battle-weary stories fill this book (including the thousandth retelling of the Polly Platt-Peter Bogdanovich breakup) were of the “equal-opportunity generation,” my old partner Debra Hill told Gregory. They are “no-one-ever-told me-I-couldn’t-do-something-so-I-just-went-out-and-did-it” kind of gals. Who could have believed that 15 years later, it could be women discouraging women from chasing hard jobs like these?

We may need to wait for our eager daughters, those empowered chicklets who are opening movies every weekend, for the newest market, girl power. This next generation will redeem the one whose head-cracking struggles are depicted here, where they are rightly anointed as the “brilliant and creative new generation of women who stormed Hollywood.” Scattered throughout Gregory’s book are stories of parking spots denied, sly passes passed on and daily petty humiliations. It was only 15 years ago that a woman’s presence in a meeting elicited dubious stares and demeaning requests for bottled water. The tales here told vary from the iconic Steel -- fired as president of production as she gave birth -- to pioneer camerawomen Brianne Murphy, who was asked by her crew if she had her own light meter. “It’s like asking a driver if his car had tires.... I had so much to learn from them, but they never talked to me about what I needed to know.”

We are indebted to Gregory for committing to history those who would underestimate their own gains. Storm Hollywood they did, and what permanent effect their cumulative efforts may have on the culture at large will not be measured by this temporal backlash alone. It will incubate in the young girls watching their stories on screen for the first time. This thought is expressed beautifully by producer Laura Ziskin at the end of the book: “Men have built the cities, made and defined the culture, interpreted the world. At no time in recorded history have women been culture-makers. Movies are arguably the most influential, important medium in the world. They have a tremendous cultural impact. Because women are now making movies, then women’s ideas, philosophy, point of view will seep into that culture. And that’s never happened in history. Ever, ever, ever. We can’t even see the impact of that yet.” Amen.