Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

With her win for best director at this year’s Academy Awards, Kathryn Bigelow joins a small, honored society of filmmakers. But then, she’s already part of a small select group:

Female directors.

Yes, women nominated for best-director Oscars are a rarity — only four in the Academy’s 82-year-history. (The previous nominees — who all lost — were Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation,” Jane Campion for “The Piano” and Lina Wertmuller for “Seven Beauties.”)
But female directors are a rare breed themselves.

The Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film at San Diego State has been keeping statistics for years. When its executive director Martha Lauzen looked at 2009’s top 250 releases, she found that only 7 percent had been directed by women.

The numbers are a little shocking — to everyone except female directors.

“When I started, I think about 98 percent of directors were men,” Nora Ephron remembered, while promoting “Julie & Julia.”

“I feel outnumbered,” admits Nicole Holofcener, the indie filmmaker — “Friends With Money,” “Lovely and Amazing” — whose “Please Give” opens next month. “I go to some events and see the crowd and just run — it feels like a boys club.”

Not that there aren’t female filmmakers out there, particularly in documnetaries and indies. And according to the Directors Guild of America, about 13 percent of their membership is female (23 percent, if you enlarge the job description to include those working as assistant directors and unit production managers).

Why then aren’t they getting 13 percent of the big jobs?

Some moguls say it’s because women don’t want them. Sony Pictures Co-Chairman Amy Pascal insists that, offered the sort of fanboy-friendly films many studios are making, most female filmmakers would just say no. So why ask?

“Look at my summer slate,” Pascal told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I don’t think there’s a woman who would’ve wanted to have directed ‘Hancock’ or ‘Pineapple Express.’”

Maybe she should talk to more women.

“I’d love to do a thriller or a rough silly comedy,” says Holofcener. “They just never ask.” And Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight,” “Jennifer’s Body”), Catherine Hardwicke (“Lords of Dogtown,” “Twilight”) and Bigelow (“Near Dark,” “Point Break”) have all made genre flicks.

“There are plenty of female filmmakers who would love to get their hands on a special-effects movie,” says Jane Fleming, president of Women in Film Los Angeles. “I dare anyone to look at ‘Hurt Locker’ or ‘Lords of Dogtown’ and say either was directed by a quote-unquote woman.”

Yet women rarely get the opportunity to do “men’s movies,” even when they publicly proclaim their interest. Even though male directors regularly get the chance to cross over and direct “women’s movies” — sweeping love stories, glossy romantic comedies — all the time.

“There seems to be a double standard,” says Stacy L. Smith, a communication professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

It affects who we see on screen, too. Smith studied the credits of 100 films from 2007 — and found that actresses had slightly less than 30 percent of the speaking roles. (That number increased, though, when women were involved as producers, directors or screenwriters.)

“Most men don’t want to make movies about women,” noted Ephron, whose “Julie & Julia” was championed by Pascal, one of the few female moguls. “They just don’t.”

And that narrows the widescreen. “Children are growing up with the implicit message that ‘male’ stories are more important than ‘female’ stories,” Smith observes.

“We don’t know what we’re not getting,” says Lauzen.

Clearly more — and more diverse — stories need to be told.

But the stakes are high, and unforgiving. Ephron, Kusama and Holofcener have spent years trying to get projects going. Bigelow is on top now, but it was an eight-year dry spell after her “K-19: The Widowmaker,” sank at the box office.

“Male directors get second or third chances,” says Holofcener. “And that’s good; sometimes it’s not your fault your movie stunk! But the same should apply to female directors. And it seems like every time we have to prove ourselves all over again.”

Not only are the attitudes unfair — particularly for a community which regularly congratulates itself for its progressiveness — they’re bad business sense.

Just recently Ephron had a sizable hit with “Julie & Julia,” Nancy Meyers had another with “It’s Complicated,” and Phyllida Lloyd’s “Mamma Mia!” grossed over half-a-billion dollars worldwide.
So why aren’t more movies by women, and about women, being made? Much of the reason comes, obviously, from simple sexism — and more complex biases.

“Investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a movie is a complicated decision,” Fleming says. “So people want to work with the same people they’ve worked with before.”

And some of the disparity comes, undoubtedly, from women themselves, and their own choices — the kind of stories they want to tell, the movies they want to work on, the size of the careers they want to have.

But all of it combines to make women less visible — even as one of them stands at a podium, celebrated and applauded, holding aloft the golden statue of a man.

from Movies with Stephen Whitty