Jennifer Aniston and Hollywood’s problem with women

The enduring mystery of how Jennifer Aniston continues to be called a movie star, despite a CV that includes four times as many flops as it does successful films, is being hotly debated this week following the dismal failure of her latest flyweight rom-com, The Switch.

In our news pages on Tuesday, I looked at some of the various theories cited for the fact that Aniston, who can still generate an annual salary of around $27m, has a box office track record that goes up and down as frequently as her eyebrows [you can read the piece here].

Reasons cited for Aniston’s failure to regularly open hit movies include the so-called “curse of Friends,” the fact that her private life is more interesting than fiction, and her failure to extend beyond lightweight “rom-coms” in which she plays needy 30-something women in search of a man.

So far lost in the discussion, however, has been one extremely important point: for all the criticism,  Jennifer Aniston’s topsy-turvy film career ultimately reflects as badly on the industry behind the movies she stars in as it does on her.

This week saw the subject of Boxed In, the fascinating annual report from the study of enter for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. It reveals that behind the scenes, Hollywood remains very firmly a man’s town.

The report reveals that indicate that women accounted for a mere 27% of individuals working in powerful behind-the-scenes roles in film during the 2009-10 season. And that measly figure represented an increase of 2 percentage points over last season. Though Kathryn Bigelow’s historic Oscar triumph was meant to herald the arrival of a new era, women account for just 16 percent of film directors and 39 percent of producers. Just three percent of directors of photography have two X chromosomes.

The report will be published on the institute’s website [here] later this week. In the meantime, with relation to Ms Aniston, it’s worth wondering if her films might be doing a little better at the box office if they were made by an industry that’s just a little bit more representative of the audience it hopes to reach.

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