by Becky Aikman
As for actresses, at the peak of the studio era the moguls recognized that stories about women filled seats, so stars like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell shone clear and bright. “These women were the center of the universe in their films, and they did stuff,” says film historian Jeanine Basinger. “They ran corporations, they flew airplanes, they edited newspapers, they were doctors, lawyers, judges. When you think about the great women stars of the thirties, forties and into the fifties, those women dominated the films they were in, and in order to do that, they had to do something.”
A few women writers also still made the cut, like Leigh Brackett, first hired by Howard Hawks when he assumed from her name that she was a man, but kept on to contribute to features like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo. Yet somehow the idea took hold that directing was the province of men.
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THE COLLAPSE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM should have opened more doors for outsiders, but female luminaries got left on the other side. “Women just disappeared out of the business,” says Basinger. By then, the all-male central command was so ingrained, it might as well have been inscribed on tablets handed down unto Moses, or at least Charlton Heston.
A complete shake-up of the industry in the sixties didn’t help. No one seemed to be fully in charge anymore. The freedom could be intoxicating, an invitation to play for writers, directors and actors who, with a wave of a wand, morphed from hired help to free agents. But there were virtually no women writers or directors by then anyway, so none were in place to seize the new opportunities. And once studios stopped grooming their careers, even actresses lost what little stature they’d enjoyed. The remaining studio bosses, impressed by the success of subversive statements like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in 1967 and Easy Rider in 1969, threw up their hands and ceded unprecedented power to their insurgent directors.
This new Hollywood glorified auteurs, writer-directors who abandoned stodgy concepts like old-school glamour and straightforward narrative in favor of personal expression, which, because all the auteurs were men, necessarily skewed far to the masculine, heterosexual point of view—dramas about moody outlaws or comedies about hapless, insecure nebishes befuddled by the sexual revolution. There was little regard for stories that didn’t arise from the subterranean urges and priorities of the male psyche. Sexual-fantasy girls fleshed out the movies while the female aviators, journalists and lawyers of the old studio pictures got the hook.
“When women do get parts at all, they are usually cast as prostitutes, empty-headed blondes, sex kittens or neurotic housewives,” the New York Times reported during a conference about the issue in 1974. Male speaking roles outnumbered female ones by twelve to one, and the only bankable female star was Barbra Streisand, who for four years in the early seventies was the sole actress on the top-ten list of box-office stars in polls of theater owners.
By the mid-seventies, the new generation of film school auteurs—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma—set off so many pyrotechnics that roles for women devolved into an afterthought at best. Critical and commercial smashes like The Godfather, The French Connection and M*A*S*H shifted the balance of Hollywood power further into the camp of the young male countercultural renegades.
The social milieu that trailed in their wake didn’t do women any favors. As filmmaking as an art form caught fire, with hedonism as the fuel and cocaine the accelerant, no behavior was off-limits, just as no artistic choice was out of bounds. “A lot of talented people came along and then got plied with gobs of money and drugs,” says Martha Coolidge, who was spinning her wheels trying to gain traction as a director. “They lived in a bubble of indulgence that will probably never be seen again.”
None of this engendered much respect for the women in town, many of whom, whether they aspired to act, direct or write, were treated more as sexual playthings than professional colleagues. “I was appalled at the men of my generation, my age, who went around with the hookers and dopey girls and had group sex and did a lot of coke,” says Paula Weinstein, who arrived in Hollywood in 1973 as a script reader for Jane Fonda and by 1981 had made it as head of production at United Artists. “There was this essentially secret club of guys who all hung out and didn’t take women seriously at all.”
Few women gained admission to the club. Between 1966 and 1979, the number of women directing a studio-backed film was a whopping one, Elaine May, the former comedy partner of Mike Nichols, director of The Graduate. May was a true auteur who wrote, directed and starred in the 1971 black comedy A New Leaf, a commercial and critical hit. She followed up the next year by directing the similarly successful The Heartbreak Kid, written by Neil Simon. Despite this double triumph, May ran over budget, filmed interminable retakes and dithered over the smallest decisions. When her third feature, Mikey and Nicky, tanked in 1976, she wasn’t given another chance until the disastrous Ishtar ended her directing career eleven years later. The argument could be made that male wunderkinds indulged in similar feats of excess and turned out similar flops (see Sorcerer by William Friedkin), but May’s former assistant Todd McCarthy acknowledged, “I do really believe that she set back the cause of women directors in Hollywood by ten years.”
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DURING THE SEVENTIES AND EARLY EIGHTIES, only two women in town had real clout, the kind that could get a movie made with a complex female at the center of the story. They were Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda, leading actresses who leveraged their box-office power to develop their own projects.
Following a Best Actress Oscar for Funny Girl, Streisand was reduced to playing, yes, a prostitute in the middling comedy The Owl and the Pussycat. The experience spurred her to form her own production company as a means to seek out more up-to-date material. Her first effort, Up the Sandbox, a 1972 comedy about the liberating fantasies of a housewife, didn’t catch fire, but her next, the 1976 rock ’n’ roll remake of A Star Is Born, racked up $140 million, her biggest box-office take for several decades.
Still, she wanted more, namely to direct. Even though many actors had been given the nod—Paul Newman, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood, to name a few—years passed as studios balked at backing Streisand, in spite of her box-office punch. When she secured a deal to direct Yentl, an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a girl who poses as a boy to study the Talmud, Streisand had to swallow a deal that took away the routine powers and perks granted to her peers. “I had to eat shit, put it that way,” she said in a magazine interview at the time. The studio trimmed Streisand’s usual salary for acting, granted her only the guild minimum for directing and built in all sorts of hair-trigger penalties if she ran over time or budget. All that, and she had to give up casting approval, script approval and final cut.
“It was as if they had this very antiquated notion of an actress as this frivolous creature,” she recalls. “How could she be financially responsible? How could she handle a movie crew? How could she make all the myriad decisions that go into making a film? It just didn’t compute for them. It was a man’s world.”
Yentl earned a solid $40 million at the box office on its release in 1983, and five Oscar nominations, although none for Streisand. It satisfied her jones to direct, but her acting career faltered afterward. Following an unprecedented run as one of the top-ten bankable stars for ten out of twelve years, she disappeared from the list in 1981, never to return.
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FOR A TIME, JANE FONDA wielded her own kind of authority, not by directing but by cannily producing projects that made gutsy statements and gave her central roles. At first, even a member of Hollywood royalty like Fonda had struggled to find her place. Despite an Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1970 and a win for Klute in 1972—as, yes, a prostitute—she kept fielding offers for witless sex comedies that featured the requisite empty-headed-blo
nde part.
She formed her own production company in 1973, vaguely aware that Mary Pickford and Streisand had done so, and assuming that others had, too. Fonda reasoned that because she was famous and a respectable box-office draw, she could get movies made by agreeing to star, and she was savvy enough to understand how to make projects commercial. “If you’re going to do a story about Vietnam vets, make it sexy and make it a love story. If you’re going to do a story on nuclear energy, make it a suspense thriller.” Her first project, 1978’s Coming Home, turned into a surprise hit in which Fonda, playing the wife of a gung-ho soldier, had an affair with a paraplegic veteran played by Jon Voight. Released ten months before The Deer Hunter, Coming Home was the first Hollywood production to take a serious look at the morality of the Vietnam War. The film scooped up eight Academy Award nominations and won three, including Fonda’s second for Best Actress. The following year, she scored another Oscar nomination and another hit with the The China Syndrome, playing the part of a reporter who uncovers the dangers of nuclear power plants.
Producing her own movies launched Fonda to a new level of stardom. Starting in 1978, she landed among the top-ten box-office stars for five years in a row, one of only eight women to make the list throughout that stretch. She also fought to slip women onto the crews of her movies, but she didn’t think about recruiting women to direct. “A movie about Vietnam, are you kidding?” she says. “These were hard enough movies to get made, let alone if I was insisting on a woman director who wasn’t proven.” Fonda didn’t regard herself as a trailblazer for others. In fact, she was surprised when Sally Field asked her for advice on how to set up a company. Why does she have to come to me? Fonda thought. “I didn’t consider myself an expert or particularly good at it.” Like most other women trying to crack the industry, Fonda didn’t realize how alone she was.
Nevertheless, as the eighties began to unfold, more women were angling to produce, direct, write—or at least try. But there wouldn’t have seemed to be much chance for a former waitress from Paducah, Kentucky, who worked in the vaguely scuzzy world of comedy clubs and music videos. Not unless she came up with one hell of an idea.
CHAPTER 3
“NEXT! NEXT!”
The sound of desperate banging broke Callie’s concentration. Heavy metal throbbed and wailed outside the thin walls of the production trailer where she had been toting up the budget for a music video. She cracked open the door. One of the backup dancers stood in the frame, chilled and trembling in little more than a Band-Aid.
“I’m really sorry.” The dancer shuddered. “I have to leave. I was hired to dance, and people are putting their hands all over me. I feel like this whole experience is degrading.”
Callie’s heart bloomed with pleasure. Finally, someone speaking her language! It was the first time she’d heard anyone say, “What the fuck is going on here?” she recalls.
“It’s terrible, because I really need the money,” the dancer said.
“No, no,” Callie said. “I’m paying you. I’m writing a check right now.”
Years later she still savors that moment, the one when she paid a modicum of reparations for all she had witnessed in the trenches of music video.
Degrading? Welcome to the rodeo.
For the most part, if a woman wanted to break into the movies in the 1980s, she put on blinders and plowed ahead, whatever she might think of the lame or skanky entertainment product she was called upon to enable. So it was when Callie Khouri worked her way through the ranks of video production. Stifle the outrage, avert the eyes and get the job done.
Those who weren’t stars like Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda could rarely attack the industry head-on. Video production was a viable flanking maneuver, a side entrance for somebody who could tolerate the drugs, the inanity and the groping of women who were hired to slink around behind the musicians while sparsely attired in a mockery of 1980s dress for success.
Around the time Callie left the comedy scene, she signed on as a receptionist at N. Lee Lacy, a tony commercial production outfit. To get the job she had to promise that she would never try to move out from behind the reception desk, swearing on her life that answering the phone was her highest ambition. The company had just launched a division to crank out music videos for the record industry, which was bankrolling attention-grabbing clips to break bands on MTV.
Callie started by greeting visitors in the serene white foyer at Lacy’s on Melrose Place. The job was classy but dull, seemingly another dead end. “I was literally running out of ideas,” she says. Eventually she did push her way into the fun part, working on commercials and videos, climbing the ladder through a jumble of titles—runner, production assistant, production coordinator and production manager. By 1987, she was freelancing as a line producer, which meant she delivered film to the lab, ordered the lighting, scouted locations, juggled schedules, arranged casting sessions—you name it—all in the service of the creative visions of the directors. “It was incredibly unsatisfying,” Callie says, “but I learned a lot.”
Young film school grads who worshipped at the altars of the auteurs jumped at the chance to direct those music videos, which could serve as a ticket in. With their flamboyance, visual flair and utter lack of restraint, the quick clips offered ripe canvases to showcase the talents of comers like David Fincher and Michael Bay. Yet while video production may have functioned as the minor leagues in Hollywood, the milieu matched or even exceeded feature films for lurid, outrageous behavior, on and off the set.
“Everyone was snorting through their days, coke everywhere, and everyone was just out of hand,” says Amanda Temple, an English-born friend who produced a number of videos with Callie. “I have to say, we did have a lot of fun. We did laugh.”
Directors basked in what there was of cachet in the genre. But production people, the women especially, felt conscripted into the coal mines of long hours, low pay and dismal taste. One night, when Callie was cleaning the soundstage as other PAs took off, one of the guys announced, “For a hundred a day, these people can go fuck themselves. I’m out of here.” A hundred? Callie thought. I’m making seventy-five. Callie worked on clips for a lot of bands that went nowhere and a few others that did—Robert Cray, Brian Setzer, Iggy Pop, Billy Idol. Having never studied film, she soaked up the process of how to tell a story visually, how all that mattered was what happened when the shutter opened wide. But ultimately the work seemed trivial, just this side of artistic—and worse.
“There were really talented directors making beautiful images,” Callie says, “but still nobody was saying anything. It wasn’t important. Some of it was beautifully crafted. Some of it was cheaply crafted and culture destroying, which was the other side of it. I got exposed to the objectification of women in a whole new way.”
She and Amanda often quarantined themselves in the production office, but still they could hear the male directors and crew routinely snickering and commenting on the bodies of the dancers who stripped down to underwear or less on the sets and in auditions. Directors bellowed: “Not big enough tits! Next! Next!”
“We were both mortified a lot of the time by the work we were doing,” says Amanda. “It was Mötley Crüe, it was Whitesnake, it was all those spandex-pants and big-hair guys with girls in bikinis.” Watching directors film women’s asses shaking from a foot away, she and Callie cut glances at each other: What the hell are we doing? “What we were doing was, we were paying bills,” Amanda says. “We needed to work, so we kept our heads down and we did it.”
Those casting sessions got to Callie. Sometimes they enraged her. Sometimes she spoke up. “The thing that was so powerful about Callie was that she had a really strong sense that this was wrong, that it was time for a change,” says Amanda. “She got up people’s noses.” Some of the guys complained that Callie had a mouth on her. Amanda stood up for her colleague, and they became tight as only allies become tight if they’re trapped together b
ehind enemy lines, surviving on nothing but camel jerky and gully water. Callie devised an expression that kept them going: “You get what you settle for.”
“It was like having a warrior queen at your side,” says Amanda. “I felt like I could fight every battle with this woman.”
On balance, Callie was tactical enough to put the paycheck ahead of her opinions. “She could play pool with the boys,” says David Warfield, who dated Callie at the time and often worked on shoots with her. “Her attitude was essentially professional. She’s not so fragile that she can’t be around dancing bimbos.”
The relationship with David provided sweet relief and proof that not every guy working in show business was a cad. In a classic California interlude, he became smitten with her when they shared a hot tub at a party, where she torpedoed the customary mellow vibe to hold forth on all the sexist and patriarchal sins of society. “It made me fall in love,” David says, “just because it was so smart, so deeply authentic, and because so few people are eloquent enough to express such a meaningful statement on the human condition that way. A couple of years later it manifested itself in Thelma & Louise.”
Callie was pulling herself together. She was happy in her house near the beach, happy with David and not altogether miserable at work, where she had caught a serious case of the movie bug. In fact, she had acquired a profound sense of mastery from her job. If a crewmate got a motor home stuck in a ditch, Callie would say, “I got this,” and drive it out. Despite the tedium of production work, the ridiculous inequality and lack of respect, she became fascinated by the craft or, in rare instances, the art of telling stories on film. The work she’d witnessed from the sidelines had all the substance of, let’s face it, an MTV video, but it was enough of a taste that she fixed on this as something she might be able to do, and do well—telling stories, expressing something that mattered for a change, with images, words and music, creating a vision that was beautiful and true. Ever since the loss of her father, she’d been grasping for the accomplishment that could satisfy his ambitions for her. Filmmaking? There were crazier ideas.