All The President's Minutes - Minute 132 with Helen O'Hara
All the President's Minutes is a podcast where conversations about movies, journalism, politics and history meet. Each show we use the seminal and increasingly prescient 1976 film All The President's Men as a portal, to engage with the themes and the warnings of the film resonating since its release. For minute 132, I join author, co-host of the Empire podcast and editor at large of Empire Magazine, Helen O'Hara. Helen and I discuss the revisionist view of those "Easy Riders & Raging Bulls," how they don't make journalists like Ben Bradlee/Jason Robards anymore, and the gravitational disturbance caused by the line, "everyone is involved."
About Helen O'Hara
Helen O'Hara has been working as a film journalist for over fifteen years, after qualifying as a barrister and immediately getting bored. She started her film writing career on the staff of Empire, the world's biggest film magazine, and remains their editor-at-large and co-host of the Empire podcast, where she can be found weekly singing the praises of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and complaining about La La Land. She is also an author and freelance writer. Northern Irish born, O'Hara now lives in London, splitting her time between cinemas, libraries and coffee shops.
Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film is out in February 2021
Synopsis:
A call to arms from Empire magazine's 'geek queen', Helen O'Hara that explores women's roles - both in front of and behind the camera - since the birth of Hollywood, how those roles are reflected within wider society and what we can do to level the playing field. The dawn of cinema was a free-for-all, and there were women who forged ahead in many areas of filmmaking. Early pioneers like Dorothy Arzner (who invented the boom mic, among other innovations) and Alice Guy-Blache shaped the way films are made. But it wasn't long before these talented women were pushed aside and their contributions written out of film history. How and why did this happen? Hollywood was born just over a century ago, at a time of huge forward motion for women's rights, yet it came to embody the same old sexist standards. Women found themselves fighting a system that feeds on their talent, creativity and beauty but refuses to pay them the same respect as their male contemporaries - until now... The tide has finally begun to turn. A new generation of women, both in front of and behind the camera, are making waves in the industry and are now shaping some of the biggest films to hit our screens. There is plenty of work still needed before we can even come close to gender equality in film - but we're finally headed in the right direction. In Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film, Empire's 'geek queen' Helen O'Hara takes a closer look at the pioneering and talented women of Hollywood and their work in film since Hollywood began. Equal representation in film matters because it both reflects and influences wider societal gender norms. In understanding how women were largely written out of Hollywood's own origin story, and how the films we watch are put together, we can finally see how to put an end to a picture that is so deeply unequal - and discover a multitude of stories out there just waiting to be told.
Twitter: @HelenLOHara
