Hollywood and media for women in 2016: Cancellations, online hatred and sexual harassment

Anna Camp, Lena Hall and Genevieve Angelson star in ‘Good Girls Revolt.’
(Photo: Jessica Miglio)

In the first 24 hours after the election, Genevieve Angelson was approached thousands of times on social media by distraught women looking for consolation after watching a man accused of sexual assault beat the first female nominee of a major political party for president.

They took comfort in Patti Robinson, Angelson’s rebellious character on Good Girls Revolt, who helps lead a group of women at the fictitious News of the Week to sue for equal opportunity. The narrative is based on the true story written by Lynn Povich of the 40 plus women at Newsweek who helped enact one of the defining moments in the women’s rights movement.

Angelson, and her co-stars Erin Darke, Anna Camp and Joy Bryant, became role models for some women searching for hope after Nov. 8.

At an event the following Saturday in Washington, D.C., an auditorium-full of women turned out to hear the actresses talk about what’s next in the fight for equality. But by Dec. 2, the feminist period drama was cut by Amazon.

“I dunno what to tell women, scared of their own president, who ask why you cancelled a hit feminist show 30 days in. What do I say?” Angelson tweeted.

Show creator Dana Calvo slammed Amazon, telling The Hollywood Reporter the show was a hit, evidenced by high Rotten Tomato scores and backed up by third-party streaming monitor Symphony Advanced Media, and tweeting that there were no women involved in the decision making process.

In a statement to USA TODAY, the head of comedy and drama series development, Joe Lewis, said the show wasn’t “performing at the levels we had hoped for- either in total viewership or completion rates,” and the Symphony numbers being reported are incorrect. No comment or confirmation was offered on the question of female representation.

A few days after the public back-and-forth, Tina Fey took the stage at The Hollywood Reporter’s annual Women in Entertainment event.

Tina Fey speaks onstage during The Hollywood Reporter’s Annual Women in Entertainment Breakfast in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, 2016, in Hollywood. (Photo: Frazer Harrison, Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter)

“What an amazing year it’s been for women,” she shouted before buckling over with a sustained and slightly maniacal laugh. Accepting the Sherry Lansing Award for Leadership, she wondered “how we can proceed in dignity in this increasingly ugly, misogynistic time?”

This was 2016 for women in Hollywood and the media.

For all the forward momentum, and excellent pieces of entertainment like Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal and HBO’s Insecure, there were pay discrepancies, misogynistic magazine profiles, online hatred.

In January, linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer shared their findings that nearly all dialogue in Disney princess films is spoken by men. Even counting the lines voiced by Mulan while she’s dressed as a man, men’s voices made up 77% of the movie.

Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels at Polygraph expanded the sample to 2,000 screenplays and found that only 18% of films had two women occupying the top three roles, guaranteeing they’d fail the Bechdel Test.

In May, the ACLU announced that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs launched investigations into the film and television industries’ hiring practices based on the group’s findings of gender bias and stereotyping that all but excluded women from directorial roles.

At the end of June,Variety’s chief film critic wrote a distasteful column focused on Renee Zellweger’s face and her audacity to age. A few days later, The New York Times ran several hundred demeaning words in which the author jested that he did not know the difference between Blake Lively and Kate Hudson, claiming the award-winning actresses are interchangeable.

Then came Vanity Fair’s profile of Margot Robbie, a self-indulgent piece that set off Twitter for its focus on Robbie’s looks and the men who helped her career rather than the accomplishments of an actress in the midst of a stellar year.

In between the misogynistic trio of articles came Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment and retaliation suit against Fox’s Roger Ailes. And the sexist backlash to the all-female Ghostbusters.

Flash forward to the revelation of the true Billy Bush, caught on tape with Donald Trump saying that now-infamous line about sexual assault. For women in the industry, hearing Bush make sexually suggestive comments about his co-worker, Nancy O’Dell, was sadly unsurprising. Bush apologized for his remarks, saying he was “younger, less mature, and acted foolishly,” and was let go from NBC.

And in November, Megyn Kelly took readers on a journey of what it’s like to be at the receiving end of the president-elect’s sexist attacks in her book, Settle for More,.

But if there was a silver lining to the difficult year, it was the voices of women in influential positions saying we can do better.

First lady Michelle Obama speaks following a screening of the movie, “Hidden Figures.” (Photo: SAUL LOEB, AFP/Getty Images)

“As we move forward in life, and get access to these seats of power, I want you to look around and make sure there’s diversity at the table,” Michelle Obama told a room of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) students at a screening of Hidden Figures at the White House in December.

“If everyone looks the same and thinks the same and has the same experience, you never come up with the right answers.”