Her name is Nicky Whelan, she’s a blonde 29-year-old Australian model and actress, and her finest moment in the new blockbuster comedy Hall Pass comes when she corners everyman hero Owen Wilson at a boozy late-night party and purrs, “You have your wife for the rest of your life, but tonight you can have me!” And then she takes off her top and shows him her breasts.
Yup. Welcome to the complex and nuanced world of the comedy actress in modern mainstream Hollywood. Here, in a two-dimensional role that will not be unfamiliar to even casual movie-goers, Whelan plays the smokin’ hot object of desire to the real subjects of the film, a group of infantilised men, led by Wilson’s hen-pecked husband Rick, who fear women and yet simultaneously crave their bodies, and are thus compelled to talk about sex, drink a lot, talk about sex, get stoned, talk about sex, have embarrassing things happen to their genitals or the genitals of those around them, and then talk about sex some more.
Thus, while television comedy on both sides of the Atlantic bustles with the best and brightest female talent — Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in the US, Miranda Hart and Tamsin Greig over here — the world of Hollywood movies seems strangely insulated against all but the most retrograde of gender stereotypes.
Hall Pass, a so-called Frat Boy comedy from the masters of the genre, the Farrelly brothers (There’s Something About Mary), is just one among a plethora of cookie-cutter movies that are increasingly dominant, to the detriment of all other comedies, at the multiplex. From The Hangover to Get Him to the Greek, from Hot Tub Time Machine to Grown Ups to Due Date and the forthcoming Hangover 2, it seems that if you’re not a schlubby male who’s good at playing drunk and desperate (think genre stars Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill), then you simply don’t belong in studio comedies.
“Comedy, alongside action and horror, is the worst genre for male domination,” says Sally Phillips, the writer and former Smack the Pony star, who makes her feature writing debut this summer with the Scottish-set screwball comedy The Decoy Bride, starring David Tennant, Kelly Macdonald and Alice Eve. “Comedy is run mostly by men, and funded by male financiers who are gambling on what they think will bring them a return, which for them means gambling on previously successful formulas.” If it worked in The Hangover, in other words, it’ll work in The Hangover 2.
Advertisement
It’s hardly surprising then that the actress Isla Fisher, aka Mrs Sacha Baron Cohen, who made such a memorable impact in 2005’s The Wedding Crashers, recently announced that the female role drought has become so extreme that she’s resorted to writing movies for herself instead of waiting for a credible part to come along. “After Wedding Crashers I was amazed by the lack of material for comedic actresses,” she said. “So I’ve started working on stuff just to get it out there by myself.”
Nor is there any serious historical precedent for this drought. Hollywood, typically, has a proud and fertile history of nurturing female comedic talent. From Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck to Bette Midler and Diane Keaton, the women in classic mainstream comedies have not only shared equal billing with their men, but were often given the best lines — watch Hepburn and Cary Grant in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, for instance, and it’s not hard to see who’s the smartest, sharpest and funniest character on screen, eg, while Grant frets about misinforming a local zoo about a missing leopard, Hepburn deadpans, cool as ice, “I can fix that. I’ll tell them you’re a drug addict.”
So what’s changed? How did we get from the sublime patrician heights of yesteryear to the punchline reality of slightly sloshed blonde Aussies flashing their bazookas? On the surface, it would seem as if it’s all financially motivated, suggests Melissa Silverstein, a movie marketing consultant and founder of the influential feminist website, Women and Hollywood. “We are told that the comedies are now made solely with men and boys in mind,” she explains. “Which originates with the idea that boys and young men, who have no interest in seeing real women on screen, are the only ones who come out and buy movie tickets on the opening weekend.”
Yet this commercial imperative — the need to grab those precious male ticket buyers — is based on wrong information, says Silverstein. For according to figures released from the Motion Picture Association of America, women purchased 50 per cent of US cinema tickets in 2010, and 55 per cent in 2009. “Which means we’re talking about a larger issue here,” she suggests. “It’s a huge question, about how this business is run, and the men who run it, and why they’re not going to change overnight, because there’s no cultural imperative to see more women on screen. And those that are on screen only help to perpetuate the stereotype that women are not funny — which they completely believe in Hollywood today.”
Phillips, as a prospective screenwriter, has done the rounds of the major production houses, from Miramax to Working Title, and says that what we really need is a seismic shift in the way that the industry currently views women — which is as sexy babes first, and as thinking, feeling and, yes, joking beings last. “At my very first pitch meeting for The Decoy Bride, I said, ‘There’s this girl, she’s a normal girl, she’s normal looking.’ And Robert Bernstein [the producer] said, ‘Can I stop you there? This is a movie. So she is stunning!’ We discussed it, and he eventually said, ‘The least attractive I’m prepared to go is Kelly Macdonald.’ And she’s one of the most beautiful women in Britain!”
Advertisement
And what’s worse, even if you are a hard-working comic actress who’s lucky enough to make it big on the small screen, as Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore did in previous eras, that’s no guarantee of a transition to movies when the time comes. “Look at Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo,” says Phillips. “They had a great sparking sparring relationship on The Ben Stiller Show, but he didn’t take her with him when he moved into film. Or Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes had fantastic chemistry on TV, and they wrote together. But when he went into movies he didn’t take her with him. Instead, for Shaun of the Dead, they chased after Kate Winslet. It’s like, when you finally grow up you get to have a beautiful woman. Or it’s like the primary job of women in cinema is just to be beautiful.”
It’s not all bad news though. For, in an industry predicated on the conservative repetition of formula, all it takes is one surprise smash to force a game- changing play. One of this summer’s big comedies, for instance, is Bridesmaids, the story of a hen weekend gone wild, and very much a distaff version of The Hangover. Yes, it’s cringingly formulaic and commercial. But if it is a hit, says Silverstein, “It might just open up opportunities for a lot of other women’s movies, and for women writers too. And maybe we’ll finally be able to expand beyond the wedding genre.”
“I don’t think the answer is just to do filthy ladette movies and to be outrageous in that way,” says Phillips, contemplating Bridesmaids. “But those are bound to be the first experiments.” Instead, she says that the clock is ticking on male-dominated comedy, and that it’s only a matter of time before the genre exhausts itself (really, how many semen jokes can one demographic take?), and before it needs an infusion of new, perhaps entirely female, talent. “I do think it’s up to the ‘getting-oldies’ like me to invent new ways to think about young women, new characters and new types,” she says. “Because it feels like we’re in a pre-Spice Girls moment right now, where everyone back then said, ‘No! A girl band will never work because girls buy the albums, and it doesn’t make sense.’ So, it’s the same right now. We’re in the boy-band phase, with these male- dominated comedies. But it’s like, any minute now, rock on, because it’s time to bring on the girls!”
Hall Pass is released nationwide today; The Decoy Bride is out this summer