"We must have naked breasts in this movie"

When Thelma & Louise was released in 1991 it inspired a stream of abuse from the (mostly) male reviewers. Many of the critics found the tale of two women who go on the run after shooting dead a rapist a little close to the bone. They claimed it had "an explicit fascist theme" and was "degrading to men".

The film's scriptwriter, Callie Khouri, saw it differently. "Bad guys get killed in every goddam movie that gets made. And that guy [the rapist] was the bad guy and he got killed. It was only because a woman did it that there was any controversy at all. If a guy had come out and saved their asses and shot that guy and said, 'Run, quick,' do you think there would have been a fucking moment of controversy?"

For women trying to make it, over the years, as producers and studio executives in Hollywood, there has been something of a similar reaction. According to a new book, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?, by journalist Rachel Abramowitz, there has been no shortage of guys who weren't pleased to see women taking control, and no shortage of guys ready to tell female would-be producers, "Run, quick," and leave the shooting to them.

Abramowitz's book is already in the bestseller lists in Los Angeles (one place above Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women, by Harriett Woods) and could not have arrived at a more timely moment. Last week, producer Paula Weinstein (The Fabulous Baker Boys, Fearless) received Variety's Hall of Fame award and made the pointed comment that it was nice to be recognised, even though she had not produced many big box-office films.

And this week a new series of Beggars and Choosers, a television satire on the entertainment industry, will feature a ruthlessly ambitious vice president of development, Lori Volpone, played by Charlotte Ross, who fulfils many stereotypes about the cut-throat style of the woman executive who makes it in the business.

The message for women producers is that either they get criticised for not making enough record-breaking hit movies or they are seen as hard-faced schemers prepared to trample in their stilettos over the backs of male executives to reach the top.

What Abramowitz found by talking to 150 of the women executives, directors and players who have made it in the film business was that many had had to ignore or tolerate quite a lot of the type of behaviour that would have had Thelma and Louise reaching for their Magnums. Women had found that their job interview for an entrée into the business often started with "take off your clothes" and that when they had been given the job, their boss's first call of the day was to pass on this information: "I'm holding my big, veiny dick in my hand." Would that Mae West was still around to make the appropriate riposte.

Gloria Steinem is among many who have praised the book, saying that it "exposes the working conditions in America's dream factory, a reality more cautionary than anything it puts on film". As if to prove her point, director Martha Coolidge recounts being told when she applied to the New York University graduate film school: "You can't be a director, you're a woman. You're wasting your time and your parents' money."

When Coolidge was finally allowed to direct her first film she was told by the head of the company: "I want you to know that we must have naked breasts in this movie four times... I don't care how you do it. I just want naked breasts." Coolidge told him she did not have a problem with that as long as she could do it her way, which she duly did, making the film Valley Girl for $350,000 and watching it gross $17m.

Women directors remain the exception. In the decade between 1983 and 1992, a period in which many barriers appeared to be being broken down by and for women in the film industry, only 81 of the 1,794 features made were directed by women. No woman has ever won an Oscar for best director and only two have been nominated - Lina Wertmuller in 1977, and Jane Campion in 1993.

The role of women in film and the relative ways in which male and female actors are treated is a different subject, although Abramowitz quotes Meryl Streep addressing the Screen Actors Guild first national women's conference: "I'm barely able to contain a guffaw when a reporter asks me what drew me to a role, as though there is a rainbow of well-written leading female roles."

Her speech coincided with the publication of research that showed that 71% of all roles in feature films went to men. It might seem that not too much has changed if this week's box-office returns in the US are anything to go by: Shaft, Mission: Impossible 2, Gladiator, Gone in 60 Seconds. The only film with a plethora of strong female roles would seem to be Chicken Run.

But the spectrum of opinion quoted in the book is broad. Sue Mengers, the veteran agent, is quoted as saying: "Power is still alien to women. They don't feel it is proper. Men get on top in sex and we are still scared of turning them off... There are now as many mediocre women working in our industry as there are men."

Sherry Lansing, who in 1980 became the first woman studio head when she was made president of Fox, tells Abramowitz: "This is going to make me really unpopular with women's lib, but they [male executives] never came on to me in a way that was abusive or I couldn't handle. I was a single woman. Nobody ever threw me down on the couch."

What did upset Lansing was the New York Times headline when she was appointed to the top job: "Sherry Lansing, former model, named head of Fox Productions." She was already 36 at the time of the appointment and she had last been a Max Factor model when she was 22. The years with Columbia as vice president of production (Kramer vs Kramer; The China Syndrome) and as MGM's vice president of creative affairs were forgotten in the face of the chance to slip in a reference to her modelling days.

Paula Weinstein recalled: "There was hellish competition amongst the women. We all tended to compete with each other and to think of ourselves on the ladder for the one woman job at the studio, rather than coming together and saying, 'Now, how do we forge ourselves as a group?' "

Barbra Streisand suggests, when talking about her time as director of the 1983 film Yentl, that "these people call me an egotist because they can't handle a woman having this much control". She was producer, director, writer and star of the film. When Yentl was not nominated for an Oscar as best picture and Streisand not nominated as best director, her supporters picketed the ceremony in LA with placards reading: "Oscar at 56 - is he still a closet chauvinist?"

One woman television executive I spoke to about Abramowitz's book and about the role of women executives in the industry said that she thought women now had more power in television than in film. "I think television is more democratic than film," she said, "although, like film, it is still a white man's world. There are some really good television directors out there but there is still a shortage of women. It is a boys' club."

Women have certainly achieved a higher profile on the management side of television than in film. My source said that she reckoned one reason for this was the need to finish programmes on time because they had to be shown on television in a specific slot and could not be delayed meant that people behaved in a more professional and democratic fashion than in film, where the final cut could always be delayed or negotiated.

Rachel Abramowitz, who is based in Los Angeles and has covered the film industry mainly for Premiere magazine, concludes her eight-year-long study with the observation that Titanic was "the biggest woman's picture of all time". Some 60% of the audience were women, and 72% of those who went more than once were female - 64% of them under 25.

Sherry Lansing said of the Titanic script when she first saw it: "This is one of the strongest feminist pieces I've ever read in my life." And Abramowitz's book ends by affirming that women audiences are taken more seriously than they were 10 or 20 years ago. But as writer and director Nora Ephron is quoted: "If you're not helped by men, you don't get anywhere in this business because men run it, women don't."

It was Mae West, of course, who gave the book its title and it's worth noting that in 1926, aged 34, it was Mae West who not only wrote the play Sex, but also produced and directed the show, which made it to Broadway.

She was jailed for 10 days on charges of obscenity but emerged to direct again the following year, this time a play about homosexuals called Drag. It was a hit in New Jersey but West was told not to risk bringing it to Broadway. From there, she went on to a film career that gave us everything from I'm No Angel and Night After Night to Myra Breckinridge and Sextette. Doubtless, were she alive today, she would be more than puzzled that three quarters of a century after she had cut her producing and directing teeth, women are still so far removed from the power lines.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? by Rachel Abramowitz is published by in the US by Random House, price $26.95.

Breaking into the boys' club

Studio executives

In 1980 Sherry Lansing became the first woman studio head when she was appointed president of 20th Century Fox. In 1984 she joined up with Stanley Jaffe to form an independent production company and, when Jaffe was appointed president of Paramount Communications in 1990, she became chairman of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group.

Dawn Steel became Paramount's production chief in 1984 and president of Columbia Pictures three years later.

Directors

Last year, women directors accounted for 10.2% of the total days worked, compared with 4% in 1985. The first woman film director - as well as the first director, male or female, to bring a narrative film to the screen - was Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) who directed, produced and/or supervised nearly 300 films in her lifetime.

The first woman to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar was Italian film-maker Lina Wertmuller, for Seven Beauties, in 1977. (She had started out working as assistant director to Federico Fellini on 8½.)

The only other female nominee has been Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993 - a film which had already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Penny Marshall was the first woman to direct a movie, Big, to gross more than $100m.

Martinique-born Euzhan Palcy was the first black woman film-maker to direct a feature-length Hollywood film with A Dry White Season, in 1989.

Writers

The first truly powerful woman Hollywood scriptwriter was Frances Marion, a one-time war correspondent who became Mary Pickford's "official scriptwriter" in the silent era. Marion won Oscars for The Big House in 1930 and The Champ in 1931. After the awards were separated into Original and Adapted in 1940, the first female recipient of Best Original Screenplay Oscar was British: Muriel Box, who shared the award for The Seventh Veil in 1947 with her husband Sydney.

The only American winner has been Callie Khouri, for Thelma & Louise in 1991. Women have been more successful in the Adapted category, with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala winning twice, for A Room With a View and Howards End.

Producers

Ida Lupino, who found fame as an actress, produced and directed B movies in the 40s and 50s, including Not Wanted (1949) and Never Fear (1950).

Julia Phillips, author of You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture, with The Sting in 1973. Polly Platt, former wife of Peter Bogdanovich and generally reckoned an unacknowledged driving force behind his films of the early 70s, produced Say Anything, Bottle Rocket and The Evening Star.

With Yentl, in 1983, Barbra Streisand became the first woman to produce, direct write and star in a film. Among current celebrity actor-producers, Demi Moore helped produce both Austin Powers films.

Zoe Trodd

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