Geena Davis Knows Women Are Good For Hollywood

PERHAPS THE SET OF Stuart Little isn’t where feminists expected to battle gender norms, but trust Geena Davis to open a front line when she sees one.

- Mattie Kahn

In the movie Davis plays Eleanor Little, mother to George and to Stuart, the mouse-son the Little family decides to take in. Once, between takes, Davis watched one of the second-unit directors line up extras for a boat-race scene in Central Park. “He found a little boy and gave him a remote control and had him sit on the edge of the water,” Davis says. “Then he found a little girl to come and stand behind him as his cheerleader.” Over and over the pattern repeated: boy, contender; girl, admirer.

It took Davis a second, and then it struck her. Oh, wait a minute, she thought, we could do something different here. She approached the director to petition for an equal split, with both genders in both roles. “He got this sickened look on his face of utter mortification,” she remembers, then said, “Yes! Of course!”

For Davis, 62, it’s this simple. “It’s all so, so unconscious,” she says. Not the harassment or the discrimination that has been exposed since the #MeToo movement exploded more than a year ago, but the bias, which has been the target of her activism for over a decade. In 2019 men still call most shots. And when men write a remote control into a script, it tends to be placed in the hands of a character who looks like them.

Since her landmark back-to-back roles in 1991’s Thelma and Louise (which she was so desperate to be part of that her hastily drawn contract didn’t even stipulate which of the title characters was hers) and A League of Their Own in 1992, the icon has pushed for decision makers to make different choices. At first she planned to do it onscreen. After Davis was nominated for a Golden Globe for League, the media all but coronated her: Because of Davis (and Susan Sarandon and Madonna) it would be different now. For women in film, it was the dawn of a new era!