In 1989, Dolly Parton joined Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis and a young Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias — a film about friendship, grief and the women who face life’s worst moments with a well-timed wisecrack.

Nearly four decades later, it is a Hollywood classic. But when Steel Magnolias arrived in cinemas, plenty of critics were less impressed. Its overwhelmingly female world was dismissed as sentimental, frivolous and lacking a “strong male figure” — criticisms that now say almost as much about Hollywood as they do about the film.

In this edition of Future Vision, we look at why Dolly Parton was perfectly cast as Truvy, how Steel Magnolias turned a deeply personal tragedy into one of the era’s most enduring films, and what happened to the Hollywood movies made unapologetically for grown women.

Writer and critic Hadley Freeman, author of Life Moves Pretty Fast, explains how the economics of Hollywood changed — and why studios increasingly turned their attention towards the teenage boys they believed could deliver a blockbuster opening weekend.

From Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment to Moonstruck and Baby Boom, this is the story of a kind of mainstream cinema that once flourished — and then almost disappeared.

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