When you’re a kid, your pop culture reality is shaped for you by the people in your life who have what you don’t — money!
When my three sisters and I were young, the movies we saw were the ones my mother picked out to plop us in front of while she ran on the treadmill in the basement. Or they were carefully curated by other moms, hosting birthday-party sleepovers, or my aunt set us up with them in the back room of a vacation rental in Cape Cod the summer all the girl cousins got lice at the same time. Without making any conscious choice, I grew up on films written or directed by women: Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham, Anne Fletcher’s Step Up, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, and Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. 10 Things I Hate About You, adapted from Shakespeare by Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah. Miss Congeniality, one of four movies my grandmother owned, written by Katie Ford and Caryn Lucas. Dirty Dancing, the huge, but only writing credit for Eleanor Bergstein! The whole Nora Ephron oeuvre. Sister Act, which I have seen more times than any other movie, has a script cleaned up by Carrie Fisher, and it stars Whoopi Goldberg in her late 30s, with 60-year-old Maggie Smith as her narrative foil.
as a kid i had no idea that hollywood is terrible to women
Everyone has movies they watched dozens of times as pre-teens, less out of affection than sheer convenience, and these were mine.
As far as I knew — until I got a job and a driver’s license — this is what movies were. They were often created by women, they starred women, and they were, you could often guess, made with an audience of women in mind. And these movies were at least somewhat representative of the Hollywood atmosphere in the late 1990s — one where (broadly speaking) a movie could easily quadruple a modest budget at the domestic box office, and international markets didn’t have the woman-adverse chokehold they developed later in the 2000s. (Thanks a lot, Marvel!)