FIVE YEARS AGO, #MeToo rattled the entertainment industry down to its tectonic plates. The hope, even in a cynical industry, was that the landscape would be permanently altered. Abusers would be rooted out, policies would change, and far more women would be elevated to decision-making positions. Five years later, how much has really changed? And how much more is Hollywood willing to change? "#MeToo is a bit of a failure in terms of institutional power," one television showrunner tells me. "They mostly didn't put women in charge, with some exceptions. The truth is that men still run Hollywood up and down the line, and they don't care. If anything, they feel that their colleagues have been unfairly maligned."

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That doesn't mean that #MeToo hasn't had an impact. "I think what has changed is that men are afraid, and that has never happened before," says a veteran film producer. "Men are afraid to behave badly because there have been enough situations where they are now suffering consequences. It would be nice if that wasn't the only motivation for behavior to improve. But I'll take it, you know?"

After the #MeToo floodgates opened, many Hollywood unions and organizations set up hotlines to help survivors of abuse or discrimination process their trauma and take the next steps, including filing complaints with HR departments. But in a recent Women in Film survey, 79.9 percent of respondents said that they or someone they knew had experienced abuse or misconduct while working in the industry in the last five years. WIF CEO Kirsten Schaffer was dismayed by the numbers, "it's kind of surprising how much hasn't changed," she says. Respondents shared stories like "An agent pulled his genitals out of his underwear in front of me" and "Our director grabbed our female PR professional's ass on the red carpet and would not let go." Says Schaffer, "it made me think about how long and how hard it is to actually change behavior. Awareness is part of the solution, but it's not the sole solution."

The Hollywood Commission, which was created in the wake of #MeToo, tracks behavior in the industry. Their 2019-2020 survey showed that 65 percent of those who responded didn't believe that powerful individuals would be held accountable for harassing someone with less power—and that barely more than a quarter of those who experienced harassment or sexual coercion reported it to employers because the rest feared, among other things, that they wouldn't be believed, nothing would happen, or they'd be retaliated against.

"There are really ABUSIVE, challenging people who are still SUCCESSFUL and OPERATING."

An industry insider who says she struggled to get her HR department to take action against an abusive colleague understands why so many in Hollywood still feel that way. "I think the whole apparatus is rigged," she says. "At the end of the day, the HR departments are beholden to the studios, and there's just too much money on the line." A diversity and inclusion executive tells me they're creating an environment where threatening behavior is no longer tolerated at all—and where employees can remain anonymous if they have reservations about the system. "We still have a ways to go, we get it," the exec says, "it's really important that people feel they can trust HR. I do think #MeToo collectively empowered men and women to speak up."

But many sources I spoke to still believe the best way to get a complaint taken seriously is by going public via the press or social media. That still requires the survivor risking their career, which is why most of the people I talked to say there is an active whisper network warning people away from the many remaining problem figures. "A lot of the really obvious ones, like the Harveys and the Rudins, have been called out and canceled, but I think there are really abusive, challenging people who are still successful and operating," says film producer Leah Holzer. Having worked for Weinstein, she now runs a production company with director Marielle Heller and producer Havilah Brewster focused on female-centric stories. She sometimes warns former interns and assistants away from potential employers who are known creeps, she says, and increasingly surrounds herself with female creatives.

"I think there's strength and safety in numbers," she says. "And there are women who are in very successful positions looking around and saying, 'I want to work with other women.' "

THERE'S A BELIEF in Hollywood that some toxic men in the industry comfort themselves with the notion that they're not as bad as Harvey Weinstein—as if that's a suitable standard, "it blows my mind that, in the year of our Lord 2022, men still think that they can get away with harassment and bias and flat-out illegal behavior," says Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a TV writer and creator at Universal, as well as the vice president of the Writers Guild of America, East. "There has been a lot of public support for victims and people who have spoken out against this kind of ongoing treatment, but I can tell you for certain that some of the very people speaking out still continue that behavior."

And just five years into this attempted reckoning, some believe Hollywood is already backsliding in terms of its resolve. "There's this tendency to want to say, 'Oh, we dealt with this...it's not a problem anymore!"' says movie producer Dani Melia. So women coming forward are now experiencing pushback, according to Schaffer, "it often comes in the form of white men who are decision makers saying things like, 'We've put women on the list [to direct or write], isn't that good enough?' Or, 'We've been talking about this for years, haven't we solved the problem?' "

Some white men in Hollywood as elsewhere think they've been marginalized, though the data doesn't bear this out. "The older white male writer is really angry right now," says the veteran showrunner Jenny Bicks, a former Sex and the City writer and the creator of Fox's Welcome to Flatch. "They did have it easier for a good portion of time, and now things are leveling...and it's ugly. It is the sense of entitlement that they lived with for 100 years of this industry." Cullen points out that, more than ever, offenders focus on the most vulnerable women: "They reserve their poor behavior for support staff and more marginalized people who they believe don't have that power to report them— for instance, people who are just getting started in the business and don't want to squander their opportunity." Another insider seconds this emphatically, saying, "if a white woman comes out with claims, she is taken much more seriously than a Black woman. I saw it happen."

As streaming budgets tighten and the movie business struggles, there's concern that the industry's dedication to funding projects by and about women and people of color will fall by the wayside. "There was a moment when it was a priority to be developing all of those kinds of shows and a lot of them were breaking through," says Holzer. "I definitely feel that contracting." She says the entertainment landscape has started to look the same as it did before #MeToo: "I feel like it's on all of us to continue pushing the agenda, because the second you let it go and let it fall out of the current conversation, things start to slip back. That's unfortunate and exhausting for all of us, but that's the reality."

Bicks, the showrunner, thinks back to something her teacher told her as a fourth grader growing up in New York City, when even a nine-year-old girl was not immune to getting groped on the subway: "They taught us that if you feel a hand on your ass, you pick the hand up and you hold it up, and you say, 'Whose hand is this?' We were kind of doing our own #MeToo in the fourth grade. And maybe that's what this all is: just finally being given the permission to take someone's hand off your ass and say, 'Whose hand is this?' And I'm all for it."