3 Films That Have Impacted Everything in Your Adult Life, with Stuart Wright
I talk to Stuart about the Call It! app, my novel Prospects and the 3 films: BUGSY MALONE, BACK TO THE FUTURE and THE ACCUSED.
Why I Quit… Hollywood (The Guardian, 8th July 2024)
When I was young, I dreamt of making it in Hollywood and working as a Producer in the movies, enthralled by showbiz, enamoured by the industry and the idea of seeing my name in the credit roll on the silver screen. And I got there, kind of. I made a circuitous 5,500 mile journey from London to Los Angeles, attending UCLA, interning for the production company of a bona-fide A-list celebrity and ultimately securing sponsorship for a visa, the holy grail of the immigrant worker. I had been seen, discovered, plucked out of obscurity and given my shot. I couldn’t have had better timing, I thought, landing in a glorious era shortly after Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction had a seismic impact on the popularity (and the gargantuan pecuniary rewards) of auteur-led independent films.
You will be unsurprised to learn that the dream was short-lived, and I was back in cold, wet London within 3 years of graduating from university. While I had anticipated the obligatory tea-making, endless script-reading and punishing hours that test an assistant’s mettle for the job, the promise of one day hobnobbing on the red carpet with movie stars was insufficiently compelling to justify the toxic culture normalised at the time. I could laugh-off a comment about my looks or an awkward invitation for dinner, but I was ill-prepared for the escalation. When I tell people about some of the more extreme workplace experiences that drove me home so quickly - the late night phone calls; the unsolicited gifts of red roses and lingerie; the oversharing of experiences with prostitutes and porn-stars; the excited filmmaker who said, as he signed my work papers, “It’s like getting a mail order bride!" - they are quick (and entirely right) to label the unwanted sexual and romantic attention as sexual harassment. “Why,” they predictably enquire, “didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you tell somebody what was happening to you?”
In the late 1990s, in a town run by Harvey Weinstein and his like, I did not have access to a lexicon of sexual harassment, of grooming, of coercion and gaslighting. What would I have said, exactly? To whom would I have said it? I did once tearily confide in a woman in a position of power about the worst of these experiences, a run-in amounting to physical and sexual assault, and was told it was “a private, personal matter between you and him.” While I was wrestling with the feelings of shame, complicity and confusion that so often accompany experiences of sexual harassment and sexual violence, there were no hashtags, let alone #MeToo, and the incidents were each disempowering and isolating, intentionally so. Like many others who have now come forward, I dared not raise my hand to complain or raise my voice above a whisper. I did not believe I could.
And so, with no recourse to an alternative solution… I quit. I had found myself in an untenable and lonely position, unable to work without injury to my self-worth and dignity, incapable of suspending my disbelief sufficiently to think my dreams remained within reach. I was not the first to quit - Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, two of the fore-parents of the industry and co-founders of United Artists and the Academy Awards, began a grand Hollywood tradition of quitting that has been going strong for 100 years - and, although I could not see it at the time, my exodus was far from solitary. The #MeToo movement has uncovered the mind-boggling numbers of women who have quit the film industry after experiencing sexual harassment, each brave woman prepared to revisit a confusing and often traumatic past and emboldened to add her small voice to a booming, collective cri de coeur.
Those of us who were working in LA’s film business in the 90s should now be at the peak of our careers, settling into a spot at the very top of the credit roll and preparing our awards acceptance speeches, but that is the reality for very few women. A gender imbalance at the apex of a profession is not unique to filmmaking - one need only glance at a list of Executives at FTSE100 companies or QCs or top medical consultants to acknowledge the ubiquity of the problem - but the disparity is glaring in Hollywood where only 1 in 5 above-the-line jobs is held by a woman and only 3 women have won the accolade of Best Director from the Academy Awards in its 95 year history. The women who were run out of Hollywood in the 1990s, a generation whose stories were too often muted by NDAs handed out like confetti, are conspicuous by their absence. Our most powerful cultural medium betrays a behind-the-scenes narrative of historical sexism and misogyny, told through the gaping holes in credit rolls where women’s names should rightly be found.
Twenty-five years after I left Hollywood, the future of cinema is uncertain, cast into the deep and murky waters of direct-to-streaming releases and an individualistic culture that prefers to “Netflix and chill” while creative freedoms are encroached upon by the threats of AI and right-leaning politics. Today, times are tough for everybody in Tinseltown. Ironically, we now have a swathe of irrefutable evidence that films with improved representation, both on and off-screen, offer more box office bang for their buck and contribute to a more sustainable, cost-effective economy, and it is crystal clear that the film industry would have benefited from greater diversity of thought over the years. While there is sadly no option to hop into the DeLorean to change what has already passed, I have hope for the future of cinema if we can just crack open its well-guarded doors and persuade some of the women who were once made unwelcome to return. For my part, consider the ticket booked.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/08/hollywood-la-film-industry-women-metoo
Kate Wilson is the co-founder of Call It! Workplace Culture App and her first novel, Prospects, is published on 1st July by Cinnamon Press (www.prospects-novel.com).
Calling It Out (for Representology, a publication of the University of Cardiff)
Perhaps I am contrary by nature, but I’ve never liked being told what to do. The use of the imperative will inevitably initiate a miniature revolt in my brain and my gut: nothing is more likely to dampen my appetite than a restaurant named Eat! or dissuade the purchase of a new sofa than a shop called Dwell. And so it is of little surprise that the proliferation of well-intended Speak Up programmes and policies across our harassment-plagued film and television industries has caused me some anxiety, and I was interested and eager to read Anna Bull’s report, Safe to Speak Up: Sexual Harassment in the UK Film and Television Industry Since #MeToo.
Interviewing 18 subjects (17 women and 1 man) who have experienced sexual harassment and/or sexual violence in the workplace since the seismic reckoning of the New York Times and New Yorker articles outing Harvey Weinstein and gang in late 2017, Bull endeavours to measure the aftershocks of the ensuing #MeToo movement to determine exactly how far afield the tremors were felt, and their ongoing impact on survivors, if any. Bull interrogates the evolution and effect of the UK’s industry-wide trend of telling victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence to “Speak up!” and report their experiences, determining the trend’s success or otherwise with a view to identifying obstacles to reporting.
For my palate, there are several flies in the ointment of Speak Up policies and programmes and, therefore, in Bull’s report, making the whole thing rather hard to swallow. First - the duty of care and legal requirement to proactively create a safe place or work, including a place of work that is free from harassment and discrimination, rests with the employers, and Speak Up policies endeavour to shift that duty of care (or a proportion thereof) from the employer to the victims of discrimination, the employees. To be clear, while victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence undoubtedly have an important role to play in initiating formal procedings against alleged perpetrators, they have no legal duty under employment law or criminal law to report their experiences at all. Anna Bull’s report perpetuates the shift of responsibility for sexual harassment and sexual violence in the direction of the victim, interviewing only victims, of which 17 of 18 are women. I would savour the opportunity to read a report that asks the perpetrators of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence, including the business leaders who are responsible for the workplaces where those perpetrators thrive, how we move forwards, and to hear men’s perspective on these matters.
The voice of the cynic in me warns that Speak Up policies are used by employers as a defensive tool, enabling the denial of knowledge of incidents or prohibited behaviours, i.e. “We received no reports and therefore cannot have been expected to act.” Are Speak Up policies really for the victims’ benefit at all or are they an instrument made by and for the employer? To quote Audre Lord, “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Second and moreover - by their very nature, Speak Up policies and programmes begin a discourse in the aftermath of the event, implicitly telling workers that sexual harassment and sexual violence in the workplace are par for the course: “Les jeux sont fait and we, your employers, failed to protect you. Now, where to begin?” In my opinion, the timeline of an incident of sexual harassment or sexual violence does not start with the unwelcome hand on the small of the back, or the inappropriate language, or the implicit threat of violence, but with the culture that endorses, encourages, facilitates and enables these behaviours.
Instances of sexual harassment and sexual violence do not happen in a vacuum, but, to borrow from Liz Kelly, in a continuum where one experience blurs into the next, effecting the next, and the next, and the next (see footnote). While victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence live and work in an office, industry, country and world that is neither psychologically nor physically safe, and while the process of reporting instances of sexual harassment and sexual violence may cause as much, if not more, psychological, physical, financial, professional and reputational damage than the event itself, victims must not be pressured into reporting their experiences. Victims may be empowered and supported to report, but we must not be so eager as to oblige them to do so.
Perhaps it is not just my contrary nature that resists the imperative to, “Speak up!”
When I was young, I dreamt of making it in Hollywood and working in the movies, enthralled by showbiz, enamoured by “the industry” and the idea of seeing my name in the credit role on the silver screen. We easily conjure an image of starlets disembarking planes, trains and automobiles in Los Angeles (or at Leavesden), offering themselves up for discovery, but there are equal numbers of young people arriving who aspire to be filmmakers, screenwriters, cinematographers, designers, each fuelled by a dream, perhaps less photo-ready than the ingenues, but each equally vulnerable in the pursuit of an aspiration that can only be realised if they are somehow seen, invited into the inner-circles of studio bosses and cigar-chomping super-producers.
And I got there, kind of. I made a circuitous 5,500 mile journey from London to Los Angeles, attending UCLA, interning for the production company of a bona-fide A-list celebrity and ultimately securing sponsorship for a work permit, the holy grail of the immigrant worker. I was seen, plucked out of obscurity and given my shot, and I couldn’t have had better timing, I thought, landing at a glorious time for independent film as ambitious auteurs and distributors tried to replicate the impressive critical reception and stupendous box office returns of PULP FICTION and Miramax.
You will be unsurprised to learn that the dream was short-lived, and I was back in cold, wet, London within 3 years of graduating from university. When I tell people about some of the workplace experiences that drove me home so quickly - the late night phone calls, the unsolicited gifts of red roses and lingerie, the oversharing of experiences with prostitutes and porn-stars - they are quick (and entirely right) to label the unwanted sexual and romantic attention as sexual harassment. “Why,” they predictably, universally enquire, “didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you tell somebody what was happening to you?”
It is essential to consider my story in the context of the local, national and global culture in which it and I existed. In the 1990s, in a town run by Harvey Weinstein, Joel Silver and Scott Rudin, to name a few, I did not have access to the lexicon of sexual harassment, of grooming, of coercion and gaslighting. What would I have said, exactly? And to whom would I have said it? I had never seen such a thing as a Dignity at Work Policy or met anyone from HR, although I did once confide in a woman in a position of power about the worst of these experiences, a run-in amounting to physical and sexual assault, and was told it was, “a private matter between you and him.”
It is not true to suggest there were not protections against sexual harassment in law in the United States at the time: the Civil Rights Act 1964 had made discrimination on the basis of sex illegal, while the Equal Employment Regulations 1980 had extended the definition to include sexual harassment, and the Civil Rights Act 1991 had enshrined the right to sue and claim compensatory and punitive damages. As I completed my university education, the effectiveness of the legal framework had been demonstrated to me and other women through two principle avenues:
Through politics: in 1991 Anita Hill accused Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas, her one-time supervisor at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (of all places), of sexual harassment, citing his persistent petitions for dates and his insistence on sharing graphic descriptions of bestiality and rape. Despite taking and passing a polygraph test, Hill was not believed, and the US Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court (and if you want evidence of Liz Kelly’s continuum of sexual violence existing over time, I direct you to his concurring opinion overturning Roe v Wade in 2022)
And through our most powerful cultural medium, film: arguably in response to Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation and associated hearings, in 1994 Warner Brothers released an adaptation of Michael Crighton’s DISCLOSURE, wherein Michael Douglas is sued for sexual harassment by a former lover turned boss who initiated the act forcefully, threatening both his career and his personal life. Yes, Michael Douglas plays the victim of a psychopathic woman who sexually harasses him and then exploits the legal protections to seek further revenge.
Suffice it to say that as a consequence of the context in which I was living and working , I do not believe that speaking up in the late 1990s would have done anything good for me or my career. I believe that Liz Kelly's continuum extends far beyond each person’s individual experiences, beyond geographical and temporal boundaries and into the political, social and cultural spheres that shape our understanding and expectations of each other and the world. While my individual experiences undoubtedly met the legal threshold of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence, I existed in a context where reporting my experiences was not a possibility for reasons including the normalisation of the behaviour, my belief that nothing would be done, my ignorance of what to say or to whom it should be said, my previous experiences, my overwhelming feeling of blame and complicity and fear of losing my job, reputation and opportunity to continue working in the industry in which I desperately wanted a future.
Anna Bull’s research is not going back nearly so far as the 1990s, of course, but limits itself to experiences of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence since late 2017, seeking evidence of change catalysed by the #MeToo movement and ensuing Speak Up trend. While the majority of interviewees had taken some step or steps towards formal reporting - anything from disclosing the experience to family or friends to leaving the job - the most interesting part of the report, in my opinion, is the list of reasons why interviewees had not formally reported their experiences of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence to their employer, namely -
Sexual harassment was normalised or tolerated in the workplace
Believing that nothing would be done and/or they wouldn’t be supported in reporting
No information available about reporting or no-one to report to
Interviewees had previous experienced and/or reported sexual harassment or sexual violence
Interviewees felt complicit; or that it was their fault; or that it wasn’t serious enough to report
Their workplace had wider discrimination issues, a toxic culture or difficult working conditions
Fearing losing the job or damaging one’s reputation
Blocked or dissuaded from reporting
And through this all too familiar list, an uneasy nostalgia is detected: forget 2017, the reasons for not reporting are unchanged since my first experiences in the 1990s. While we may have started to see the evolution of the legal frameworks that aim to prevent discrimination and some commendable improvements to employers’ policies and procedures, the continuum and context in which these experiences are happening are insufficiently changed. My suspicions are confirmed by further research including the 2021 UN Women UK report into the prevalence and reporting of sexual harassment and sexual violence in public spaces, and further observations of current affairs and culture highlights including enquiries into Jimmy Saville, Philip Schofield and Russell Brand, and BAFTA’s choice of recipient of their 2021 Outstanding Contribution to Film Award, Noel Clarke.
So, where do we go from here? How do we move the dial towards a culture in which it is safe to report without putting victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence at risk of further harm? How do we protect workers without shifting the duty of care onto their already embattled shoulders, respecting their very good reasons for not reporting? How do we move forwards, respecting the context and continuum in which we exist and in which these behaviours persist?
Having returned to the UK at the start of a new millennium, I found the opportunities in the much smaller film and TV sector hard to secure, but the sexual harassment equally unavoidable, prevalent and as damaging. I retrained as a consultant, attending law school and working across the arts and cultural sector, only returning to film and TV after a ten year hiatus for recovery and rehabilitation, open eyed to the many and various pitfalls before me. I spoke with other women and I began to find my voice and niche, and in 2021, in the wake of the suicide of Caroline Flack and the allegations against Noel Clarke, I shared some of my experiences with two other loud-mouthed women who had found their voices, too, Jules Hussey and Delyth Thomas, a producer and director respectively. Together, we developed the Call It! App, a data collection and signposting tool.
Call It! is an incredibly simple piece of technology addressing incredibly complex issues: if workplace culture (including workplace discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual violence) were climate change, then our app is a thermometer. We don’t pretend that an app can solve the problems we face, but an app can help us measure and better understand those problems, and in so doing, it can improve leaders’ opportunities to create safer, fairer places of work while engaging with victims where they are, here and now, in a world that is far from perfect and where, despite the best of intentions, it is not always safe to speak up.
You can learn more about the Call It! app here: www.callitapp.org
Kelly, Liz (1988). Surviving Sexual Violence. Polity Press, p.74, 91
Cannes Film Festival
Later this week I’m heading to Cannes. There’s a slim chance, I suppose, that I’ll find myself within eyeshot of rarefied accolade recipients Meryl Streep, Donna Langley or Andrea Arnold, or earshot of jury members Eva Green or Lily Gladstone or their esteemed president, cinema saviour Greta Gerwig. Slim to none, if we’re being honest…. But there is a very good chance I’ll rub shoulders with lesser familiar, lesser newsworthy women who have experienced sexual harassment and sexual violence while working in the film industry. Better than a very good chance…. It is inevitable. 100% guaranteed.
I think the poor treatment of women working in film has been ubiquitous, and I believe the independent film industry (in Hollywood and globally) is on its knees, creatively and financially, in large part due to the harassment, abuse, exploitation, commodification and exile of women (I’ve literally written a book about it….). And so you might think I’d be cheering on the anticipated publication of a “Secret list of ten men in the industry, including leading actors and directors, who have been abusive to women” in Cannes on Wednesday. But I’m not.
The publication of a list of men against whom anonymous allegations have been raised is a mistake, in my opinion. It is reckless, contrary to the principle of fair hearing, and I think it undermines the important work that was (barely) begun by the failed #MeToo movement.
While I do not question the veracity of the allegations therein, the list reduces a systemic, industry-wide cultural problem that requires a comprehensive reckoning to… ten measly names. Ten names? What about the man who was eleventh on the list? And what about the man who was the 11,000th?
The publication of the list as Cannes opens on Wednesday threatens to overshadow the achievements of Meryl and co (even if they do feel rather tokenistic, a point eloquently address my Kristen Stewart this week). It makes disruptive entertainment and cheap newspaper headlines out of something much more complex and pernicious, something impossible to quantify, and something that needs to be addressed strategically and collectively. The redress of women’s treatment in the film industry is culturally, economically and morally essential for our sector, and it will not be advanced by the publication of the list of ten men.
Rather than listing names of abusers (seriously… they’re ten a penny! You can’t swing a cat in Cannes without hitting one…), we need to focus our efforts on developing a positive plan to address the systemic failures of the industry, investing in an infrastructure and improved culture that will afford opportunities to women working in film, and building an industry that is safe for women, for today and for our future.