Diane English Talks “The Women”

Diane English, the creator of the groundbreaking TV series Murphy Brown, has defied convention and expectation by finishing her 13-year dream project, updating George Cukor’s 1936 film The Women, an indictment of high-society gossips which starred Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Rosalind Russell and is particularly notable for the fact that there is not a single man in the cast at all - nowhere to be found. English’s new version of The Women, which opens this weekend, duplicates that rare feature with an all-star cast that includes Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Bette Midler, Kathy Griffin, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Cloris Leachman, Carrie Fisher, Ana Gasteyer, Lynn Whitfield and her former Murphy Brown star Candice Bergen.

As you might imagine, there was considerable resistance to this project from the man-happy Hollywood studio world, and every successful female-driven film tends to be written off as a fluke. You might also imagine that someone with English’s history of featuring women succeeding in a male-dominated field would have a lot to say about that particular preconception. She spoke to The Buffalo News about how her project came to be, and shed some light on how this new statement to the Hollywood Boys Club finally made it to the screen.

“[The original was] a poison pen letter to high society women who were idle gossips. I feel that coming into the 21st century, women’s attitudes toward each other have to change and have changed. My version of this movie isn’t a poison pen letter, but a valentine and more of a celebration of women and the power of female friendship.”

“I’d always really liked the old film because of the all-female cast. That was appealing to me. I realized that no one had done that since 1939 and I felt the movie was ripe for a remake since women had come so far from the 1930s. I had my agent chase the project.”

“Hollywood really caters to the demographic of men under 25. They have demonstrated over and over again that they go to movies opening weekends and that they go multiple times; that women will go see things that men want to see, but men won’t go see things that women want to see.”

“[Sex and the City] was actually not even a thought in anybody’s head when I started to write this. Then the series came on and we all fell in love with it. But it didn’t help. The fact that ‘First Wives Club’ was a big hit and ‘9 to 5’ and ‘Steel Magnolias’ and ‘The Hours’ … I had a laundry list of movies that featured primarily females and were hugely successful, but no studio saw the pattern — they would say it was a fluke. You would have to start from scratch.”

“There was a lot of division within the company [New Line Cinema] on whether this was a movie the company wanted to make,” English recalls, adding that her continued frustration eventually led her to buying the film rights. “My husband and I wrote out a very large check. At that point, we decided to try and set the movie up as an independent film. We spent five years chasing down every last dollar and when we finally got to the $16 million mark we started putting the film in the camera. We were hoping to make the movie for over $20 million, but we just could not erase what our financiers thought was the risk factor. Once we got down to the $16 million mark, then we were off and running because at that point they felt that the risk was manageable.”

“Everybody deferred their fees or a good portion of their fees. It was a labor of love. Everybody who was on board realized it was an important statement to make to Hollywood — that an all-female cast, which was such a fun idea in the 1930s, became a liability in the 21st century. We all felt very strongly that we needed to change that attitude - and this has certainly been the summer to do it.”

Technically, autumn doesn’t start until September 21, so this is still a summer release. Can it approach the success of Sex and the City without the backing of years of a popular television series? That’s up to the audiences (or possibly the marketing department) but hopefully some headway can be made into upending that Hollywood double standard.