Geena Davis talks about Thelma, ‘Beetlejuice’ and women’s issues

For two years, Geena Davis said, she had dreamed of landing the role of Louise in “Thelma and Louise.” The movie had already been cast, but she kept re-reading the script and making notes about it. She worked with her acting coach to prepare for the role. Her agent called the producer once a week and reminded him that Davis was interested in the part, just in case it opened up.

Finally it did. She met with director Ridley Scott. She brought in detailed notes and told him all the ideas she had developed over two years for how she would play Louise.

“So you wouldn’t consider playing Thelma?” Scott asked.

Actually, she told him, the funny thing is, despite what she had been saying all that time, she really preferred to play Thelma.

“Then I just made up a bunch of (expletive) about Thelma,” Davis said. “And that’s the role I ended up playing.”

Geena Davis, the Academy Award-winning actor from such diverse roles as Thelma in “Thelma and Louise,” a professional baseball player in “A League of Their Own” and the first woman U.S. president in the TV series “Commander in Chief,” regaled a capacity crowd at Sarasota’s Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall Monday morning with stories from her life and career. Her talks — one in the morning and one in the evening — were part of the the Ringling Town Hall Lecture Series, which benefits the Ringling College Library Association.

The stories were unfailingly entertaining, but they were a backdrop to what she was really there to talk about. She heads a foundation, the Geena Davis Foundation for Gender in Media, to study the way women and girls are represented in TV and movies. The results of that research are astounding.

Everyone she talks to in Hollywood thinks that the problem is something that has long ago been “fixed,” but the data proves that there are no more female roles in movies now than there were in 1946. Even in crowd scenes, men predominate. When women characters speak, they’re more likely to be off-screen than male characters are.

The directors, producers and executives that Davis shows her research to don’t think of themselves as sexist, and in fact believe they’re actively working against sexism. Until they see her foundation’s research.

“Their reaction is always the same,” she said. “Their jaws hit the ground.”

It’s not just a matter of creating more and better roles for women actors. When young girls grow up watching movies and TV shows that show few women, and show them mostly in inconsequential or subservient roles, that shapes their self-image and their future.

Her foundation has the scientific research, but in her talk on Monday her evidence was mostly anecdotal. In 2012, she said, the movies “Brave” and “Hunger Games” were both released, and both featured leading women characters who were archers. Very soon, she said, young women started in vast numbers taking up archery, and they now outnumber men in the sport. The one career field in which women are well-represented on TV, she said, is forensic science, and in recent years young women have been applying to university programs in forensic science in unprecedented numbers.

Other countries do a much better job of representing women in the media, she said. In fact, movies and TV shows in China and Korea have approximately equal numbers of male and female characters.

The situation isn’t getting better here, or at least it’s not getting better at a significant pace. At the current rate, Davis said, Hollywood will achieve gender parity in 700 years.

“I will not rest until that number is cut in half,” she joked.

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Geena Davis talks about Thelma, ‘Beetlejuice’ and women’s issues."