Oct. 23--Earlier this month Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar winner for "Silver Linings Playbook," let loose with an essay sparked by a financial revelation. At 25, she may be the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, earning (according to Forbes) a cool $52 million in the fiscal year ending June 2015. But Lawrence made considerably less than her male co-stars Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner while working on director David O. Russell's "American Hustle."
Lawrence's essay was a call to arms. It was also a confession. Posted to Lena Dunham's online forum Lenny Letter, it quickly became a national talking point -- in part because the "Hunger Games" star and "X-Men" ensemble player pointed the finger at herself as well as others.
After seeing the salary numbers revealed by the leaked Sony documents, "I didn't get mad at Sony," Lawrence wrote. "I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. ... I didn't want to seem 'difficult' or 'spoiled.' ... This could be a young-person thing. It could be a personality thing. I'm sure it's both. But this is an element of my personality that I've been working against for years, and based on the statistics, I don't think I'm the only woman with this issue."
Lawrence summed it up: "I'm over trying to find the 'adorable' way to state my opinion and still be likable."
With that sentence, how many women and men around the world nodded, or muttered, "Damn right," or silently thanked America's A-lister of choice at the exact same moment?
Lawrence left out one thing, though. Her essay implies that pay inequity is Hollywood's most damaging sin. It isn't.
We believe what we see on screen; that's the idea, anyway. And the most damaging sin in Hollywood is the material -- the images of women we're seeing, and the images we're not -- actresses below Lawrence's pay grade must elevate, somehow, year in and year out.
Right away Lawrence's open letter provoked grumbles in the backs of establishment (i.e., white male) throats all over Hollywood. In Variety, former Paramount honcho Peter Bart dismissed the letter. In today's international film market, Bart said, only "the combination of an actor and a 'brand' -- Cruise in a 'Mission: Impossible,' Damon in a 'Bourne Identity' -- can guarantee an opening. But the real stars who guarantee opening grosses are faux people like Harry Potter or some character who fell out of a comic book. So Jennifer should be grateful for her fabulous paydays -- and change the subject." (So "Jennifer" doesn't merit the last-name respect afforded Tom and Matt?)
Cooper chimed in, saying he liked what his once and future co-star wrote. He added that he'd be willing, colleague to colleague, to share salary details with a female co-star, just to move the ball a little further down a level playing field. Renner, on the other hand, pleaded the fifth, telling Business Insider this week that sharing such information was, in his words, "not my job."
Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of the blog Women in Hollywood and director of the New York-based Athena Film Festival, says the anger and gratitude stirred up by Lawrence's letter "speaks to a lot of things going on in our culture, and I trace this cycle of the conversation to a year and a half ago."
The conversation at hand began March 2, 2014, Oscar night. Cate Blanchett won her second Academy Award, that one for "Blue Jasmine." Oscar speeches tend to blur together, but the Blanchett acceptance speech was better, and more urgent, than usual.
There are those, she said, "in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are 'niche' experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them, and in fact, they earn money." Industry observer Silverstein considers Blanchett's moment as "the first salvo. Here was a high-caliber actress choosing to stand up, on the biggest night of the movie calendar, on behalf of women. And women's stories. And the female audience."
Since then, we've heard many variations on this theme. Patricia Arquette won a supporting actress Oscar a year later for "Boyhood," and used her stage time to remind "every woman who gave birth, (every) taxpayer and citizen of this nation, (that) we have fought for everybody else's equal rights. It's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America." To approximately 49-51 percent of the U.S. population, this was typical liberal claptrap. To the other half, it was depressing that Arquette had to point it out in the first place.
This summer Emma Thompson decried the state of sexist Hollywood, and alarming lack of older female roles that amount to anything Emma Thompson might find interesting to play. "When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world," she said.
We've seen actress Rose McGowan go public, on Twitter, to share her audition-notice intel regarding an Adam Sandler project, in which she was asked to wear a "form fitting tank that shows off cleavage (push up bras encouraged)." Nothing new there. Ashley Judd wrote recently of sexual harassment she experienced in the 1990s. Nothing new there. Hollywood history is littered with men with money exploiting women on their payroll, or trying to.
Regarding film industry practices and attitudes, Thompson said: "When I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad."
Rooney Mara, the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" star and a recent best-actress award winner at the Cannes Film Festival, for "Carol," told The Guardian recently: "The thing that's more unfair than the pay is the terminology that's used to describe actresses who have a point of view, and want to have a voice in their life and their career, and what they choose to do. I've been called horrible things. If a man was acting in the same way that I was acting, it would just be considered normal."
To make a better future in movies, we must look back at where we've been. We too easily romanticize the past, the heyday of the studio system. But there are lessons to learn there.
As a critic and a movie lover, I'm crazy for the period commonly known as the "pre-Code era," referring to the early sound phase (1929-1934) before the film industry's self-policing Production Code was strictly enforced. This was a gamy, often raunchy period in American film. It was also full of splendid female protagonists existing all over the spectrum -- not merely virtuous sops or fallen women, but every type and dimension in between.
