The people who make these deals, I believe, do not consider themselves to be using their power and discretion to depress women’s wages. They just want to make profitable movies. Hopefully good ones, too, but nobody wants to finance an expensive masterpiece that sells no tickets. Nobody sets out to make another Heaven’s Gate.
A hot script crosses a producer’s desk. Looks great. Plenty of agents have read it, and it’s a hot property. Can we get Tom Cruise for it? I hear he’s available next spring since that Spielberg thing fell through. I dunno, he’s getting $32 million for MI 8, will he take a pay cut for this? We can afford him if we pay $18 million for the love interest. Can we get J Law for that? Not anymore, but send an offer to so and so… etc., etc. It’s all a dance, who can we get, who’s hot now, who can we afford, who’s more trouble than they’re worth, whose star (and price) has risen out of reach, who’s new and hungry and exploitable (or recovering from a bomb and pliable and negotiable) and all these factors don’t rely on gotta-pay-the-dudes-more sexism so much as they fall back on always-did-pay-the-dudes-more sexism, and since Cruise and Carrey won’t necessarily volunteer for a pay cut, the alternative road to parity is for the studios to resolve to pay the women more… and you can predict how quickly they fall over themselves to pay anyone more than they have to, or more than they’ve paid in the past.
The institutional sexism already started the women on a lower rung of the ladder. The next thing it does is shorten their working careers. Dudes like Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood played romantic leads in their sixties. A female actor finds the job offers drying up before she’s forty, more often than not. Studios take advantage of this without overtly trying to be dicks about it. They’ll say the roles aren’t there, those scripts don’t get written, those films don’t get made because audiences won’t buy those tickets (and again, they’re shocked to find out the opposite on the rare occasions when such movies somehow get made anyway). And all the while the studios are passively following the path of least resistance toward what they suppose will be the greatest short-term profits, and thus actively perpetuating the cultural narrative that female actors are worth less than males because they always have been, because female characters are less compelling, and female stories are less interesting. These things are so, think the blinkered studio minds, because they always have been so, not because we want them to be so, and we just give the public what the public wants.
And Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect 2 were utterly inexplicable anomalies. Who could have predicted people would actually watch those? Neither one had Jim Carrey in it, or even Dwayne Johnson.
I guess my larger point is that women have more than one sexist obstacle in their way in this particular slice of the workforce. Their careers are often shortened for sexist reasons (too old for the ingenue parts, sweetie, you’ve been replaced by the new hot young thang!), which gives them less time to build up the body of work and reputation to command top dollar so they have to rise fast or peak relatively low. Carrey got his $20 million breakthrough at 34, whereas J Law became the highest-paid actress in the world at 25. Her career may very well be as sturdy and long as Meryl Streep’s or Helen Mirren’s… but female careers like those two are exceptions to the rule.
And then there’s that fact that 71% of the speaking roles are male. If nothing else, there’s more competition for the female parts, further depressing wages. And that lack of female roles is another sexist part of Hollywood culture, directly derived from American culture at large.
It’s a profound and obvious problem that needs to be addressed.
