On Many Fronts, Women Are Fighting for Better Opportunity in Hollywood
The American movie mainstream needs a revolution — and if some women have their way, it just might get one. It’s time. Not because Ava DuVernay wasn’t tapped as a best director in the recent Academy Award nominations, even though her acclaimed movie “Selma” received a best picture nod. There has been a lot of speculation about the snub, but the reasons are less crucial than the message that the largely white, male directors in the Academy sent: This woman doesn’t deserve credit for her own movie. Women in film are routinely denied jobs, credits, prizes and equal pay, so the rebuke was familiar. That’s because while individual men struggle in the industry, women struggle as a group.
The
outrage over the Oscar nominations has been welcome even if the problem
isn’t the Academy Awards but a blinkered, fossilized industry that
offers so few opportunities to women and minorities. Ms. DuVernay is one
of the few female directors to make the leap into the major studio
world. While it’s disappointing that she wasn’t nominated, she made a
great movie and is going to keep directing without the permission of the
mainstream old guard. The good news is that she won’t be alone.
Increasing numbers of people — if mostly women — are pushing back hard
at the industry’s biases. And they’re pushing back publicly, a gutsy
stance in an industry that runs on secrets, lies and fear.
Some
of these activists, like Geena Davis, are focusing on female
representation in the media; others, like Maria Giese, a member of the
Directors Guild of America, are going after their own organization. Gamechanger Films
is practicing checkbook activism by funding female directors. The
Sundance Institute and the advocacy group Women in Film have
commissioned an important study for which researchers like Stacy L.
Smith are crunching the numbers. Consider some recent findings: Only 4.4
percent of the top 100 box-office domestic releases between 2002 and
2012 were directed by women. In 2012, only 28.4 percent of all on-screen
speaking characters in the top 100 were women. If you thought women in
movies don’t have much of a voice, you’re right.
American
commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don’t think
there has ever been another time when women have been as
underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn’t
genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more
opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem
is the six major studios that dominate
the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination.
Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal,
and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women.
The
barriers that female directors confront are numerous, substantial,
structural and ideological, which is why activists are attacking biases
on a number of fronts. Ms. Giese, for one, has turned her personal
frustration over a stalled directing career into a veritable crusade.
Her primary target has been her own organization, the Directors Guild, the labor group
that represents more than 15,000 directors and directorial support
staff working in movies, television, commercials, the news, sports and
new media. In the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner became the Guild’s first female member. Women now make up 22.5 percent of its membership — but only 13.7 percent are directors.
Among
Ms. Giese’s criticisms is how the Guild classifies women and male
minorities under the general rubric of diversity, including in its
latest contract, which stipulates
that employers “shall work diligently and make good faith efforts to
increase the number of working racial and ethnic minority and women
directors.” She writes on the blog Women Directors in Hollywood
that companies that are Guild signatories can “fulfill their diversity
obligations by hiring male ethnic minority members, and hiring no women
at all.” In a recent study,
the Guild established that minority men directed 17 percent of the
prime time episodic television produced from 2013-14, while white women
directed 12 percent and minority women directed 2 percent. The numbers
for both women and minority men are undeniably awful, and the
industrious Tyler Perry might be pushing the numbers up for minority
men.
I
raised the issue of combining women and minority men with Paris
Barclay, the president of the Directors Guild, noting that 23 percent of
a recent season of the FX series “Sons of Anarchy” had been directed by
a minority man — namely Mr. Barclay — while 8 percent (one episode) had
a female director.
“Well,
it’s interesting,” he said, speaking by phone. “I mean, on ‘Sons’ the
No. 1 director was me, that’s true. I’m a black, gay man, so I’m
virtually a woman,” he said with a laugh. “We’re in a fight for hiring
equity, and the work that it takes to break down these studio and
network directing stereotypes requires advocating for all of our
members,” Mr. Barclay continued. “We really believe in this particular
fight that solidarity is the way to go.”
Solidarity
is a seductive word, but it can also obscure the differences between
sexism and racism. With rare exceptions, women of all colors were shut
out of directing during the old Hollywood studio era, for instance. But
some white women did work in executive suites and on sets, while many
more worked as actresses, even as black and Asian women were relegated
to invisibility or maid uniforms. Female filmgoers helped popularize
movies and build a star system that, in turn, produced indelible images
of women — along with stereotyped roles, the casting couch and the
occasional suicide. There are still female stars, and most, alas, are
still white, but actresses now often compensate for a lack of roles by
playing the star on the red carpet and in the entertainment media.
Behind
the parade of dazzling smiles and designer gowns is an industry that is
failing women. The most visible proof is the limited roles for women,
especially in top box-office releases. In 2004, Ms. Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media,
an organization she runs with Madeline Di Nonno. They have raised
awareness through educational campaigns, symposiums and deep-dive
research. Among their findings is a statistic that many women know
intuitively: Female directors and writers create more female characters
than men do. That isn’t the case with producers, which may be why there
seem to be more high-profile female producers than directors.
An
important partner in Ms. Davis’s activism has been Dr. Smith, a
researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, at
the University of Southern California. Squirreled away in a media lab on
the campus, Dr. Smith’s team collects data that put the American movie
industry’s sexism into stark, empirical relief. The lab is modest,
dominated by a narrow hallway crammed with computers and a room in
which, the day I visited last fall, a handful of students were coding
titles like “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” a painstaking process — each
movie is checked by at least three people — that allows them to identify
the gender breakdown in a movie, among other factors.
A
few years ago, Cathy Schulman, the president of Women in Film, and Keri
Putnam, the executive director of the Sundance Institute, joined forces
with Dr. Smith for a three-part study on female directors. “Exploring
the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers,”
conducted by Dr. Smith, Katherine Pieper and Marc Choueiti at
Annenberg’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative,
looks at gender differences at Sundance’s film festival and its
filmmaking labs from 2002 to 2013. Sundance has been, for good reason,
widely viewed as more welcoming to women: During the study’s period of
research, women directed about a quarter of the movies in the
high-profile dramatic competition, far more than they did in the top 100
box-office releases.
There
is a multitude of reasons female directors struggle, from the legacy of
the historically male-dominated Hollywood to, as Kim Gordon once
suggested, a fear of a female planet. Women fare fine in some areas,
including in film schools. In 1998, Martha M. Lauzen, who tallies women
working behind the scenes in her annual report, “The Celluloid Ceiling,”
found that women composed from one-third to over one-half of the
students at the schools she surveyed. More recently, I checked in with
six film schools, including Columbia University and the University of
California, Los Angeles, and found that women were consistently well
represented. The problems happen later.
Ms.
Schulman said that there’s “an absolute decrescendo of opportunity for
women as the economics crescendo.” The third part of the Women in
Film/Sundance study, which will be previewed at Sundance on Monday,
takes a closer look at early careers and why it’s hard for female
filmmakers to make second and third movies that are either independently
or institutionally funded. “Women are treated more equally in the
independent sector,” said Kimberly Peirce, who went through Sundance’s
directors and screenwriters labs with “Boys Don’t Cry,”
her 1999 feature debut, and whose second feature, “Stop-Loss,” was
released nine years later. “You don’t have histories of employment, you
don’t have tendencies. You’ve just got a story — let’s tell it. You’re
less encumbered by presuppositions.”
The
equity fund Gamechanger Films is bypassing those assumptions by tapping
investors to bankroll female directors. This for-profit was founded in
2013 by four independent producers — Julie Parker Benello, Dan Cogan,
Geralyn Dreyfous and Wendy Ettinger — who were moved to action around
the same time as the Women in Film and Sundance research was gearing up.
“Our
contribution,” Mr. Cogan said, “was to say that the way you address
this problem is money. It’s about access to capital for women directors.
That’s it. It’s not about mentorship. It’s about putting the money on
the table and giving it to women.” To that end, Gamechanger focuses on
commercial projects across a variety of genres. One of its recent titles
is a forthcoming thriller, “The Invitation,”
from Karyn Kusama, who broke out with the indie favorite “Girlfight,”
stumbled in the commercial mainstream (“Aeon Flux”) and has now
re-entered the indie fold.
Money
will only go so far. Minds need to change and, more radically,
filmmaking values and habits. Even as women have directed more movies,
the profession remains heavily coded as masculine, from its white-collar
male auteurs to its blue-collar laborers. It has a production culture
developed over time by men, and if more women are to join its ranks,
that culture will need to evolve, including dealing with the crushing
hours that are especially difficult if you’re the primary caretaker of
your kids. Female directors eagerly work those hours.
But
the question — especially given concerns over hours and safety — is why
anyone, fathers and mothers included, should have to. Clint Eastwood,
first among he-men auteurs, is famous for quick, efficient shoots.
Anyone who thinks women can’t hack it should know the name Jamie Babbit,
who was directing a movie right after delivering a baby. (Her next
feature, “Fresno,” was funded by Gamechanger.)She had tried to hide her
pregnancy from her financier, worrying that it might get in the way of
the movie. She hoped it looked like she just had a beer belly. The week
she was to deliver, the financier told her that their movie was suddenly
a go. “O.K., give me three days after I deliver,” Ms. Babbit said, “and
I’ll come.” She hired a nanny and directed the movie, pumping milk
through the shoot.
Ms.
Babbit had a chance and grabbed it, just as any man would, the
difference being that she did so with a baby in tow. This isn’t 1960,
even if the movie industry continues to treat women — film directors and
filmgoers alike — as if it were. In 1960, most women worked in the home
and most Americans were white. Now almost 60 percent of women
participate in the labor force, and 40 percent
are the sole or primary wage-earners. Whites are 64 percent of the
population. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2060, around the
time that “Marvel’s The Avengers: 48 Years Young!” opens on your
wearable device, whites will be 43 percent.
By
then, Ms. DuVernay will have a few dusty Oscars, and girls being born
around now will be running the world and, if any are left, a few movie
studios.
