Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  One night she flew with a load of camera equipment to Monument Valley to work on an Estée Lauder commercial. All alone, Callie packed up a van and drove toward the motel where the crew awaited. A full moon lit the fabled rock formations. Stretching toward the horizon, they towered like silvery apparitions in absolute clarity and perfect silence as she guided the van down the empty highway. It was both hyperreal and otherworldly, a visual spectacle that sent her thoughts spinning.

  Callie felt that she understood herself in a way that had evaded her for ten muzzy, cluttered—frustrating—years. She considered how glorious it would be to communicate that sensation in a movie, that feeling of facing who you are, perhaps for the first time, in a grand, impassive space that opened the mind to reflection. She had something to say, something that mattered, and she knew it belonged on film.

  CHAPTER 4

  WIELDING A GRACEFUL CLEAVER

  By the mid- to late 1980s, when Callie chose to join the filmmaking fray, the romance of the movies had summoned a new batch of hopeful women writers, producers and directors to throw themselves against the well-guarded gates of the studios. The prospects for women had improved since the near shutout of the seventies, but still only a few found a way in. The latest contenders weren’t so much celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda as people more like Callie, with nothing but experience in starter jobs or student films to recommend them. If a novice wanted to tap into the collective experience of these contemporaries to find out what to expect, it might sound something like this:

  Know that film schools and studio bosses will assure you that women do not write, produce or direct.

  Hold the champagne on ice if a studio decides to back you after your first film wows the critic from the Village Voice. It is the second or third film you need to worry about.

  Channel the prom. When you are offered the opportunity to make a movie, it will be a comedy about horny teenagers.

  If that movie makes money, the press, the industry, your colleagues and possibly your mother will call it a “sleeper hit.”

  Expect sexual overtures or assaults from guys dangling low-level job opportunities.

  And there will be crying, but preferably only in the ladies’ room.

  Such givens crop up throughout the stories of women from all corners of the industry, from art house obscurities to commercial triumphs, who rose to prominence during the years when Callie worked to leave videos behind by writing a movie of her own.

  The first strike against Callie might have been that she had parked herself on the wrong coast. Often those who had wangled opportunities before her had done so through independent films in New York. Joan Micklin Silver, the first woman to make an independent movie with a more commercial bent, was pushing forty and shooting educational films there when she approached studios for directing work. Everywhere she went, she ran into the first industry given: women simply did not do this.

  “Look, feature films are expensive to make and expensive to market,” one executive told Silver. “Women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”

  Her husband, Ray, a real estate investor, pulled together $375,000 so that his wife could write and direct Hester Street, about a woman who found emancipation when she immigrated to America. No studio or distributor would take on the film, and so the Silvers submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival, where they sold rights to three foreign countries, raising enough money to open the movie themselves in New York in 1975. Lines formed around the block in a rainstorm on opening day, and Hester Street emerged as a critical favorite and widely touted sleeper hit. It earned an Oscar nomination for actress Carol Kane and sold $5 million in tickets, a spectacular return on a pea-sized investment.

  Hollywood did not come calling. But Silver’s next self-financed film, Between the Lines, about an alternative newspaper, prompted United Artists to underwrite her following effort, Chilly Scenes of Winter, based on an Ann Beattie novel. The company saddled the 1979 film with a slapstick title, Head Over Heels, dumped it on a double bill and wrote it off as a fast flop. A rerelease three years later restored the original title and Silver’s smart reputation, but the experience established a persistent pattern for aspiring directors: promising indie debuts by women who then stumbled when graduating to full-scale studio productions.

  —

  THE “BEWARE THE FOLLOW-UP” CURSE proved persistent for other filmmakers throughout the seventies and eighties. “I cannot tell you the number of people who said, ‘Don’t hire her—she’s indecisive,’ or ‘Don’t hire her—she’s difficult,’” says Paula Weinstein, a rising studio executive at the time. “Women, if they falter, get dismissed a lot faster than men.”

  It happened to the New York writer-director Claudia Weill, who landed a deal with Columbia following her 1978 independent sleeper, Girlfriends, an endearingly awkward friendship comedy that Lena Dunham later cited as an influence. When Weill’s next picture tanked in 1980 amid studio second-guessing and interference, she retreated to theater and television.

  The pattern repeated with Susan Seidelman, an NYU film school graduate, who caught the wave of New York’s independent film surge with 1982’s punk-infused Smithereens, which she pulled off with minuscule grant money. Studios sent her scripts, but she hesitated. “A lot of them were female teen comedies, and just very silly,” she said. “I was very aware that because there were so few women directors to begin with, if a woman got some attention for making an independent film and landed a Hollywood movie—and it didn’t succeed at the box office—you never heard from her again.”

  Two first-time producers, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, approached Seidelman with the script for Desperately Seeking Susan, a singular romp by first-time screenwriter Leora Barish about a bored housewife who borrowed the identity of a punk free spirit, a character that served as the movie debut for Madonna. Barbara Boyle, an executive at Orion Pictures, persuaded her bosses to back the film if the budget stayed under $5 million.

  Seidelman applied visual flair and a feel for the energy of downtown New York to whip Desperately Seeking Susan into a fizzy alternative screwball comedy, brimming with a cast of barely known performers like Rosanna Arquette, Aiden Quinn, Laurie Metcalf and John Turturro. The Orion marketing department didn’t know what to make of this outlier, suggesting a poster that showed the face of the housewife reflected on the side of a toaster. But Sanford prevailed when she pushed for a cheeky photo of the two leads, defiantly punked up in thrift-shop threads, even though one of the marketing guys held the slides up to his office window and squinted with distaste. “You put two women on a poster,” he said, “and people are going to think it’s a lesbian movie.”

  Audiences showed they were eager for a fresh take. On its release in 1985, the movie grabbed $31 million in box office and designation within the industry as one of those unexpected sleeper hits. Seidelman landed four more studio gigs that didn’t measure up before moving to television, eventually directing the pilot for Sex and the City.

  —

  THE PATH SEEMED EVEN MORE PUNISHING for those who tried their luck in Los Angeles. When Martha Coolidge headed west after she aced NYU’s film school with a trophy case full of awards, she ran smack into the third and fourth givens of the industry: unwanted sexual come-ons and offers that were nearly as distasteful to her—to direct nothing but teenage comedies.

  Coolidge’s agent, the powerful Bob Bookman at ICM, told her that an executive once warned him about another writer-director client, “Don’t ever send a woman to me again that I wouldn’t want to fuck.” Once during a pitch, a studio chief locked the door to his office and chased Coolidge around the room, forcing his tongue into her mouth. Otherwise, women seemed invisible except at industry parties, where some tried to parlay their sexuality to associate with power and fame. “The girls were dressed up really sexy, and they’d all drop Ludes, which would make them completely helpless,” Coolidge says
. “The guys took them or left them. It was for the picking.”

  To her added despair, the only scripts that came her way were essentially soft-core porn with teenage characters. Desperate for a break, Coolidge finally agreed to take on one called Valley Girl. She thought she might be able to buff it up to respectability by adding a falling-in-love scene and a breaking-up scene to bracket the sex. At a meeting with two production executives who put up $350,000 to make the movie, one of them said, “We want you to promise that there will be nude breasts in four scenes in the picture. Is that a problem for you?”

  They insisted that she shake on it while repeating a solemn vow: “Four naked breast scenes.”

  Valley Girl made $17 million in 1983, but the doors it opened led only to other teen comedies, the low-budget, low-prestige genre that was fast becoming a certified safe zone for women directors. “I kept trying to change my luck from these sleazy movies where the women didn’t have names,” Coolidge says. “I read more bad scripts than you can imagine.”

  —

  WHATEVER IT TOOK, female aspirants sucked it up and moved on, each only vaguely aware of whoever else was doing what to whom to bring their movies to life. The film industry was a free-market free-for-all, a hive of creative killer bees striking their own deals and jump-starting their own projects with a fragmented dispersion of companies and producers. There was no central human resources department to monitor hiring and behavior, no coffee cart where workers could compare notes. All kinds of remarks and conditions that might lead to a lawsuit in a formal workplace went unchecked in the freewheeling, unscrutinized world of the movies as women chipped away at a ceiling that was more concrete than glass. Nevertheless, women began to break through.

  The producer Lauren Shuler Donner produced her first movie, the hit comedy Mr. Mom, in 1983, moving on to some three dozen others, including the billion-plus-earning X-Men franchise in the 2000s. But when she was starting out earning a living as a camera operator, there was no recourse for a long series of human resources no-no’s. At a job interview where she insisted she wanted to be a producer rather than a secretary, she was told, “Honey, either learn to type or get yourself a see-through blouse, because that’s the only way you’re going to get a job in Hollywood.” The director Sam Peckinpah countered a request for employment with the question “Do you wear a bra?” And when she worked on television’s Soul Train, she was off the show the day after she turned down an overture from the host, Don Cornelius.

  Penelope Spheeris finally made it as a director after enduring similar offenses when she scrounged for work in the seventies and eighties. A UCLA film graduate, Spheeris eked out a living at first by making early music videos. Once, a music executive invited her to his hotel room to pitch a video for David Essex. She showed up in a satin jumpsuit—a little sparkly for the afternoon, but that was the scene. The guy reached over, grasped the neckline of the jumpsuit and ripped it open down to the waist, then tried to jump on top of her. Spheeris jerked away and ran out of the hotel, clutching her clothes to cover herself. Instead of slinking away, she found her way to the nearest phone and called the room.

  “You’ve got three choices,” she said when he answered. “You can let me do this video. You can get some sugar poured in the gas tank of your stupid-ass Porsche. Or I can talk to your wife.” She got the job.

  Eventually, wheedling some money from guys in the porn industry, Spheeris made a documentary about punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization, which led to teen-movie features. When at the age of forty-five she eventually got a shot at a mainstream commercial comedy, 1992’s Wayne’s World, it took in $183 million worldwide.

  By the late eighties, a few other female filmmakers had won respect with box-office winners of their own. Penny Marshall directed Tom Hanks in Big, the first movie by a woman to break the $100 million mark. And Amy Heckerling followed a trajectory from teen comedy to eventual blockbuster after she made the most of a small budget for her first feature, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, to win critical acclaim and sleeper-hit status. Not satisfied, she declared: “I wanted to have hits the way boys had hits, not like a ‘girl hit’ that made fifty million, but a boy hit that made hundreds of millions.” She could afford just enough to hire Bruce Willis for voice-over work as a talking baby in Look Who’s Talking, which she both wrote and directed. When it earned $140 million in the United States and another $157 million abroad—boy-hit territory for sure—it took sleeper hits to a whole new level.

  —

  ANOTHER FACTION MADE ARTISTIC STRIDES during the decade. Kathryn Bigelow, destined to become the first female winner of the Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker in 2010, began to make an impression in the eighties with somber, philosophical action movies that mostly centered on masculine codes of honor. It was therefore absurd that after her debut feature, a biker movie called The Loveless in 1981, studios pursued Bigelow with the same lame teen-comedy scripts that stalked other women directors like deranged ex-boyfriends. In a later interview, Bigelow diplomatically stated the obvious: “It was an intersection of absolutely inappropriate sensibilities.”

  An even more highly praised debut director at the time was Randa Haines, who got tapped from television for a first feature film, Children of a Lesser God, that earned five Academy Award nominations in 1987, including Best Picture, although Haines didn’t make the cut for Best Director. A Best Actress statuette did go to the star, Marlee Matlin, a first-time actress, only twenty-one years old, playing a student in a school for the deaf. “I had a good period with the big boys,” Haines says. “I didn’t feel any kind of weird stuff was going on.” But she left the business after two more features, frustrated by producers who undercut her decisions: “Strange behavior toward me, people lying to me—it didn’t have any clear goal. It was the only time I thought this boys’ club I was playing in doesn’t like something about me.”

  —

  SOME CRACKERJACK SCREENWRITERS blazed trails in the 1980s, too. Melissa Mathison wrote 1982’s E.T. Nora Ephron spanned the decade with Silkwood, written with Alice Arlen, and her own Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally. Ephron would segue into directing in the nineties, as did Nancy Meyers, who started by writing neatly crafted hit romantic comedies for grown-ups, like Private Benjamin and Baby Boom, with her husband, Charles Shyer.

  By this time, Hollywood women had been at it long enough to develop some winning strategies, deploying soft power to make the old guard comfortable with somebody in the mix who reminded them of a wife or girlfriend. “Being part of a team helped me so much,” Meyers said. “I know the fact that there was a man in the room with me all those years made the medicine go down.” Like others of her generation, she walked a delicate line, putting across her point of view while taking care not to offend. “She was the funny, smart girl in rooms full of men when I first met her,” the director and producer James L. Brooks recalled. “She’ll hit you with a cleaver, but gracefully.”

  Lauren Shuler Donner says she advanced her producing career by confining her crying to the ladies’ room and cultivating an ability to let things slide. “I used to go in with my fists up,” she says. “I’d go, ‘I’m tough, I’m tough, I’m tough.’ Eventually I had to learn that that is the worst thing; that is what men really hate. A lot of women fell by the wayside because they’d be so tough-ass in trying to prove themselves.”

  —

  FOR ALL THE STRIVING WOMEN of the era, it was ever so easy to make the wrong tactical move—on anything from choice of material to choice of demeanor—and end up back as the script girl or, worse, the girl taking Quaaludes at the party. “When the stakes are high, when fame and extreme amounts of money and power are involved, it’s a jungle out there,” Penelope Spheeris once said. “It’s brutal. How hard do you want to fight?”

  Carrie Frazier, a casting director on many seminal eighties movies, advised director friends to treat meetings as auditions for roles, to dress in army boo
ts and convey the impression they’d been soldiering through mud. “People want to hire a director who’s a general, who has that kind of masculine energy,” she warns. “She can’t be ‘I’m a nice girl, let me direct your movie.’”

  Then again, she can’t be too threatening, either.

  Like women breaking into other tough jobs, as so many did back in the eighties in just about every line of work, women in Hollywood had to calibrate aggression with standards of femininity, ambition with diplomacy, and that didn’t even factor in talent or skill. Most likely, any attempt to cull advice for women in the business at the time would have yielded a ludicrous muddle of contradictions:

  Wear combat boots, or a see-through blouse.

  Put down your fists, or act like a general.

  Hold fast to your position, or let things slide.

  Hit them with a cleaver, but do it gracefully.

  Get a studio deal, but don’t trust the studio.

  It’s no wonder so few women made it all the way to the closing credits, like the last girl standing in a slasher movie. The rules were as ruthless and arbitrary as a chain-saw massacre.