by Andi Zeisler
As the profile of independent film rose and became part of the Hollywood machinery, though, the economics of the studio system began, just as they did in the early part of the twentieth century, to press out much of what made indie films a true alternative: namely, creators who didn’t resemble the majority of big-time moviemakers.
Take Just Another Girl on the IRT, the 1992 film that told the story of Chantal, a smart and smart-assed high-school junior whose dreams of going to college and becoming a doctor are thrown into uncertainty when she gets pregnant. The story was notable not only for having a young, female, and black protagonist, but also for dealing with the issue of abortion and reproductive choice with a straightforwardness that was quickly becoming obsolete. Leslie Harris wrote, directed, and produced the film expressly to offer a fresh take on black women and girls in the movies. (“I was just tired of seeing the way black women were depicted, as wives or mothers or girlfriends or appendages,” Harris told the New York Times in 1993. “She’s the central character. There’s no male character to validate her.”) Just Another Girl was a standout at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993: indie hitmaker Miramax picked it up for distribution, Harris took home a special Jury Prize, and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers raved about the film, calling it “artfully stylized, explosively funny,” and identifying Harris as a “bracing new voice.” The movie even turned a profit. The director could reasonably have expected to set off on a trajectory similar to that of fellow indie directors like Sex, Lies, and Videotape’s Steven Soderbergh, but she didn’t. By 2002, when she was interviewed for an article in Salon about the lack of female directors, Harris had been trying for ten years to get a second movie funded, to no avail: “I’ve been told — a lot — that black women can’t carry a film.”3 In 2013, Harris used crowdfunding to finance her new feature, I Love Cinema.
A 2013 study co-commissioned by the Sundance Institute and the nonprofit organization Women in Film confirmed that Harris’s experience was consistent with a pattern of behind-the-camera stagnation for female film directors. The study found that, while the numbers of women and men graduating from film schools were nearly equal, from 2002 to 2012, women represented less than one-third of the more than eleven thousand writers, directors, producers, and cinematographers whose work has been shown at the festival, with little change in representation over those years. But women are overrepresented in Sundance’s list of one-hit wonders—films that, like Just Another Girl, were lauded at the festival only to languish upon release. The female directors of festival faves like The Tao of Steve, The Woodsman, Blue Car, Girlfight, and Winter’s Bone, though embraced at Sundance (and, in Debra Granik’s case, at the Oscars, where Winter’s Bone was nominated for Best Picture in 2010), didn’t get the kind of immediate support and industry mentorship necessary for a robust career—or even a second film.
It’s worth comparing their careers and name recognition to the male directors who also debuted at Sundance and have since gone on to become some of the biggest names in Hollywood filmmaking—among them Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, the Coen brothers, David O. Russell, and both Andersons (Wes and Paul Thomas). Look at any list of “Sundance’s Breakthrough Directors” and you’re more or less guaranteed to see one male, white face after another. Do these guys just happen to make better movies, write more universally gripping stories, cast more appealing actors? Many people would likely argue that they do. But it’s equally possible that the sure-footed appeal of their movies is the product of an undeniably gendered power structure wherein “the money” invests in male directors’ potential from the start because executives already identify with them. (As director Mary Harron put it, “Male executives are looking for fantasy versions of their younger selves.”4)
The 2013 Sundance/Women in Film study asked fifty-one independent female filmmakers how their gender had affected their careers in films. In their answers, five key challenges stood out: “gendered financial barriers,” “male-dominated networks,” “stereotyping on set,” “work and family balance,” and “exclusionary hiring decisions.” The first of these was the most overwhelmingly cited as having impacted the careers of women, with more than 43 percent of the respondents reporting having experienced gendered financial barriers, including lower production budgets, producers and investors being reluctant to trust female directors with big-budget features, “female” subject matter being deemed commercially unviable, and more. Discussing the findings of the study, Keri Putnam, executive director of the Sundance Institute, told Entertainment Weekly that female directors “do considerably better at Sundance than they do in the mainstream studio industry,” noting that a more general lack of diversity in that industry makes executives and funders simply see women as outsiders—and thus, unlikely to make it into the hiring loop in the first place, particularly for big-budget projects. Put simply, “As budgets increased, the presence of women decreased.”5
Alison Anders—who like many of her colleagues from the ’90s indie boom, including Lisa Cholodenko, Lesli Linka Glatter, and Martha Coolidge, now works mostly directing television—made the point succinctly: “I’ve seen men who can’t direct their way out of a paper bag make a film that bombs, and they turn around and get a huge studio film. . . . When our movies don’t [succeed], we don’t get a chance to make a second movie.”6 More recently, first-time director Desiree Akhavan, a young Iranian-American woman whose first film, 2014’s Appropriate Behavior, drew instant raves, frankly noted on the podcast Death, Sex & Money that received wisdom about gender affected her sense of creative potential to begin with. “Two male filmmakers this year have told me, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and make a B-minus second film?’ . . . . I don’t think I have the luxury of making a B-minus second film if I want to keep working. Who’s going to finance the film after [the B-minus film]?”
At the root of this split is a fundamental difference in the way women’s perspective is understood as a single entity standing apart from men’s stories and visions. It’s a perspective that’s been devalued for much of history as canons of literature, film, music, and more have ingrained a tacit understanding of (white) men’s stories as universal and women’s as special-interest. (Back in 1996, David Foster Wallace tipped his hand when referring to any writers who weren’t white and male as “tribal.”) So when people complain—and they do—about surveys like Sundance’s being “bean-counting,” they’re missing the point. It is about numbers, but more important, it’s about what those numbers mean, about beliefs in the value of “men’s stories” and “women’s stories,” not to mention an acknowledgment that—as Fury Road amply illustrated—these are not mutually exclusive categories. It shouldn’t be a radical notion that the experiences of women have the potential to be as universal and as broadly felt as those of men. Yet two key beliefs—that women are only capable of telling women’s stories, and that women’s stories are still special-interest ones, tribal and uncompelling and even alien to men—hold particularly fast in Hollywood.
With much of the blockbuster business centered on international audiences, female directors’ chances of breaching the gulf between indie and blockbuster may be getting even worse. Inkoo Kang, who covers film for IndieWire’s Women in Hollywood blog, notes that the studios are “quite aware” of the gender and race imbalance, but from a financial perspective, they’d rather take their chances on serving the international market than on serving the women here at home. “What they’re banking on,” she says, “is the status quo of racism and sexism that’s already in the general public. And, unfortunately, the international audience is more racist and more sexist than mainstream American culture. So I don’t really see much of it changing.”
What Women Watch
Hollywood’s long-standing woman problem has been so entrenched for so long in part because it’s been kind of a family secret: Those who benefited from and invested in it saw it as the norm; those who might have wanted to protest risked their careers if they did so. And efforts to compel the motion pictur
e industry to implement hiring practices that better reflect the demographics of filmgoing audiences are not new. Evidence of pattern race and sex discrimination in hiring practices in the 1960s prompted a series of hearings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which resulted in an investigation that found—what do you know?—discrimination in hiring practices. A 1978 report issued by the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in its findings that “despite claims to the contrary, minorities and women are poorly represented in decision-making positions in the motion picture studios,” and, notably, that hiring practices make minimal use of official job descriptions, evincing instead “an overdependence on word-of-mouth recruitment.”
Institutions like the New York Film Academy and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism have funded studies that quantify inequality in everything from speaking roles (one USC study found that of 2009’s one hundred top-grossing movies, only 30 percent of speaking roles were female) to how women are portrayed onscreen (in a survey of the top five hundred films from 2007 to 2012, for instance, the NYFA found that 28.8 percent of female characters wore sexually revealing clothing, as opposed to 7 percent of male ones). Surveys like this existed well before the advent of the Internet—Donna Allen’s Media Report to Women, for instance, began chronicling women’s participation in and creation of media in 1972; the Celluloid Ceiling Report has been published annually for almost twenty years by Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. But the blog posts, think pieces, and number-crunching infographics that regularly issue from these organizations and others have amplified them immensely. Online viral incubators like Upworthy send out bite-sized factoids, graphics, and videos like all-points bulletins, crafted for snacky shareability. Blogs like Women in Hollywood, Shadow and Act, and more report on nearly every aspect of the industry that relates to gender and race. And jaw-dropping anecdotes from the anonymous Tumblr called Shit People Say to Women Directors & Other Women in Film (Sample: “I’m not being sexist but it would be better to talk to a man in that meeting. Let’s reschedule until [he] can make it”) became a source of communal ire only hours after it debuted in the spring of 2015.
And yet, even as evidence of outright discrimination piles up like unsolicited scripts—even as the American Civil Liberties Union announced, in early 2015, a new investigation into the hiring practices of Hollywood’s major studios—film-industry players regularly tell us that we’re living in a time of unprecedented womanity at the movies, both behind and in front of the camera.
Take John Fithian, the CEO of the trade group National Association of Theatre Owners, who predicted at an industry convention that 2015 would be “The Year of the Woman” in movies, noting that female-identified moviegoers had already accounted for 60 percent of tickets sold to lady-friendly releases like 50 Shades of Gray, Insurgent, and Cinderella. Fithian went on to add that he was “so pleased that my daughter can see more women in leading roles than ever before.”7 (As the key liaison between movie-theater owners and the film industry, one might rightly wonder why, if it was so important for Fithian’s daughter to see more women, he hadn’t made any previous overtures toward the industry, but okay.) A few months later, more year-of-the-woman accolades rang out from the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where filmmaker Agnès Varda was given the festival’s lifetime achievement award—the first time in sixty-nine years it had gone to a woman—and, in another first, the film chosen to open the festival, Standing Tall, was one by a female director.
According to the Variety article that reported on Fithian’s address, his prediction departed somewhat from conventional wisdom. It noted that while “most analysts are betting that the domestic box office will exceed $11 billion for the first time ever, their confidence is largely based on a slate of fanboy fare such as Avengers: Age of Ultron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Meanwhile, the excitement over Standing Tall kicking off Cannes was a conscious PR move by its head, Thierry Frémaux, spun to downplay the reality that the festival, arguably the world’s pacesetter for prestige films, has a dismal track record when it comes to showcasing those made by women. (Standing Tall was one of two films screening—out of nineteen total—that was helmed by a woman; the previous three years’ respective totals were two, one, and zero.)
Declaring variations on “Year of the Woman” pronouncements in Hollywood has, over the past decade or so, become a very weird way in which the media continually lowers the bar on expectations. If, say, only 12 percent of lead roles in the hundred top-grossing Hollywood movies are women’s roles—which was the case in 2014—then a few percentage points’ increase the following year will be cause enough for effusiveness about how good things are getting. In 2012, despite noting that “it would be silly to proclaim, on the basis of a handful of roles, that some kind of grand role reversal has taken place,” A.O. Scott’s New York Times Magazine article on women’s roles (“Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship”) was titled in a way that did just that.
I asked Martha Lauzen, who authors the annual Celluloid Ceiling Report, about the prevalence of what seems like an almost pathological optimism about women in the industry that insists, despite what the numbers say, on repeating that women have more power in Hollywood than ever before. It’s a misguided notion, she agrees, that’s fueled by two crucial things. “First, people see high-profile women succeeding—Kathryn Bigelow, for example—and assume that women have ‘made it.’ A few of these cases can dramatically alter people’s perceptions of reality, which is why it is so important to actually count the number of women working in powerful behind-the-scenes roles and on screen every year.”
The second thing, Lauzen offers, is that pondering the extent to which things haven’t changed in decades is just unbelievably depressing, and Hollywood is nothing if not an aggressively feel-good business. “People have a very strong desire to believe that things get better every year,” wrote Lauzen in an email, adding that “representatives for organizations with an investment in the status quo do their best to encourage this belief.” She mentioned a statement that Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the first African-American to hold the position, and only the third woman) had made in the wake of 2015’s announcement of Oscar nominees, a list that had no nonwhite names in any of the acting categories and no women nominated for either writing or directing. Boone emphasized that the Academy was “committed to seeking out diversity of voice and opinion,” but Lauzen wasn’t convinced that this was anything more than an attempt to tamp down public derision like that of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that promptly scorched a path through Twitter.
There have always been wonderful, multifaceted, inspiring, funny female film characters (though admittedly most of them have been white). Likewise, there have always been robust female audiences, not to mention people of all genders who gladly vote with their dollars in favor of more female-directed, -produced, or -focused movies. But that hasn’t changed the overall attitude of movie executives toward either female stars or female audiences: instead, the prevailing belief is often that if such a film succeeds at the box office, it’s some kind of wild, unprecedented fluke. The same is true for movies with majority-non-white leads, a fact that nonwhite filmmakers have emphasized over and over, apparently unheard, as studio executives scratch their heads at “overperforming” recent films like McFarland USA and The Best Man Holiday. (Lee Daniels, director of The Butler and Precious, has been especially pointed: “What does it take for people in Hollywood to see that black people will come out to see a movie?”)
When Bridesmaids was released to critical acclaim and crackerjack box office receipts in 2011, it was greeted by Hollywood critics and analysts as though it had literally never occurred to anyone in the industry that: a) a comedy starring a female ensemble cast could be funny; and b) that women would haul ass to the
theater to watch such a thing, and not even on date night. The headlines everywhere, from trade papers to movie blogs, all seemed to ask variations on one question: What kind of sorcery is this? Sure, its raunchiness—in the form of anal-bleaching jokes, foul language, and, of course, the collective gastrointestinal meltdown in a bridal atelier—was a newish twist on the female-ensemble film. But was the concept of a female-ensemble film new? It shouldn’t be, assuming you’ve heard of a few recent pictures called Sex and the City ($153 million), Mamma Mia! ($144 million), and The Devil Wears Prada ($125 million), to say nothing of past hits like 9 to 5, Waiting to Exhale, Steel Magnolias, Charlie’s Angels, and Working Girl.
Nevertheless, Bridesmaids’ surpassing of box office estimates (it grossed $288 million worldwide) incited a flurry of studio and media interest that, much as it was supposed to be good news, highlighted just how regressive the industry is. Business Insider reported that “Studios were paying close attention . . . to see how it would do before they greenlit other female projects.”8 Producer David T. Friendly wrote an entire article in the Hollywood Reporter congratulating himself for actually calling up a female screenwriter to discuss a project. As with the aforementioned female-focused hits, Bridesmaids ushered in a spate of think pieces in which reporters (invariably, but not exclusively, male) tried to pinpoint just exactly where this nutty new women-going-to-the-movies trend had started; and along with those came a disquieting amount of people patting themselves on the back for supporting it.