The dearth of movies written about women and for women

In 2013 women constituted just 10 percent of the writers working on the 250 top grossing films. If the remaining 90 percent of working screenwriters are too lazy to write a movie from a woman's perspective, then the result is what we see now: an absolute dearth of movies written about women and for women. Amy Pascal, Sony's then co-chairman, said, 'You're talking about a dozen or so then female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. It's a numbers game - it's about there being enough women writers and enough women with the power to get movies made'.

Not that studios especially want these female-driven movies anyway: they want franchises, and romcoms and female comedies aren't seen as blockbuster material. 'Studio executives think these movies' success is a one-off every time,' Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something's Gotta Give and It's Complicated, said. 'They'll say, "One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack [Nicholson] was in it," or "We hadn't had a comedy for older women in forever". According to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood, 'Whenever a movie for women is successful, studios credit it to a million factors, and none of those factors is to do with women'.

Romcoms aren't heart surgery, but they - at their best - explore and explain the human heart, and that's why great ones are so great and terrible ones are so very, very terrible. This is also why it feels like such a shame that studios simply think they're not worth their time any more. To be fair, writers as wise and funny and fair as [Nora] Ephron - and Austen for that matter - don't come along every day. But things have reached a pretty pass when film trade publications admit that When Harry Met Sally wouldn't even get made any more.

- Hadley Freeman, Life Moves Pretty Fast, London, 2015, p.110.

See also:
Blog: Highlander vs Ladyhawke, 15 March 2018
Blog: The remarkable impact of My Forgotten Man, 1 May 2016
Blog: 'Hey, did you see the grosses for Gandhi 2?', 3 February 2014