Geena Davis on ‘A League of Their Own’’s 30th Anniversary and Why There’s No Cat-Fighting in Baseball

But perhaps more crucially, A League Of Their Own also formed part of what became a deliberate shift for Davis, one that had been prompted the year before by Thelma & Louise. “After that movie came out, people not only recognized me from it, they wanted to talk about the movie with me,” she says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ It was like, ‘Listen, I gotta tell you, you have no idea. This is what it meant to me. This is how it changed my life.’ And it really made me realize something very, very important. Which was how few movies give women an opportunity to come out feeling jazzed and empowered. And I thought, well, I want to make more movies that do that. And then my very next movie was A League of Their Own, which seemed to have the same reaction.” It certainly did—not only was it a box office hit, but its legacy has also gone on to inspire generations of little girls to explore sport. Davis recently met the football superstar Abby Wambach, who told her that it was the reason she first picked up a ball.

However, there was some disappointment for Davis (and the rest of womankind), that the success of A League of Their Own didn’t lead to an abundance of female-centric ensemble films, or films about women’s sports. (A full decade would pass before the release of Bend It Like Beckham.) “It was very interesting to learn that… having a successful movie with women in it didn’t change any opinion about women’s movies in Hollywood,” says Davis. “They were still all of the mind that women will watch movies about men, but men won’t watch movies about women.”

This valid frustration was channeled into the latest stage of Davis’s career: as a researcher and campaigner for gender equality in TV and film. Her work within the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has already been game-changing. “Now, the lead characters in TV shows made for kids are gender-balanced for the lead characters, and also in kid-rated movies we’ve reached parity in the lead characters, which is unheard of,” says Davis. “It’s just astounding for that to happen. When we started, in movies it was only 11 percent with a female lead character, and now it’s 50 percent. So we’re excited.” The organization is also working to improve wider representation when it comes to race and ethnicity, disability, older people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and a greater variety of body types.

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