When I was young, I dreamed of making it in Hollywood and working in the movies. Enthralled by the showbiz industry, I wanted to become a big-time producer and see my name in the credits on the silver screen. And I got there, kind of. I made the 5,500-mile journey from London to Los Angeles, attending UCLA, interning at the production company of a bona fide A-list celebrity and ultimately securing sponsorship for a work visa. I had been plucked out of obscurity and given my shot, and the timing couldn’t have been better, I thought, landing shortly after Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction had a seismic impact on the popularity of auteur-led, independent films.
But my dream was short-lived and, just three years later, I was back in cold, wet London. While I had anticipated the obligatory tea-making, endless script-reading and punishing hours that test an assistant’s mettle for the job, even the promise of one day hobnobbing on the red carpet with movie stars was insufficiently compelling to justify the toxic culture that was so much a part of the industry at the time.
I would laugh it off when my superiors made comments about my looks or extended an awkward invitation for dinner, but I was ill-prepared for how extreme things would get: late-night phone calls and unsolicited gifts of red roses and lingerie from employers; men in the industry bragging about sleeping with sex workers and porn stars; and the senior industry figure who said, as I signed a contract: “It’s like getting a mail-order bride!”
When I tell these stories now, many are quick to label the incessant, unwanted sexual and romantic attention as sexual harassment. “Why didn’t you speak up?” they ask. In the late 1990s, in a town run by Harvey Weinstein and his ilk, I simply didn’t have the language to label what was happening as sexual harassment, grooming, coercion, gaslighting. What would I have said, exactly? And 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, but was told it was “a private, personal matter between you and him”. Like many others who have finally felt able to come forward post-#MeToo, I dared not raise my hand to complain at the time – 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. Suddenly, my dreams of making it in Hollywood felt completely out of reach.
Although I could not see it at the time, my exodus was far from solitary. The female writers, producers and directors 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 top of the credit roll and preparing our awards acceptance speeches. But that is the reality for very few women.
Just one in five above the line jobs are held by a woman today, and only three women have won the accolade of best director from the Academy Awards in its 95-year history. Those of us who were run out of Hollywood back then, a generation whose stories were too often silenced by non-disclosure agreements handed out like confetti, are conspicuous by our absence.
The #MeToo movement helped shine a light on us again; each woman who spoke up about a confusing and often traumatic past adding her voice to a booming, collective cri de coeur.
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. Today, times are tough for everybody in Tinseltown. Ironically, we now have a swath of irrefutable evidence that films with improved representation, on- and off-screen, offer more box office bang for their buck and contribute to a more sustainable, cost-effective economy. It is crystal clear that the film industry would have benefited from greater diversity of thought over the years.
We can’t change the past, but 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 so unwelcome to return.
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Kate Wilson is the co-founder of the Call It! workplace culture app; she is the author of Prospects
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