Expendable and Abused with a Short Shelf-life

At the outset, let’s focus on shelf-life.  I am not writing about a fresh-baked French baguette carried under an armpit, but about the lot of actresses on both sides of the Atlantic.  Male actors have no expiry dates as exposed by the 2020 Academy Awards nominations.  Four of the ten nominated actors are septuagenarians.  On the other hand, the oldest female nominee is 72-year-old Kathy Bates in the best supporting actress category.  As a result, the median age difference between men and women nominees is a whopping 21 years! 

At the Oscars, age bias has been a constant[1], but in this period of Time’s Up, 21 years seem to be a provocation.  If the male actor geriatric club is alive and kicking, leading roles for actresses over 70 are few and far between.  Only Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Catherine Deneuve get a chance.

Last week, on friends’ recommendations, I went to see the film Judy.  As the name indicates, it is a biography of actress, singer and dancer Judy Garland.  I never cared much about Garland and never saw any of her films.  However, I always liked Renee Zellwegger’s work, and her portrayal of the talented but troubled Garland is outstanding (though she is much taller and slimmer than the middle-aged Garland) and has received Oscar buzz.  She has already collected most of the less prestigious best actress awards.  The film’s interest is how Garland, who “was the poster child of old Hollywood glamour” (Nicky Swift[2]), became the poster child of movie studio abuse and manipulation.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Garland’s studio, monitored her every move and curbed her freedom.  At the outset, with the provision of drugs, coffee, cigarettes and diets, her bossy and wicked mother “programmed” her to meet the taxing studio’s requirements

Garland’s teen years appear to be straight out of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.  She is a flesh and blood Olympia, the mechanical doll created by an eccentric inventor.  Olympia captivated the public with her dazzling singing performances.  But, like a clock, the doll’s mechanism had to be recharged, and finally Olympia spins out of control.  Louis B. Mayer and Garland’s mother shared the role of the doll inventor.   Garland was even pushed to abort her first child in order to keep her virginal teen market value.  Studio- imposed abortions were common practices and many young stars did this to keep their contracts and graduate into stardom. 

                                                                 Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Louis B. Mayer.


This studio exploitation took its toll.  Garland became an alcoholic, a chain smoker, and a drug addict.  She was an unhappy serial wife (five husbands), fought child custody battles, and was afflicted by money problems.  She was suicidal with impulses for self-mutilation.  Her voice gone and broke, she died in London of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 47.

The abuses suffered by Garland were made worse by her mother’s meanness and ambition, but they were common practices in the 1940s, and 50s.  Studios acted like dictatorships, and women were fair game as both studio icons and preys.  As a result, like Garland many stars struggled with addiction, anxiety, depression and broken homes.  They married numerous times, probably thinking that husbands would protect them from studio oppression.  Hedy Lamarr, one of the leading screen sirens of Golden Age Hollywood was married six times.  Last year I saw the documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, which shows how outstanding and unhappy her life had been.  She resented being valued only as a pretty face.  Lamarr received an Oscar but not for her acting, she was awarded the BULBIE which is regarded as the Oscars of inventing.  During WWII, she and George Antheil developed an early technique for spread spectrum communications which is now used in cell phones.

The studios contract system was akin to indentured servitude.  Stars under contract lost their personal freedom and became studio property.  The young women went through an extensive image make-over to conform to the studio’s imagination and market[3].  If aspiring actresses strayed from the studio’s control, they would be pushed aside and often discarded.  Many who failed the “casting couch” test ended up as waitresses, “party favor” girls (i.e. to be sexually exploited during Hollywood stag parties), or even prostitutes.  To get a paycheck, women had to consent to the Hollywood pervasive sexualized culture.

The power imbalance between studio moguls and aspiring starlets led to institutionalized sexual harassment.  For an actress, the “casting couch” was a Hollywood time honored rite of passage.  “The casting couch is a euphemism for the practice of soliciting sexual favors from a job applicant in exchange for employment in the entertainment industry, primarily acting roles.”[4] In other words, to get ahead, the applicant must make a down payment in the form of nonconsensual sex.  “The transactional nature of the film business was something women learned sooner or later”[5], but at their expenses, notably when many of them were vying for the same part.

By the 1960s, the autocratic studio system had fallen into decline, but the sexual exploitation it had created did not.  The disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein is a modern reincarnation of generations of abusive studio moguls.  It seems that little as changed behind the silver screen.  Weinstein is on trial in New York for many alleged sexual assaults.  Although, a notorious sexual predator, he may get off as his victims’ accusations seem so confused.  # Me too and Times’ Up are valuable initiatives, but the statistics are stacked against woman empowerment.  During the last decade 96% of the 1,200 highest-grossing films were directed by men, and 72% of producers were white men.  To make matter worse, female directors overly focus on women-interest films.  The industry needs more women like Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow.  Weinstein fell from his pedestal because he was already a movie mogul on the decline.  Had he been still at the top, I wonder if he would be on trial today.  

---

[1] Over the past 25 years, the average age difference has been 7 years.

[2] https://www.nickiswift.com/117410/untold-truth-judy-garland/?utm_campaign=clip

[3] In a lesser extent, men actors (like Kirk Douglas who recently passed way at 103) were also made over.

[4] Wikipedia.

[5] Vanity Fair, Holiday Issue 2019-2010, p.107.