She quotes a line from a Joanne Kyger poem: “That we go on, the world always goes on, breaking us with its changes until our form, exhausted, runs true.” I listen, impressed, not wanting to interrupt. “I mean, that’s definitely the place that I feel like I’m in,” she says, “like I’m making a sort of developed mental leap.” She pauses, then sharpens her statement, in her conscientious way. “In your 20s, you’re still so jagged and fractured, and I feel like everything has sort of cohered.”
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Let’s talk about money, I tell her. It’s late afternoon now, and techno music has begun to thud-thud-thud from what seems to be a day rave below. Money, she says, was never that important to her: “It was never a motivating factor for me. It’s never been the thing that’s gotten me out of bed to go to work.” To support herself and Matilda, Williams lived frugally “in a very simple house, with a very junky car, and went on no vacations.” She drove a Prius, which she has since replaced with a mini-van with fabric-upholstered seats—“a couch on four wheels,” she calls it. “They were like, ‘You can get leather for an additional $4,000 or something,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’” She laughs. And then, more seriously: “Keeping a life sustainable, that’s really important to me.”
She turns 38 in September, and as she gets older, she finds that money is becoming important to her, too. Financial success buys her freedom—like the freedom to take only films that shoot close to home or that do not require her to be away for longer than a week. She and her daughter moved back to Brooklyn six years ago, and since then Matilda, who is now 12, has been in the same private school without interruption. “She hasn’t had her routine disrupted and hasn’t missed class,” Williams says, and it’s clearly a point of pride for her. She also wants the ability to preserve summers as “undone time” (“less scheduled, less regulated, less hustle, less go go go”) she spends with her daughter in their house upstate. There they live according to their inner dictates, “like animals in their natural habitat”: waking when they want, eating when they want, swimming, gardening, reading, walking, spending time with friends.
Were any of her recent professional choices made with finances in mind? Like Venom, perhaps? It would be difficult to conceive of anything seemingly more out of character for her than a comic-book superhero movie. “You know, if something like Venom works, it’s life-changing,” she tells me. “I wanted to open myself to that possibility.” She repositions herself on the couch so she’s cross-legged and chooses her words even more fastidiously than usual. “Before this, I had a real fixation on . . . purity,” she explains, “but I’ve started to address that notion as I’ve gotten older, and as I talk to more women, and more women artists, and I think about my long-term future, I’ve started to adjust my thinking about . . . how to make a life, how to support a life.”
I ask her to tell me the Wahlberg story—how did the pay gulf first come to light? She inhales deeply and audibly, as though she’s about to step onstage to deliver a speech or steady herself for an acrobatic feat. “The teachable moment,” she says, “is that the story came out and no one cared. It didn’t go anywhere. It was like it never happened, which just confirmed to me there is no recourse.” But Hollywood was changing quickly in those final months of 2017. In the nearly six weeks between the publication of the two articles in The Washington Post and USA Today, Time’s Up was formed, the Golden Globes ceremony was awash in somber black dresses, and a handful of actresses (Dern, Sarandon, Streep) walked the red carpet with activists. Williams, in fact, attended with Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement.
The day after the ceremony, the kindling finally caught flame. Jessica Chastain, who has 750,000 Twitter followers, is one of the most vocal advocates for equity in Hollywood, and also happens to be an old friend of Williams’s (they co-starred in a 2004 stage production of The Cherry Orchard), texted her to ask permission to tweet about the issue. Williams responded, “Yeah, sure, go for it. But it’s already out there, and nobody cared.”
Regardless, Chastain went ahead. “I heard for the re-shoot she got $80 a day compared to his MILLIONS,” she tweeted. “Would anyone like to clarify? I really hope that with everything coming to light, she was paid fairly. She’s a brilliant actress and is wonderful in the film.” Williams’s crisp, lockjawed portrayal of Gail Harris—the mother of John Paul Getty III, and the flinty moral backbone of a dissipated and depraved family—is the beating heart of the movie; that her performance garnered a Golden Globe nomination only renders her paltry fee all the more galling. (Ridley Scott, who in mid-December told USA Today that all the actors did the re-shoots “for nothing,” could not be reached for comment.) “Please go see Michelle’s performance in All the Money in the World,” Chastain tweeted the following day, after USA Today reported the exact figures. “She’s a brilliant Oscar nominated Golden Globe winning actress. She has been in the industry for 20 yrs. She deserves more than 1% of her male co-star’s salary.” The time was right. The world had shifted, and the news spread, says Williams, “like wildfire.”
Her phone started blowing up. What was she going to do? Would she leave her agency? Make a public statement? She was acutely aware that the moment was symbolic. “I’ve never really been at the center of something like that, of a news cycle like that—other than, you know, traumatic death,” she says. During the ensuing week, “between Jess re-breaking the bone of the story and WME offering a monetary apology,” as Williams puts it, she had a series of telephone conversations with the (male) higher-ups at the agency. She called her new friend, activist Mónica Ramírez, co-founder of the National Farmworker Women’s Alliance and head of the National Latina Equal Pay Day Campaign, whom she had gotten to know during the planning for the Golden Globes, to help coach her. They spoke on the phone, Williams says, “on breaks from work, after our kids went to bed, and before they woke up in the morning.”
After each call with WME, Williams would notice that her hands were shaking. “But I would think about what Mónica had told me. That if it was hard to negotiate on my own behalf, I should imagine myself negotiating for her. Or for my daughter.”
In the end, Williams chose not to leave either her agent or WME—a decision that seems, well, surprising. Later, when I press her on it, she will say that her agent, Brent Morley, is someone she “values creatively,” adding, “I believe in second chances.”
For her, what resonates from the experience is the power generated by women banding together. “I was one woman by myself,” she says, “and I couldn’t do anything about it. But in the wolf pack—the phrase Abby Wambach uses—things are possible. And that’s really what it took: somebody who was at the head of the pack, Jessica Chastain, pulling me up with her, and then all these other women surrounding me, teaching me.” Says Chastain, “No one should have to step out onto a limb on their own. We are all here to share the weight. It’s easy to label one actress difficult, harder to label a group.”
There is, of course, a lot of talk about how overcompensated all actors are, women and men alike. But, for better or worse, we do look to Hollywood actors as avatars of socio-cultural change, and in the absence of revamped industry standards, why should actresses be paid so much less than their male counterparts? “It’s important not to forget that women in the entertainment industry are women workers as well, and we’re trying to make things better for all women workers,” says Ramírez. “It’s not about the income bracket; it’s about the justice.”
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The following evening, Williams texts me and asks to meet at a French restaurant in Fort Greene. It is a shoebox-size place, but she goes unnoticed; instead of coffee, we drink rosé. She is conscious of this time, the years before she turns 40, as “potentially being really generative,” and is enjoying her work more than she ever has, with plans to play Janis Joplin in a biopic and an abortion activist in This Is Jane. “You’re told that things get worse
as you age, from the outside,” she says. “But your internal experience is ‘I’m hitting my stride.’” She tells me that a “shred of belief” in herself and in her acting has finally “crashed through.” She shrugs, smiles. “It would be cruel not to admit it to myself.”
The one subject Williams won’t initially discuss is her private life. She’s got a relatively new someone—or new to the media, anyway—and I can tell she’s itching to mention him, the way people in love are. “I would tell you everything, in the spirit of women sharing with each other,” she says, but “the Internet’s an asshole.” A couple of weeks later, she changes her mind and decides to talk in the hope that doing so might “take some heat and confusion” out of the situation when it finally becomes public.
By the time you read this, she and her partner, singer-songwriter Phil Elverum, whom she met through a mutual friend, will have been married in a secret ceremony in the Adirondacks, witnessed by only a handful of friends and their two daughters. Her new husband, an indie musician who records and performs under the name Mount Eerie (and, before that, the Microphones), also lost a partner in tragic circumstances while parenting a small child. His late wife, illustrator and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with inoperable stage-4 pancreatic cancer in 2015, four months after the birth of their daughter, and the two very private artists went public with a GoFundMe page to help defray medical costs. Castrée died 13 months later, in July 2016, leaving Elverum with an 18-month-old daughter. In the past two years, he has released two raw, critically acclaimed albums, A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, that unflinchingly explore grief, death, and the utility of art in the face of loss. Williams calls her relationship with Elverum “very sacred and very special.” In July, he packed up his home in Anacortes, Washington, and drove across the country to live with her and their daughters in Brooklyn.
“I never gave up on love,” she later tells me, saying that she has spent the 10 years since Ledger’s death looking for the kind of “radical acceptance” she felt from him. “I always say to Matilda, ‘Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes.’” I can hear her voice crack. She sometimes can’t believe that she’s found this kind of love, at last. “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship,” she says, “but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”
Williams decided to open up about her relationship, as she did about her income, on the chance that other women might find hope or instruction in her story. “I don’t really want to talk about any of it,” she says. “But there’s that tease, that lure, that’s like, What if this helps somebody? What if somebody who has always journeyed in this way, who has struggled as much as I struggled, and looked as much as I looked, finds something that helps them?” In the end, she says, what she’s learned is simple: “Don’t settle. Don’t settle for something that feels like a prison, or is hard, or hurts you,” she says. “If it doesn’t feel like love, it’s not love.”
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Back at dinner, she reaches into her purse and pulls out a small gray notebook, in which she has scribbled some thoughts about our previous interview. She wrote them in a sauna, so they’re slightly smudged. “I’m going to transcribe all this much more beautifully,” she tells me. Two weeks later an elegantly composed e-mail, in which she calls herself “a perfectionist Virgo, constantly qualifying and rethinking,” arrives. “Women have to be watchdogs for each other. A great change has come, but if it is for me or just within my industry, it won’t be enough,” she writes. “Women must recognize what power we have and where—however small and dull it might feel—and use it to advocate on behalf of others for the betterment of us all.” The e-mail also mentions that she was just offered a new television role and the same amount of money as the male lead without having to negotiate for it.
A few hours later, en route to a night of Venom re-shoots in L.A., she calls and elaborates. The show will be produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda, directed by Thomas Kail, and filmed in New York, and she’ll get to sing and dance. “When they told me about it, I thought, O.K., now comes the part where I have to go in kicking and screaming and shouting about equality and transparency. . . . Then, before I could even ask for it, they said, ‘They’ve offered you what Sam Rockwell is making.’ I cried.” I would, too, I tell her.
In a literary novel or an indie film, this ending wouldn’t fly. True love, equal pay: it would be too neat, too contrived, too tidily wrapped up in a bow. At one point, Williams says she’s “at the end of one journey and embarking on another,” and then worries that phrasing sounds clichéd. But sometimes reality escapes the dictates of narrative in ways that are better and more interesting than you ever could have imagined, and language falters in the realm of the truest feelings. A few days before she elopes, we talk again, and she says, simply, that in life and in love, she’s found the sense of expansiveness she’s long searched for. “This kind of freedom, it’s the thing that I look for. It’s been a theme in my life,” she says. “It’s the thing that I experience in Montana, the thing that I experience onstage, the thing that I get in my work in between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’” She pauses for a moment. “I’m free. I’m free.”
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
A BOOM OF THEIR OWN
By Cari Beauchamp | Hollywood Issue 2018
The idea to convene a summit of women filmmakers was an informal, modest one, yet it was born of a deep-seated frustration. And it all began because Allison Anders was pissed.
It was late 1999, and Anders, the indie film director (Gas Food Lodging, Grace of My Heart) and a MacArthur “Genius” fellow, saw women being isolated and marginalized. Why did they have such trouble getting their movies produced? Why were men, after a flop, allowed to fail upward, but if a woman’s film was successful, it was viewed as an aberration? And why didn’t women in Hollywood know about the female pioneers who had shaped the business? Anders was devastated when she learned that Dorothy Davenport Reid, an acclaimed director in the 1920s, had died in obscurity 50 years later, “practically in my backyard in Woodland Hills,” Anders now recalls.
Dorothy Davenport had not been alone. At cinema’s dawn, dozens of female directors flourished in Hollywood, where they supported one another both personally and professionally. Before 1925, almost half of all films were written by women. And yet they had risen at a time when film wasn’t taken seriously as a business. Once talkies arrived, in the late 20s, budgets soon tripled, Wall Street invested heavily, and moviemaking became an industry. Men muscled into high-paying positions, and women were sidelined to the point where, by the 1950s, speakers at Directors Guild meetings began their comments with “Gentlemen and Miss Lupino,” as Ida Lupino was their only female member.
Anders appreciated the potential power of the camaraderie to be found among fellow creative souls, and so she e-mailed a dozen friends asking if they felt the same way. If so, what would they think of getting together, each paying her own way, to spend a weekend hashing out their concerns, strategizing, and talking about, as she put it, “what needs to happen next.”
Her idea touched a nerve, and in April of 2000 more than 100 women showed up for what was billed as the “Women Filmmaker’s Summit”—held at the Miramar, a run-down but still vibrant hotel between the Pacific and the railroad tracks in Santa Barbara. (The rooms shook when trains went by.) Anders knew Miramar by the Sea as “a magical place” where she occasionally holed up to write. It was on the beach, had a large conference room, and Anders secured a slight group discount.
The Miramar itself is long gone (a developer is opening a luxury hotel there this year), but that weekend still unites those who attended, and the impact of the conclave continues to
ripple out in ways that few people in Hollywood realize.
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Allison Anders, an innate collaborator, drew together an organically diverse and multi-generational group. Some of the women were friends. Most knew of one another only by reputation, and for many this was the first time they had come together without the support of a guild or association. The excitement was palpable and uniquely female: part reunion, part suffragette rally, part 60-hour sleepover. Maya Smukler, then working at Women Make Movies, in New York, enlisted participants from the East Coast. Publicist Kristin Borella greeted everyone upon arrival with name tags, an agenda, short bios, and Anders’s original letter tucked inside a green paper folder like the ones used to turn in middle-school reports.
And what a packed agenda it was. Friday afternoon and evening were set aside for what Anders presumed would be a “very sloppy and loose” venting session. The mantra, as she recalls, was: “‘We are not victims, we are survivors.’ . . . There was so much anger from devastating disappointments and being fucked over—and a general feeling of injustice.” Everyone crammed into the minimalist main room, with its coastal white-and-blue décor. Some sat around tables decorated with bouquets of sweet peas; others stood against the walls. Most stayed late, watching The Wild Party, starring Clara Bow and directed by Dorothy Arzner, who, among her many accomplishments, is one of those credited with inventing the boom mic. (As a writer of film history, I was asked to provide a primer on the women of early Hollywood and bring along some VHS tapes of films by our foremothers.)
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