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).