Two-time best actress Oscar-winner Jane Fonda has said Hollywood studios that maintain gender-biased policies deserve to be publicly shamed.
Figures suggest female directors are given charge of the cameras for just 23% of films, with only 6% of big studio productions directed by women. Speaking at the Sundance film festival, Fonda suggested largely male hierarchies were unlikely to address inequality of their own accord.
“The studios are run by men and they have the bottom line to meet and they give jobs to people like them,” said Fonda at the Women at Sundance brunch on 26 January. “It’s a matter of gender, not that we don’t have the experience,” she added, pointing out that male directors with few credits are regularly handed control of big budget Hollywood movies.
“We have to shame the studios for being so gender-biased. We have to prove we can be commercial,” said Fonda. “We have to fight real hard to get women in positions of power and remember there are no set rules. Kathryn Bigelow made a guys’ film [The Hurt Locker], while her ex-husband James Cameron made a feminist film in Avatar.”
Fonda noted that her 1970s purple patch, during which she won Oscars for 1971’s Klute and 1978’s Coming Home, also featured box office disappointments. “I made movies about things I passionately care about,” she said. “Some of them really hit big, some didn’t.”
She said she was proud of her earlier, less cerebral work. “I like being someone who caused a generation of men to have their first erection,” said Fonda, referencing her 1968 turn as a sexually liberated space traveller in Barbarella, which became a cult hit following a 1977 re-release.
