These Are Our Stories - How To Break into the Entertainment Industry as a Women
It was half past three and Mr. D has already given his three daughters an afternoon snack before piling them in their family car to drive down through the Hollywood Hills. The youngest by 4 years, Sarah D (who has asked to keep her identity anonymous), sat cross-eyed as mounds of people buzzed through the streets and steam arose from the asphalt, spilling an earthy, comforting aroma through their windows. It was summer in Los Angeles. The car came to a stop and Sarah felt her father’s hands lift her from her seat and into his arms, her sisters, Grace and Jamie, trailed behind their father like little ducklings. “Girls, I say hi to Mr. Weinstein.” This was the first and only time Sarah saw the infamous film producer, Harvey Weinstein and a memory that her father often never addresses. Sarah D, now an Entertainment and Media Studies student at the University of Georgia says, “It felt almost like a dream, I was so young sometimes I question if I saw him at all but my sisters swear by it. Completely, gives me the creeps.”
The horrifying wrongs this man allegedly committed throughout his years working in Hollywood more than validates Sarah’s uneasy feelings towards him and, after years of abuse, it has come time for his reckoning. A new era for women is being ushered into film sets, workplaces and national stages, through the mouths of celebrities and common women, alike. The script has been flipped on the entertainment industry and the responsibility of power lands on the shoulders of the new generation of screenwriters, producers and directors that are taking back the industry.
On October 5, 2017, New York Times published the first article to make substantial allegations against Weinstein per BCC’s detailed timeline. This is when the flood gates opened and it seemed everyday a new powerful man was being held accountable as more and more women found courage to speak up. Soon movements were being made on social media, including the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements and the coverage of allegations were the new journalistic crack. The discourse created by the changing power dynamics was truly an entity that had been boiling in the underbelly of Hollywood and other markets like it for years. Enter 2018, actresses like Reese Witherspoon, Kristen Stewart and directors such Ava DuVernay and Kathleen Kennedy refused to allow these women who came forward to be bound within their assault, instead they decided to honor their courage and involve themselves in films written by women, for women and in the perspective of women. “These women were girlfriends and wives but they weren’t at the centers of their own stories.” Witherspoon lamented on British Television program, Lorraine 2017. “But my mother always said to me, ‘If you want something done, do it yourself.’” This is exactly what Witherspoon did, opening her production company, “Pacific Standard” in 2012 to create “more on and off screen roles for women.”
What can you do about it? This is the question that begs an answer. Stephanie Skinner, a native Atlanta screenwriter and executive producer for her own company, The Wondermnt, says the best thing you can do is surround yourself with people who you trust and know your own value. Skinner remembers being a college grad working as a film assistant, “At the time in the early 90s, there was definitely some shady, sketchy stuff that was going and I had a couple runs in with dirt bags and people doing some of the similar stuff that is coming out now. It was just part of the culture. You had to hold your own against it,” says Skinner.
Someone truly worth marveling over is 22-year-old actress, writer and director, Quinn Shephard who wrote her first screenplay at age 15. “Blame,” which screened at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, accounts an intoxicating yet controversial relationship between student and teacher, friends and enemies. Shephard and her mother did this film all on their own. She recounts in an interview, “That’s why we did it alone, because we didn’t want anyone, like any men in suits, telling us what to do. So, we just decided to do it on our [own terms].” She continued when asked what advice she had for aspiring female filmmakers, “Jane Rosenthal, she’s the founder of Tribeca, she said at the director’s brunch ‘Don’t make the stuff they want you to make. Make the stuff you believe in.’ I am a huge proponent of that. I used to push myself when I was really young to be brutally honest in my writing and in all of my work. I felt like if I wasn’t brutally honest, it was not worth anything.”
Sarah D, Reese Witherspoon, Stephanie Skinner and Quinn Shephard all have one thing in common, they are women changing the industry for other women. The impact they have on the industry is monumental and a vital response to the changing power dynamic of Hollywood, behind and in front of the camera. These issues are structural in nature and can only be solved by the restructuring of a broken system according to Anita Hill, who headed the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace along with Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilms. The value in understanding this issue is grounded in simple human decency, while “lead[ing] the entertainment industry towards alignment in achieving safer, fairer, and more equitable and accountable workplaces.” Although Sarah D can’t remember the exact details of meeting the man responsible for 90 plus sexual accusations, she certainly will never forget the eeriness of that memory and how an impending summer rain will always remind her of it.
