Monday, Aug. 27, 2007 SfafesmflttSpeclal Features Page 21 Hollywood look is getting skinnier BY RACHEL ABRAMOWIT Los Angeles Times HOLLYWOOD — I'm searching for body fat in Hollywood. Its the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and judging by the standards of the youth-obsessed network's magenta carpet, blubber, let alone curves, or even softness is out of fashion. Girls — and I mean girls, given their lack of womanly heft, glide by. Jessica Biel, in a loose black mini-dress. Jessica Alba, with sylphlike arms rising above her red puffy minidress. Cameron Diaz, at 34, the veritable grandma of the bunch in a black micro-dress, only inches longer than a bathing suit. Not one woman won an award that night, but the few female presenters hovered like ethereal specters over giant, solid, male movie stars including Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandier and Will Ferrell. Host Sarah Silverman, in a parade of girlish dresses, presided like the tiny, squeaky voiced, mean girl from every high school nightmare. It's no newsflash that women are skinny in Hollywood — by far skinnier than the 66 percent of Americans who qualify as overweight or obese. But are they getting even skinnier? Or do we just read a lot more about them as an endless stream of celebrity rags and fashion mags chronicle their corporal exploits, alternately castigating and holding them up for public ridicule when their bones stick out (Attention: Kate Bosworth! Mischa Barton! Nicole Richie!) and celebrating the personal resourcefulness they exploited to lose excess poundage. Some observers believe that yes, women in Hollywood are shrinking, even more than in previous decades. Amid the attention given recently to the finding, published in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, that obesity is "contagious" — that people tend to get fatter when the people they consider friends get fatter — these days Hollywood is giving ample evidence that the reverse is true as well. It makes sense: Social norms affect a person's weight. When a woman's most successful peers have protruding bones, she's going to feel pressure to head in that direction as well. One person who has noticed that Hollywood women are skinnier than ever is casting director Joseph Middleton, who has cast an array of youth-oriented films including "American Pie," "Go" and the upcoming "Jumper." "The girls that are considered the ingenues of the day are getting thinner," Middleton says. "You can tell, because the first year that you (audition) them, they come from Chicago, Ohio and Georgia, and they're really pretty girls who are healthy. "A year later, you read them and they look like slimmer Hollywood versions. I can't tell you how many times producers and directors have said, 'Well, she's a little heavy for camera.' I don't think they're saying, 'We want these girls to be unhealthy,' but they sure like that thinner version." Us Editor-in-Chief Janice Min, another close observer of Hollywood's mores, agrees that extreme thinness "has definitely become an issue." Min says for many actresses, it has come to seem like a question of survival. "Obviously, being a female celebrity, you're in constant competition whether you want to believe it or not. You're competing for roles, parts, male attention and it's a competition primarily involving looks. It's a system of rewards, and you are rewarded for being the most beautiful, the sexiest, and the competition has almost extended to being the thinnest." The rest of us, meanwhile, have gotten so used to it that we've stopped seeing it. "On the red carpet, people used to wear outfits with sleeves and necklines that went up to their Well, this guy is ... and this guy is ... H O L L Y W O O D S K I N N Y : Actress Kate Bosworth looks markedly different than the toned surfer she portrayed in the 2002 film "Blue Crush." Maybe those pounds went out with the surf. LA Times photo necks," Min points out. "There's been such a movement to show more and more and more, and it seems inevitable that the pursuit of the most perfect body you can achieve has consumed actresses. You don't want to be the one actress whose photo is taken with two skinny actresses and you look like Shrek. Everyone's eye has adjusted to the new reality that doesn't reflect reality in the least." One major costume designer says that when looking for clothes for actresses, she can hardly find any in size 0 — "They're all sold out." "Look at the cast of the TV shows, they're not even 0, they're double 0," says Min. "The competition to be thin, I've never seen anything like it." Perhaps it's a sign of Hollywood's readjusted eye that whenever an average-size woman — a Jennifer Hudson or an America Ferrera — bursts into the limelight, there's the predictable magazine frenzy over robust women who still manage to be successful, who are not going to commit hara-kiri over being a size 10. Of course, in the cases of Hudson and Ferrara, their curves were specific to the roles they broke out in — in fact they became a shorthand for their character's feistiness, for their willingness to defy the expected norms of their environments. I remember seeing a costume exhibit of red-carpet gowns in the lobby of the ArcLight theater and realizing the experience was not that different from seeing period clothes from previous centuries in the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I realized with a shock that whoever could wear those tiny black Valentino and Armani gowns must be really, really small — as diminutive as the presidential wives of centuries gone by, and the French aristocracy, circa the age of Marie Antoinette. With a little hemming, the clothes would look smashing on the largest-size teddy bear available from Build-A-Bear. In 100 years, one can imagine, people will look back at the whittled, hipless female celebrities of today as victims of a cultural definition of beauty as strange as those Renaissance women who plucked the hairs from their foreheads to extend their hairlines onto the tops of their heads. Both are hard-to-get comics on the Comedy Club circuit. One was a finalist on this summer's Last Comic Standing! S« DKft &91H IN M 1Se UUltMM, S A W , 86Pt 15,7:30. ?5. yOUt SMS VALL HURT, m m PROMISE. Why are Hollywood women shrinking? We're certainly not in any heyday of women's power, as behind-the-scenes female power players increasingly disappear from the ranks, including onetime studio honchos Sherry Lansing, Gail Berman and Nina Julie wanted to fit in at college, so she did English. And soon Julie was doing English every weekend. It was the best of times. Julie was swept away from reality. ^r 499+ It's not, of course, universal. Casting director Joanna Colbert, who used to run casting for Universal, notes that the women she auditions — real actresses as opposed to MAWs (model actresses whatever) — don't look "underfed. They just look like they go to the gym all day long. It's just something that is pervasive in any business that has to do with how you look." At least one top manager points out that actresses who compete most in the weight realm appear, to be the same ones who live in the tabloids. "There's a difference between that iconography and the working actors. Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Amber Tamblyn — they all have very lovely, appropriate body types. They don't look like they've come out of a prison camp." The skinny-minnies, the manager said, tend to be "the pop celebrities in the axis of fashion and celebrity. Instead of the fake boobs of 15 years ago. there's a whole generation obsessed with being thin." And there have been other shirts in the last 15 years that put more pressure on actresses to be thinner. As more and more actresses sideline officially or unofficially as fashion models, more appear to adopt the aesthetic of the modeling industry, which prefers sticklike female figures because they highlight the clothes better. Party girls also tend to have access to certain drugs that are known to cause weight loss. When Lindsay Lohan was arrested last month on suspicion of drunken driving, police said they found cocaine in her pocket. Paris Hilton recently told Larry King that she takes Adderall for attention deficit disorder. Both of these drugs often are used by women hoping to lose weight. English on half.com was cheaper, so Julie did twice as much. She went crazy-nesting with cuckoos and developing a fear of wrathful grapes. ^ \ • — Today Julie is seen every so often on the subway, where she rambles on in incoherent soliloquies, asking for spare change in iambic pentameter. Julie smells repugnant. Jacobson. In front of the camera, it's the same story. In a review of movies dating from June 2006 to June 2007, there were 185 films that featured male leads and only 47 that sported female leads — meaning that there's a lot of competition for parts. It's unclear what female star, if any, can truly open a movie, given that Julia Roberts, the undisputed box-office queen of the last decade, hasn't appeared corporally in a movie since 2004. It's true that TV lately is providing a font of great roles for women, even Oscar-winning actresses who have come to be perceived as box-office nonentities. Still, according to the Screen Actors Guild's latest statistics, in 2004 men dominated the TV landscape too, with 84,108 roles to women's 56,603. - - . -••" LEARN FROM JULIE, '"•' m . Just because half.com is cheaper doesn't mean you need to buy twice as much English. Use your savings for good on half.com and try a video game instead. by SAVE $5 FDatVlRn50yDU5F-NDDNHALf.COM- Type in "overstudy" on half.com and get started on your subject of choice today* com- " Wo du oM coreiww BXJ (wavoo d CnfjBcti a any aeh subsonce. Please ust'csponsitfy nnd in « i MH ^ ^m ^m ^m H I • • ^m ^m • • H I ^ V • " $ 5 off promoiion open to legal U.S. residents 18 years ol age or older who are first-timo buyers on hatf.com. $5 on promotion good lor first-time pureruse ol $50 or more, excluding shipping .and handling, on hall.com only. 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