According to Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, of the top 250 grossing films for 2012, women accounted for only 9 percent of directors. That’s a boost of four percentage points from 2011, but dead even with the percentage of women directors working in 1998. Significantly, Lauzen, a leading researcher in the field who teaches at San Diego State University, titled her 2012 report “The Celluloid Ceiling.”
At the same CinemaCon at which Davis revealed the latest research findings from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which she founded in 2004, Hollywood Reporter editorial director Janice Min assembled and moderated a panel titled “Driving Financial Success: Women + Movies = Bigger Box Office” that included Davis, director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat), producer Nina Jacobson (The Hunger Games), Amy Miles (CEO of Regal Entertainment Group), and Vanessa Morrison (president of Fox Animation Studios). They addressed a few of the myriad issues concerning women and Hollywood, both behind and in front of the camera.
Clearly, despite all the evidence over the years showing a consistent number of box-office hits aimed at women, from Thelma and Louise to Sex and the City, the Hollywood studios would rather chase after young men—who account for an average of 44 percent of the opening weekend crowds—with big-budget VFX than feed even modest-budget pictures to the underserved, starving women’s audience. “There is an overwhelming belief in Hollywood that women will watch men but men won’t watch women,” says Davis. “Which is like the Bible or something. You cannot go against it. It’s a myth that keeps getting propagated, but it’s just not true.”
And yet while young men can be counted on to show up on opening weekends, they are not the most frequent moviegoers, according to MPAA research. Adults twenty-five to thirty-nine are. “There’s this pursuit of the young male, the most distracted demographic, between video games, sports, and girls,” says Jacobson. “There’s a lack of diversity overall which excludes many people as we obsessively pursue a demographic that’s the most elusive of them all. And there’s room for franchises to be made of many different sizes. It does not have to be a $200 million movie where a lot of things blow up. The remedy for a lot of the issues that afflict female representation in movies is also the same remedy for the marketplace.”
A reflection of the industry itself, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also skews to older white males. A 2012 Los Angeles Times study found that nearly 94 percent of Academy voters are white, 77 percent are male, and Academy members have a median age of 62. Blacks make up about 2 percent of the Academy, and Latinos less than 2 percent.
The reasons for Hollywood’s myopia about women—despite consciousness-raising efforts from groups such as Women in Film and Davis’s Institute—are many. But they mostly come down to the entrenched studio habit of making movies by men for men, and of more willingly entrusting male directors with multimillion-dollar budgets. The studios accept the conventional wisdom that movies aimed at young males tend to open and perform better around the world than movies aimed at women, which they consider to be execution-dependent (in other words, women wait for good reviews and higher quality) and hit or miss.
Women directors are often assigned modestly budgeted romantic and family films, which tend not to get as much marketing support. While there are plenty of women who produce and function in behind-the-scenes roles such as editing, casting, and costume and production design, there are fewer movies made for women, written by women, directed by women, or starring women in the lead role. It’s a vicious cycle.
And while there’s still a (shrinking) list of male marquee movie stars who get paid $20 million to guarantee opening weekends (the list includes Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, and Robert Downey Jr.), few actresses carry solo films. Most are relegated to romances, or to supporting roles as appendages to male leads, bitch-bosses, fussy mothers, or girlfriends—and they don’t get to topline big-budget global action films the way their male counterparts do. Angelina Jolie is the major exception, followed by Sandra Bullock, Cameron Diaz, and Jennifer Lawrence.
Men have the advantage of a much longer shelf life not defined by their looks: as they age into masculine authority in their forties and the decades beyond, still making love to scads of constantly replenished sweet ingenues in their twenties and thirties, women age out, with few exceptions. Sixtyish character actress Meryl Streep remains eminently bankable because she’s an Oscar perennial. But she is also an anomaly.
Sony chairman Amy Pascal insists that she hires women directors when she can, such as commercial romantic comedy writers Nora Ephron (who died June 26, 2012) and Nancy Meyers, who despite a robust box-office track record (Something’s Got to Give, What Women Want) still struggles to get her glossy big-budget relationship comedies funded. Inside the studio system, directors like Ephron and Meyers who can write and/or produce their own mainstream projects tend to fare the best. Pascal has begged Bigelow to do a Spider-Man or Bond film, but she refuses. Women have to survive scads of rejection and still fight for what they want, like getting to make a big-budget studio movie, Pascal tells Forbes: “It’s about women saying that’s what they want and not saying no. The whole system is geared for them to fail.”
Foreign countries nurture far more world-class women directors—New Zealand’s Campion, Denmark’s Susanne Bier, Poland’s Agnieszka Holland, and France’s Agnès Varda and Anne Fontaine, to name just a handful—but their films command relatively small budgets. More men move on from film schools to direct films than do women, who tend to wind up in lower-budget indie and television production. Many talented women serve the visions of their male bosses, as did the late production designer and producer Polly Platt, with Peter Bogdanovich and James L. Brooks.
In Hollywood, the barriers remain incredibly high for women hoping to direct, unlike the music or publishing industries, points out Pascal, where it’s relatively easy for exploitable talent to show what it can do. Men are permitted a few mistakes, where women are not. Movie stars Barbra Streisand and Angelina Jolie did not earn much respect for their directing on Yentl and In the Land of Blood and Honey, respectively. The list is long of women who have directed one or two films. Women directors with bona fide big-budget movie careers like Ron Howard or Barry Levinson? Rare.
Pascal runs a studio, as many women have done, from Columbia’s late Dawn Steel, retired Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing, and Universal’s Stacey Snider—who left to run DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg—to Universal’s current cochairman Donna Langley. They have all taken the occasional flyer on women’s material, but they always weigh their risks; they still have to meet the same bottom-line demands as their male studio peers. However, Pascal was able to scoop up Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty in a multipicture deal with Annapurna.
After starting out as a painter, hanging with the likes of Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, and Richard Serra in New York, Kathryn Bigelow came to realize that movies were a more accessible medium able to reach far more people. In Los Angeles, she built industry respect with a solid résumé directing robust, stylish genre films: Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days, and K-19: The Widowmaker. Her interests run to smart action films, not rom-coms. Bigelow, who is just under six feet tall, likes being one of the guys, and has studiously avoided being singled out as a female director. (“Would Michael Mann be described as a male director?” she asks.) The Hurt Locker star Jeremy Renner raved to me about how Bigelow—who was logging long hours and miles on large-scale sets in 110-degree heat in Amman, Jordan—was, at age fifty-five, in better shape than he was.
Bigelow first met journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal via an article he wrote for Playboy about an undercover female cop at a high school. Later, she admired Boal’s script for Paul Haggis’s war-at-home military family drama In the Valley of Elah. Bigelow knew Boal was embedding in Iraq, which she considered an underreported war. She asked him to collaborate. Bigelow was hoping he “might come back with some really ric
h material that would be worthy of a cinematic translation, and that’s what happened,” she told The A.V. Club.
They started working on the Hurt Locker script in 2005, and raised the money in 2006. They worked on their own, devoid of outside financial support, and filmed in 2007, because that’s “the way one works if you want to do a piece that is a passion project, uncompromised,” she told me when The Hurt Locker was first unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2008. “We made it completely independently, cast it as it should be cast, with these extraordinary actors.”
Away from the studio development and casting process, which demands certain dramatic character arcs and well-known stars, Boal and Bigelow were able to create a boots-on-the-ground experience for viewers: gritty, realistic, stripped of varnish. The director wanted Renner’s bomb-defuser to “put a human face on this combat situation, to give you a look at a conflict that would otherwise be abstract. He gives it heart.”
The movie sends an Iraq bomb-disposal unit out over thirty-eight days to disarm and dismantle improvised explosive devices (IEDs), treating each day’s mission as another day at the office. “That’s the war, that’s the conflict, not air, not hand-to-hand, that’s the signature weapon of the insurgency,” Bigelow said. “These are the stories Mark brought back. Obviously, there’s great drama in what these men do.”
She wanted Renner to be “a fresh face in a tense film where your landscape alone provides a tremendous degree of lethality; you don’t know who’s going to live and who’s going to die. He was a relative unknown, so the audience was not coming to the character with any preconception on [his] destiny. Anything could happen, which compounded the tension.”
Obviously, Bigelow was proven right—The Hurt Locker grossed a modest $17 million domestically but scored $32 million more around the world. So on her next go-around, she and Boal collaborated again on researching a real drama: the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Only this time, real events caught up with them. Preparing to shoot a movie about how he eluded capture by U.S. Special Forces in Tora Bora, they had to stop in their tracks when news broke that bin Laden had been killed by the Navy’s SEAL Team Six on May 2, 2011.
Bigelow and Boal prepared a new script for Zero Dark Thirty and again obtained independent financing, $45 million from Annapurna with distribution from Sony. Pascal is gung-ho on the film’s “observational journalism,” she tells me at the film’s premiere. At the same the time that various authors were researching nonfiction books on the subject, Boal used his sources in the intelligence community to re-create for film the CIA’s decade-long search for bin Laden.
So in this rare case, a Hollywood screenwriter wasn’t waiting to use the book as a basis for the movie—as with All the President’s Men, to take one example. No, Boal was skipping that step. He was dramatizing his shoe-leather journalism into a two-and-a-half-hour fiction feature, which offers more leeway when it comes to pesky fact-checkers and legal vetting. But he was also claiming a high degree of verisimilitude.
The opening title card of Zero Dark Thirty reads: “based on first-hand accounts.” One thing that Boal discovered about the decade-long post-9/11 pursuit to track down Osama bin Laden was that several women were key players. This makes the movie groundbreaking in more ways than one. The filmmakers were in touch with the real CIA agent who is the basis for Jessica Chastain’s Maya, who is still working undercover—and making waves inside the agency. After the CIA complained that the movie gave too much credit to the one agent, the Washington Post verified that she in fact does exist, and very much the way she was described in the film.
“We started getting the idea to capture history in the context of the drama of the capture at this moment of time in American life,” says Boal in the Q&A session after one of the first industry screenings in Los Angeles during Thanksgiving weekend. The packed audience of Screen Actors Guild members at the Pacific Design Center theater in West Hollywood is clearly stunned by the two hour and thirty-nine minute film. The industry is eager to finally get a gander at this long-withheld movie, which has skipped the film festivals in order to stay out of the election fray. The marketers don’t have much time to get the film seen and promoted before the opening December 19, and Oscar nomination ballots are due January 3. At the Q&A, an exhausted Bigelow admits that she had signed off on the final mix just four days before this screening: “We wanted to make something that stands up to the test of time.”
Bigelow adds that having the film feel real and contemporary was important; the actors had to perform “in a narrow bandwidth not using conventional Hollywood tropes, working within the rigorous confines of history.” Though never explained in the movie, the title is military jargon for thirty minutes past midnight, the exact time—12:30 a.m.—when the Navy SEALs first stepped into the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The film starts by dropping young CIA agent Maya (Chastain) into the thick of the action in Pakistan as her agent colleagues (Jason Clarke of Lawless and Jennifer Ehle of Contagion) and the local CIA chief (Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights and Argo) are deep into the investigation of bin Laden’s terrorist network. They are interrogating and torturing suspects. Bigelow does not spare us here: from pain and choke collars to waterboarding, the first twenty-five or so minutes of the film show CIA agents, desperate for leads in the case, brutalizing a detainee.
Maya arrives with a reputation: “She’s a killer.” She becomes obsessed with one courier and his link to bin Laden. When other people get distracted, she does not. When politics intervene, she won’t let anyone forget her single-minded purpose: to kill bin Laden. “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op,” Maya declares after one particularly destructive terrorist attack eliminates several of her close colleagues. “And then I’m gonna kill bin Laden.” It’s a chilling moment.
Chastain is tough, steadfast, and foul-mouthed as Maya, and does little to make her charming or accessible. There’s no backstory and, thankfully, no love interest. Like many male heroes in movies, she is her work. That’s it. What you see is what you get. In one crowd-pleasing scene she is the only woman in a room full of suits taking credit for her long hours of labor, the crucial discovery of bin Laden’s compound. CIA chief Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) asks, “Who’s the girl?” She responds, “I’m the motherfucker that found this place, sir.”
While a top CIA officer (Mark Strong) lets a room full of CIA agents have it after yet another terrorist event—the movie reminds us of the real-life cost and sacrifice brought by the war on terror—it’s nothing compared to the fury unleashed by Maya in pursuit of her cause. “I’ve learned from my predecessor that life is better when I don’t disagree with you,” says one of her bosses. These men are terrified of her. And they put up with her because she’s that good. “She’s smart,” one CIA exec says to Panetta. “We’re all smart,” Panetta snaps back.
The movie is as relentless as its heroine, laying out the hard facts and details without flinching from its purpose, which is to make real the daily headlines. Bigelow deploys 120 speaking parts—her cast includes a Venezuelan (Édgar Ramírez), Australians (Clarke, Joel Edgerton as the leader of SEAL Team 6), and Brits (Strong, Ehle, Stephen Dillane)—and three to four roving cameras to catch the unfolding action in locations from India, Egypt, and Jordan to London and Washington, D.C. “You shoot it, you do it,” says Clarke. “You bust your ass. The long takes give vitality.”
Even during production, in a November 12, 2012, brief filed in federal court, the conservative group Judicial Watch sought details about the identities of four CIA operatives and a Navy SEAL who met with the filmmakers, complaining that “selectively providing nonpublic information to some filmmakers while refusing to release it generally . . . crosses a line of appearance.”
Bigelow and Boal admit that the publicity around their supposed access to inside CIA information made it difficult to get military cooperation and cost the production untold thousands of dollars. The last section of the movie makes a
satisfying finale, with real tension building before an unseen President Obama finally gives the green light to order the Navy SEALs to fulfill Maya’s mission. The irony, concludes Boal at the panel, is that “the leader of al-Qaeda was defeated by the specter he feared most: a liberated Western woman.”
In January 2012, Zero Dark Thirty editor William Goldenberg met in a Studio City editing room with Bigelow and Boal, who were just back from Jordan, where most of the film was shot. He was coming into the process late, joining top-flight editor Dylan Tichenor, who was well under way with three hours of footage edited on an abbreviated schedule. To ensure the film was finished on time, the two editors handled different sections of the movie. Goldenberg took on the last sequences filmed: the tricky car/cell-phone courier tracking scenes and the SEALs’ raid on bin Laden’s compound.
Goldenberg had to tackle an overwhelming amount of archive material—the raid alone had forty hours of untouched, uncalibrated dailies, he tells me in phone interview, “enough to make a movie on its own. On my hard drive was a bunch of unorganized stuff. I put it up on my laptop and I couldn’t see any image. They didn’t tell me anything about the night vision. I see they’re SEALs in there. Some shots are brighter than others.”
The enormity of the responsibility for cutting that sequence and the logistical difficulty of the hours of footage was overwhelming, even for the experienced editor.
So Goldenberg did what he learned to do a long time ago, he says. “You have to go into a room, keep your head down, work on the shots in front of you, and not think about how this is the definitive hunt for bin Laden, costing many millions of dollars, and the responsibilities of money and time schedule. If you do, you’ll freeze up and not be able to do anything.”
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