Try a little thought experiment with me, yes?
What comes to mind when you roll the phrase "ambitious slut" around in your mind? (I promise I'll tie it all together in a few moments).
If I were to think of myself as an ambitious slut, I would, I suppose, picture a pit of molten lava roiling around my belly (or, “power chakra” if you’re from Northern California or India).That fire pit would fuel my professional success as well as my limitless sexual pleasure. It would self-regenerate.
When I multiply this image and picture ranks of such power-bellied ambitious sluts entering into Hollywood, outlandish scenarios ensue: Multiple Academy Awards for women. People of color superheroes in ubiquity! More movies that meet the Bechdel test that two women talk to each other about something other than a man. And so on.
(Photo used with permission of artist Leanne Williams, http://www.diamondlightlmw.com/)
With enough ambitious sluts, it could happen.
Even with the abysmal statistics on women and film, the screen still compels me as a place to stoke my storytelling fire. So after twenty years of publishing in print and online, a screenplay finished, several more in progress and a decade of study with some truly gifted teachers, I decided it was time to go through a final rite of passage: Robert McKee’s Story seminar. After all, what better odds-booster than to have the tricks of the master in my pocket? Surely the thousands of women who have passed through his Story Seminar couldn’t all be wrong.
The good news is, for the most part, Robert McKee rocks. His Story Seminar is unequalled—he’s a gifted lecturer and performer who engages his audience at every turn. His teachings, though at times on the complicated end of the continuum, reveal deep insights about story structure and the human condition from which every screenwriter, storyteller and entertainment professional could benefit. I was impressed to see people from such a wide cross-section of the entertainment industry: actors, producers, game creators and more, showing up to learn what goes into story.
I was thrilled to be the first to ask a question during the break, which got videotaped: Riffing off his eulogy on the heyday of story, I asked, What do you think has contributed to the demise of Story in entertainment? This seemed to touch a nerve with him, in a good way. He seemed genuinely enlivened to engage with a question beyond the realm of How do I break into Hollywood?. He spoke eloquently and with passion about the rise of postmodernism, and how it displaced the humanistic principles that informed story. I listened, fascinated, as I recalled endless hours in the mid-eighties at my uptight Ivy League institution, navigating the intricacies of deconstruction with Prominent Literary Scholars. Intellectual fashion isn’t always juicy,and it certainly gave me few tools to create great stories. But it did help me craft my gender lens, which to this day remains polished and clear.
The heart of Mr. McKee’s work, the core of story, is gender-agnostic. It’s execution, wrought by fallible humans in Hollywood, religiously sexist. But we knew this. What I hoped for in Mr. McKee, especially after sitting face-to-face and having a peer-like conversation about the demise of story, was an informed ally against the odds; a fanning of my creative flames from someone on the inside.
To his credit, unlike many other lecturers, Mr. McKee did make a point of using the editorial “she.” Even hardcore feminists, intellectuals and other criminals often regress into “he this” and “he that” out of habit or laziness or just plain ignorance. The cumulative effect of so many he’s is like a whisper, over and over, in a creepy taunting voice: “women don’t matter…the hypothetical person worth discussing is always male…”, echoing past (and perhaps some current, unconscious or not) belief systems. So it was great to feel his alliehood through this simple but weighty choice of pronoun.
Every group in the margins needs allies in the mainstream, particularly in Hollywood where we face higher hurdles than elsewhere. Allies go places we can’t. They utter words which, coming from them, carry more weight. For example, I recently heard a story of a male business consultant from the Bay Area who, upon arriving at his client's board meeting and finding a room full of men, turned around and walked out. He said, "Call me when you have women on your board." True story.
When I as a white person make a point of creating roles in my scripts for actors of color, or even have the chutzpah to ask, Why are there just white people in the lineup? Or indicate with my words and actions that non-white worlds, perspectives and cultures count, I’m also acting as an ally to those outside. When it works, the mainstream can widen and admit more diversity, which frankly makes the world a more interesting place, at least for me.
Because his choice of language acknowledged women's worth, and also because of the many jabs he took at what in his day went by “the establishment,” I took the leap, however unfounded, that Mr. McKee cared about women, and our concerns in the entertainment industry in particular. I got excited about the idea of burning bigger and brighter toward my own goals. So as he had invited the class to do, for the second time of the seminar, I approached him on another break.
“Why is it that in a town as flagrantly liberal as Hollywood, and in a mediumas gender-agnostic as filmmaking, that the field is so overwhelmingly and inexcusably dominated by men?”
Mr. McKee frowned and cleared his throat. I was completely unprepared for what came next.
“Well,” he said, “I think a lot of women come here hungry, and they make themselves too available.”
Um…gear shift...did someone reset this guy to 1958?
I finally understand now. It’s not that Hollywood is sexist—it’s that women are too ambitious. Oh, and we’re sluts. The old guy is on to us—but in a very pre-enlightened sort of way. The fire in my belly for a moment became a wet, charred stump.
Let’s see if we can help Mr. McKee. Did he perhaps mean that a lot of women come to Hollywood wanting success…and in order to realize their ambitions, use their sexuality to make connections? What then means “too” available? Too available for what or whom, and with what consequence?
Or did he mean women come here with legitimate ambitions, but eventually make the fatal mistake of... having sex, which then makes it impossible for any men with decision-making power to see them as anything but sex objects, a consequence men in the same position rarely if ever face?
On the last day of the seminar, in his analysis of Casablanca, McKee revealed more about his views on women and sex. He discussed the scene in which where Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) approaches Rick (Humphrey Bogart) at his café, where she finds him drunk and insulting. He implies she’s been with men other than him and her husband Victor Lazlo. McKee shouted out his five-word interpretation, “He’s calling her a whore!”
I know most people consider that term insulting, but the power of the word “whore” to harm rests on the idea that there’s something inherently repugnant about a woman (but not about a man) who exercises her sexual freedom for pleasure or profit.
The scene begs to be fleshed out more thoroughly. Rick’s insinuations look a lot like what some couples' therapists would call an “attachment protest.” He didn’t feel as special to her as he longed to. He was expressing his own desperate insecurity and desire to matter to a woman to whom he gave his heart. So, to gain the upper hand in a situation where he feels utterly vulnerable and powerless, and to make sense of something so painful and nonsensical as the sudden departure of his beloved, he throws a knife. As Marshall Rosenberg says, "Violence is a tragic expression of unment needs."
McKee’s analysis missed the crucial insight that the Madonna-whore syndrome is an outdated and limited myth that protects men from their own terror of female sexual agency (and dubious paternity). Sure, he may be calling her a slut, or a whore, but that’s only insulting if you still believe women should play by outdated patriarchal rules. From a story perspective, what the epithet masks is much more interesting to me than the simple fact of its residual power to insult.
And then there’s the piece about hunger, as in, women come to Hollywood ambitious, which contributes to our failure. A recent article in Elle magazine exploring women’s relationship to power, ambition and success begins with, “In Leslie Bennetts’ long career interviewing famous women, only one—one—has ever admitted to being ambitious.” (italics in original). Bennetts gives example after example. Condoleezza Rice admits to Oprah Winfrey that she doesn’t see herself as very smart. A governor and university president attribute their success to luck and happenstance respectively. Punishing statements like Mr. McKee’s reveal the climate that makes it hard for women to inhabit and cop to ambition, let alone ambition coupled with sexual agency.
Once I recovered from being stunned by McKee’s comments, I wanted to hack the stage to bits and deport Mr. McKee to a hard labor camp where he could toil alongside his attitudinal counterparts until he was able come up with some more insightful ideas about just what it is that creates barriers for women in Hollywood. But a new woman friend talked me down from that. I was also able to remember that I generally favor nonviolence and dialogue. And I’d sure hate to shore up any nasty stereotypes of ambitious, ball-busting feminists.
So I approached him again later.
“Mr. McKee, I wanted to make sure I heard you correctly earlier. Did you actually say that you think any difficulties women experience in Hollywood are due to us being ‘hungry and making ourselves too available?’”
The great master frowned and cleared his throat.
“Well. I don’t know. I don’t know why it is.”
He continued, apparently deeming the topic worthy of a moment’s more thought, if for the first time.
“I do think men tend to finish their projects more—women tend to let them go on and on.”
OK, I have to agree here—and, it also bolsters my point. When I worked as a book coach, to a client, I had to pump up women’s confidence and urge them on, because they all doubted their work was worthwhile. Meanwhile, the men charged ahead, often with work I considered unfinished, brushing off my warnings to polish it up before foisting it on the public. Bennetts noted in the Elle article that even though many doors have been thrown open for women in the last century, for the most part, we have yet to walk through most of them in any but the most diminutive numbers.
Open door or not, it’s a lot easier to walk through when there’s a welcoming committee rather than a gauntlet on the other side. To my ears, everything McKee said about the paucity of women in Hollywood could basically be summed up as, “I don’t know, and I don’t really care. From what I can see it’s your own damned fault.” For a $765 seminar, I expected a bit more well-thought-out advice for a group that makes up potentially half his attendees.
He also said, “You know how we’ll know when we’ve arrived? When a Black filmmaker makes a movie with only white people in it.”
So not only is a female screenwriters’ greatest enemy her own passion, but those pesky people of color really ought to set about squeezing themselves into white comfort zones—in his mind, the ultimate yardstick of success. Funny, the road to my utopia looks quite opposite: white screenwriters of all genders write more roles for actors of non-white ethnicities; at least half of all produced screenplays are written by women, and the white men running Hollywood decide that more than just their own little worlds are worth exploring.
I told my story to a screenwriter friend, who wasn't surprised. He said, "McKee is a hell of a performer/teacher, but he's a blow-hard. A Cold War-era, white male of privilege dinosaur. Kind of a bohemian version of the types now lauded on shows like Mad Men."
Maybe my friend is right. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that Mr. McKee meant neither to be insulting nor dismissive, but was simply caught off guard—and clearly without having given the issue adequate thought. That deep down he really is an ally to women, and that if he took the time to excavate his deepest beliefs from under the many layers of fossilized acculturation, what he would have said was something like this:
You’re right, we have a problem. Women are absolutely some of the most talented writers around and ultimately, it’s the viewing audience who suffers for the lack of diversity onscreen. It saddens me terribly to see so many great scripts by white women and people of color, and old people and so on get passed over for these non-reasons.
We will have arrived when a white man asks, How can we make this film more representative of the diverse world we live in? And listens—really listens—for the answer--then acts on it. We will have arrived when we see this change in attitudes reflected in the genders and flesh tones on the screen, and in the names in the credits. Because ultimately—like yourself, that’s the world I want to live in.
Until then, keep writing—I believe in you. Believe in yourself!
That would have been a satisfying answer. That would have told me the Great Man actually gave a damn.
He’s right about one thing—if we don’t finish our work, we have nothing to complain about. Only when we bring forth our own unique art in the first place will we impact others. And then, the world will be a different place.
What the hell are we waiting for? And what better way to skyrocket our careers than to feed that great fire of ambition and hunger in our bellies?
P.S. Mr. McKee (or anyone else who would like a scripted response to hard questions about gender in Hollywood), feel free to take my italicized one above.
P.P.S. Oh, and Mr. McKee? So you know your initial advice about women’s fate in Hollywood wasn’t wasted, I sincerely promise never to risk sullying my career by trying to sleep with you.
Jill Nagle is a screenwriter, former book coach and freelance fiction and non-fiction author whose work has appeared in publications such as BUST, American Book Review and CounterPunch, as well as a number of anthologies. She edited Whores and Other Feminists (Routledge, 1997) and coedited Male Lust: Pleasure, Power and Transformation (Haworth, 2001).
