Women vs Hollywood by Helen O’Hara

Author:Helen O’Hara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Now you might be thinking, ‘Why not keep the brand names and change the casting? Why can’t some of these roles be played by women – or anyone?’ These are good questions. Changing aspects of the identity of a few characters or writing entirely new characters of a different sex, race, gender identity, physical or mental disability or sexual orientation could make your adaptation feel more representative of our times, or justify your remake beyond mere commerce. It can make stories that have been told a million times feel different because the mere fact of being a woman, or a gay man, or a blind man, will give that character a different perspective on both the action and the familiar elements that you might be leaving in place.

That’s why, when shooting a new Battlestar Galactica TV series in 2004, showrunner Ronald D. Moore made the hard-drinking, risk-taking Starbuck into a girl.23 He told an audience of TV critics that the move allowed him to avoid Han Solo comparisons. ‘Making Starbuck a woman was a way of avoiding what I felt would be “rogue pilot with a heart of gold” cliché.’ It’s essentially the same character, but she felt entirely new because we haven’t seen a million women smoking cigars with the lads and knocking back shots of whiskey. Also, Katee Sackhoff’s performance was absolutely riveting.

The Ancient One in Marvel’s 2016 Doctor Strange posed a thornier problem. In the comics he’s a paper-thin stereotype of the wise old Chinese man, so director Scott Derrickson tried to sidestep that trope by casting Tilda Swinton instead. ‘The first decision that I made was to make it a woman, before we ever went to draft, before we ever had a script,’ Derrickson told Jen Yamato at the Daily Beast.24 Unfortunately, he worried that casting an Asian actress as the remote, authoritarian figure would play into other ‘Dragon Lady’ stereotypes, leading to the character’s whitewashing. In terms of representation, this one clearly is not a straight win, but at least there was some sort of thought process before they hired yet another wise old male mentor.

Gender swapping works fine where there’s no real reason for the role to be played by a man. The concerned parent in Flightplan was switched from a father in the original script so that Jodie Foster could take the role. Superspy Edwin became Evelyn, and Angelina Jolie stepped up instead of Tom Cruise in Salt. Some of the biggest female names in Hollywood have started asking their agents to look for roles written as male; that’s how Sandra Bullock came to star in 2015’s Our Brand Is Crisis, playing a role that George Clooney – her onscreen brother and predecessor in the Ocean’s franchise – had once considered. Bullock also starred in Gravity, after director Alfonso Cuarón faced down studio pressure to rewrite the story with a male lead.25

Yet this tactic of simply adding women can meet stiff opposition in geekier brands. Introducing new, female characters into an existing universe

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