Women Who Run the Show by Mollie Gregory

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood is an insightful look at how and when women began assuming positions of power behind the scenes of film and television. It is also about how those women related to the women's liberation movement during the 1970s and how much farther Hollywood has to go.

Women Who Run the Show delves into the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but it also touches on women in early Hollywood history and looks toward the future. There is very little emphasis on the internet, a relatively new provider of entertainment content when the book was published in 2003.

Mollie Gregory interviewed more than 100 women for Women Who Run the Show. It is impossible for a reader to keep each woman straight, although some do recur in multiple chapters. In some way, that is the point: their stories pile up and illustrate important points as Mollie Gregory moves through the decades.

Certain individual women and experiences stand out in Women Who Run the Show.  Among the tales that may resonate with readers:

• The important survey of 1972-1973 television shows by the then-newly formed Writers Guild Women’s Committee that revealed a great disparity in the number of employed writers who were women
• Brianne Murphy, one of the first female directors of photography, who was constantly challenged with questions such as “How much does that camera weigh?” to which she replied “Less than a kid”
• Barbra Streisand’s feminist take on A Star is Born and her long struggle to get Yentl made

The  typical “layperson” who reads about Hollywood is mostly aware of actors. The Women Who Run the Show are not celebrities who make tabloid headlines or attract throngs when they walk the red carpet. Instead, they are women who made or are making their way into the upper echelons of power in an industry that clung for too long to the idea that women couldn’t do certain jobs.

Mollie Gregory and the women she interviewed repeatedly relate tales of male executives who are baffled by the very idea that women would or should move into more powerful roles.

Women Who Run the Show is enlightening and feels very immediate. It is not heavy handed. Because the women worked on famous films and television shows, at least some of their work will be familiar to almost all readers.

However, the entire book may not sustain everyone’s interest. Occasionally it feels repetitive, and there is little variation in the pacing. It is more a series of linked ideas than a dramatic story. On the other hand, precisely because it is a non-fiction book without a plot, it would be easy enough for a reader to dip in and out of the chapters and skim through any segment that isn’t as compelling.

Overall, though, the stories are compelling, because of what they tell us about society. Mollie Gregory examines Hollywood, but she is also examining the working experience of women throughout the United States in the last half of the 20th century. She relates the tale of individual heroines, but she also tells the story of the women’s movement and its very practical effects in the lives of women. Women Who Run the Show is about power and society, it is about creativity and feminism, and it is about choices and persistence.