Jodie Foster in The Brave One. Photograph: Warner Brothers
The status of women in Hollywood - likened, by more than one onlooker, to a caste system - took a further step backward yesterday with the news, reported in the LA Weekly, that one of America's largest film studios, Warner Brothers, will no longer make films featuring a female in the lead role.
Jeff Robinov, Warner Brothers' President, allegedly made the order - confirmed to the newspaper by three separate WB producers - following the disappointing box-office performance of the studio's two major fall releases: Neil Jordan's The Brave One ($42m worldwide) and sci-fi blockbuster The Invasion (a paltry $14m in the US). Both films were perceived to be female-driven vehicles - the first, starring Jodie Foster, the latter with Nicole Kidman.
Robinov has denied the report, and - presumably by way of an olive branch - announced he is still more than willing to put a female star into an action role. Which is great news for Milla Jovovich, rather less so for Meryl Streep.
Yet one can't help but feel that Warners might be missing a crucial point, here. The reason those movies flopped had nothing to do with the gender of their stars. It was because they're bad films.
One - The Invasion - was destroyed by meddling: yet another remake of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, producer Joel Silver felt original director Oliver Hirschbiegel's version was too "cerebral" (ie lacking the requisite explosions) and replaced him for extensive reshoots by the Wachowski brothers (who appear hell-bent on erasing any last vestiges of goodwill the original Matrix might have earned them) and their colleague James McTeigue. Who, you might recall, gave us the painful V For Vendetta. The other - distaff vigilante drama The Brave One - suffered from an uninspired, by-the-numbers script, and a general sense of ennui from an audience who felt they'd seen it all before ... with Foster in the same role.
Neither film exactly advanced an argument for the pros or cons of female actors - or indeed, the enduring worth of the human species. Nor can either failure be laid at the feet of its cast. But what's most remarkable about this move is not that a Hollywood studio should treat women more unfairly than their better-salaried, longer-lasting male counterparts - it's that they chose actually to broadcast the fact, rather than simply relying on their usual policy of exclusion-by-silence. You know, like they do with black people.
You might be forgiven for thinking this the kind of blinkered prejudice that was prevalent decades ago - say, 1939. Except that was the year Gone With the Wind was made, and The Women, and Ninotchka. Not by Warner Bros, though ... that was MGM, always the studio most sympathetic to female audiences.
True, Warners was an early innovator, pioneering the use of sound (the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was a Warners production) and the development of Technicolour. Indeed, the studio first made its name with lavish show-spectacles like 1929's Gold Diggers of Broadway. But then around 1932, under new production head Darryl F Zanuck, it made an abrupt U-turn - choosing to favour grittier, more realistic storylines: the "torn from the headlines" pictures that fed on and whetted America's growing fascination with its criminal underworld.
They jettisoned most of their musical and silent stars. The new Warner Bros stars were terse, working-class types - tough guys like James Cagney and Edward G Robinson, and brassy dames like Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell. MGM was known for its glamour, and Paramount for its array of stars. But, notwithstanding the occasional sop to the ladies (1939 also saw A Child Is Born, with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gladys George and Gale Page), Warner Bros was very much a guys' studio, churning out movies for the fellas. It seems little has changed.
