Geena Davis – Smart, Gorgeous, Tall, Pissed, Justified

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It’s time for a comeback, and I don’t mean just the fab actor Geena Davis (Thelma and Louise, Commander in Chief) herself, although I wish we’d start with that.

I mean the return of the issue of why women over 40 are still getting shucked like corn from Hollywood mainstream.  The madonna and whore syndrome has not died in Hollywood; either you’re a vixen or a sage.  Why oh why is this still true?

When asked about it today in Daily Beast,  and about the idea of a Thelma and Louise sequel, Davis smiles wistfully and asks the “where are the women” question herself.  The ice began to break a bit with Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect.  Now that the television bias for major talent is gone, we’ve got Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer and Holly Hunter in Saving Grace and Sally Field in Jon Robin Baitz’ high-class night soap and Glenn Close in Damages.  Susan Sarandon’s doing okay as the pages turn.  Let’s not stop for a decade and rest on this.

Film is not keeping pace with television on female power — and it’s not because women aren’t box office abroad, although dinosaurs still seem to think so.  (Larry Gelbart once postulated to me that box office abroad is about action rather than dialogue to overcome the language barrier, but anybody can sit in a car that blows up — it doesn’t take a guy.)

Geena Davis wonders aloud in today’s Daily Beast below, and all I want to add is I think yes we can bring Sarandon and Davis back together in a sequel to Thelma and Louise, not a literal one, we don’t need their ghosts coming back to the Grand Canyon to see what happens next, but maybe with a new vehicle utilizing those two character types?  Yes we can put women, even two at a time, at the center of a major non-chick flick.   It works five thousand times in a row per male star for buddy movies.  Small step for Hollywood, giant step for womenkind.

…  it is impossible to sit in a room with Davis and not feel the full force of her onetime superstardom—she is, after all, a Mensa member, an Oscar and Golden Globe winner, an Amazonian beauty, the miracle mother of twins at 48, an Olympic-level archer (really), and a feminist media activist. She worked with Brad Pitt in his first big role (“Brad was wonderful chapter in my life, he was so young and sweet and aw shucks”), and Madonna at the height of her pop stardom. That Davis can describe herself as “put out to pasture” makes little sense, and yet she speaks of her career with a wistfulness that shows she really believes it.

“I wish I could do every role I ever did over,” she says with a slight frown. “I have thought of a sequel to everything I’ve ever done. Except Thelma & Louise, that is. We are very, very dead. People ask me all the time if we could do another one, and I look at them like they are crazy. That wasn’t ambiguous—we were pancakes at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”

“I hoped that Commander in Chief would last,” she says of her latest show, which ran for only one season (though it resulted in a Golden Globe). “I really thought that show would go for six years. Maybe it was because people claimed that it was a ploy by ABC to get Hillary elected, which is like…really? I thought ABC liked to make money, and that was sort of their goal in creative programming rather than some subversive message.”

via Still in a League of Her Own – Page 2 – The Daily Beast.