Meryl Streep: It’s time for women in Hollywood to… | Little White Lies

Women In Film

Meryl Streep: It’s time for women in Hol­ly­wood to seize their moment

15 Jan 2018

Words by Sarah Bradbury

Three adults conversing in an office setting, one wearing a denim jacket, one in a suit, and one in a navy blazer.
Three adults conversing in an office setting, one wearing a denim jacket, one in a suit, and one in a navy blazer.
The actor issued a ral­ly­ing cry at a press con­fer­ence for The Post.

I look around this room and I see many, many women,” says Meryl Streep. You would not have been here in 1971.” We’re at a press con­fer­ence for Steven Spielberg’s thrilling new dra­ma, The Post, which tells the sto­ry of the The Wash­ing­ton Post’s role in expos­ing US gov­ern­ment secrets uncov­ered in the leaked Pen­ta­gon Papers, and Streep is address­ing the female jour­nal­ists in the room. In the film, it falls to her char­ac­ter, Katharine Gra­ham, America’s first female news­pa­per pub­lish­er, to hold the line for press free­dom at a time when there were no female reporters and no female CEOs. It was a piv­otal moment both for the press and for women.

It’s a point that not only chimes with me – a female jour­nal­ist in a per­sis­tent­ly male-dom­i­nat­ed indus­try – but also seems to strike at the heart of soci­etal pre­oc­cu­pa­tions as we step with trep­i­da­tion into 2018. Indeed, much of the film’s cov­er­age thus far, and con­ver­sa­tion among Spiel­berg, Streep, and her co-star Tom Han­ks, who plays icon­ic media fig­ure, Ben Bradlee, med­i­tates on the film’s time­li­ness”: themes of pro­fes­sion­al gen­der imbal­ance and defend­ing the First Amend­ment find par­al­lels between 1971 and 2018 in myr­i­ad and unex­pect­ed ways.

And it was that sense of time­li­ness that prompt­ed Spiel­berg, and enthused an A‑list cast, to pro­pel the film from script to screen in just nine months: In my entire span of 49 years pro­fes­sion­al­ly direct­ing, I nev­er had a project come togeth­er this quick­ly.” Less a piece of mass mar­ket enter­tain­ment, this movie is a polit­i­cal statement.

In some respects it might be easy to sim­pli­fy The Post as a retort to Pres­i­dent Trump’s assault on the media. But Spiel­berg empha­sis­es the issues are much big­ger than one admin­is­tra­tion and in fact, The first thing that attract­ed me to The Post was Katharine Gra­ham.” The spot­light on Graham’s role in the Nixon-era exposé cap­tures a sense of social change in the air, of women’s posi­tion in soci­ety being recon­fig­ured. And that recon­fig­u­ra­tion is once again tak­ing place.

Nowhere is that more true today than in Hol­ly­wood. As Streep asserts, not only should there be greater par­i­ty in sto­ries told by women and about women, but more films should be green­lit” by women: If women were equal­ly rep­re­sent­ed in the agen­cies, at the heads of stu­dios, on the cor­po­rate boards that own the stu­dios, the world would be a dif­fer­ent place.”

Mean­while, Han­ks notes that the advent of big-bud­get tele­vi­sion has pushed the enve­lope in terms of diver­si­ty, and Spiel­berg observes how a raft of female direc­tors have made a name for them­selves by telling impor­tant sto­ries, from The Handmaid’s Tale to Mud­bound, and Lady­bird to Won­der Woman. There is a new kind of sto­ry being told,” he says.

The Post itself is a tes­ta­ment to female tal­ent both in front of and behind the cam­era, with Liz Han­nah as co-writer, Amy Pas­cal and Kristie Macosko Krieger as pro­duc­ers, and fan­tas­tic per­for­mances along­side screen-heavy­weight Streep from the bril­liant Sarah Paul­son, Ali­son Brie and Car­rie Coon.

Ulti­mate­ly, the film belies a pos­i­tiv­i­ty for the future: in the way the actions of Katharine Gra­ham and Ben Bradlee paved the way for fun­da­men­tal change in the press and in pol­i­tics in the US, con­tem­po­rary debates around gen­der, pow­er and media seem to have gained trac­tion for the same. As Streep con­cludes of the #MeToo and #Time­sUp move­ments: The inequities and the imbal­ance in pow­er isn’t just in Hol­ly­wood. The exploita­tion of women, their labour… that goes right through soci­eties. The most heart­en­ing thing about it to me is that it doesn’t feel like a one-off. It hasn’t gone away. And I don’t think it will, I don’t think we’ll go backwards.”

The Post is released 19 Jan­u­ary, 2018.

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