Women Vs Hollywood Exclusive Darling interview with author Helen O’Hara on her ground breaking book
Where did your love of films begin? I’ve loved film as far back as I can remember. Some of my favourite childhood memories include movies: going to the cinema for the first time ever to see a re-issue of Snow White and being terrified by the Wicked Witch; seeing Return Of The Jedi on the big screen; sneaking a look at 15-rated videos with my friends when we were far too young! I love storytelling and imagination, and cinema’s ability to take us out of our own heads for a couple of hours.
What got you interested in women’s place in the film industry? I’ve been interested in the strange disparities that exist in film for a long time, just as a film fan and film journalist. Why are almost all directors male? Why are most leading characters male? Why did Hollywood experts call Mamma Mia’s success a surprise, when any woman could have predicted it? The situation is not natural, because we’re half the population. So I started looking into what was happening, and the book grew out of that. There’s a bit of anger in there at some of the injustices that have held women back, but I do have hope as well. I believe things are changing for the better.
Can you name a few female filmmakers and actresses who changed film through the decades and how they influenced audiences? There have been so many, and even in film school you’re taught about very few. Alice Guy-Blaché was one of the first filmmakers anywhere and made literally hundreds of short films, starting in 1896, but was written out of film history – literally. The company where she worked, French studio Gaumont, left her out of its first official history book. Lois Weber was one of the most important directors in Hollywood in the mid-1910s, but was demoted 46 read more at darlingmagazine.co.uk summer 2021
to doing screen tests by the end of her career. Mae West became one of the highest paid people, in any profession, in the US in the 1930s, but her career was squashed by censorship – which also stopped black actresses like Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge from having the careers they deserved, because black stars were not allowed to play romantic scenes with white actors. Stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford shaped fashions and inspired generations; others like Olivia de Havilland and Marilyn Monroe fought the studio system to ensure better deals for actors.
What was the pivotal turning point in the 1910s and 20s from women having a place in the industry to being sidelined? By the late 1910s, big investors realised that there was huge money to be made in movies, and the studios became almost like factories, signing stars and filmmakers to contracts and then shuffling them from one film to the next to keep them busy, a human production line. The small, female-run studios that Guy-Blaché and Weber had established couldn’t compete, and they were no longer given opportunities at the big studios. So gradually almost all women in senior roles were phased out and were replaced by men.
How did men get to control the money and therefore investment in films? In the beginning, you could make films on a shoestring budget, in a studio space not much bigger than a family home, and people made them not just in Hollywood but all over the world. As films got longer – going from 30 seconds to over an hour during Guy- Blaché’s career – they became much more expensive and required larger spaces, most on huge studio backlots around Los Angeles. The growing studios therefore needed money, and that meant Wall Street investors. Those were
