Women Directors: Out of the Hollywood Loop?

(An alternative, Variety-style headline for this post, suggested by a reader: Flix by Chix Nixed cuz no Dix?!?)

The LA Times has an interesting article on the lack of female directors. For example, “‘Chasing Papi,’ a low-budget movie directed by Linda Mendoza now in theaters, is the first female-directed film released by 20th Century Fox in four years.”

The article suggests several possible causes for the lack of female directors, which makes it more interesting than most such articles.

• Vestiges of past inequalities. Given the huge amount of money at stake, producers and studios only want to work with established directors. “…Executives are loath to stray from lists of bankable filmmakers, where the only safe bets are directors who’ve had box-office hits or directed a reelful of hip Nike commercials or Jay-Z videos.”
• The extreme male dominance of the commercial-and-video-directing field. Commercials and video directing is the major route for breaking into studio film directing. “Since most of the biggest box-office material revolves around special-effects thrillers, executives seek out video boy wonders whose visual style is suited to action-oriented material.”
• This is especially true because of the dominance of action films. This is where the money is. And, it is suggested, women just don’t want to direct films that are marketed for teenage boys.
  

  “I’ve tried over and over to hire great young female directors like Sofia Coppola and Kimberly Peirce,” says Columbia Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal. “But I’m making ‘Men in Black II’ and Adam Sandler movies, so I don’t have the material they want to do.”

• Another culprit is the choices women make in higher education. Women in film school are more likely to train to be screenwriters and animators, but less likely to train to be directors. (Even so, 30% of the applicants to the relevant department at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema are women, whereas nowhere near 30% of directors are women). But is this a cause or an effect? Women may be avoiding the directing major because they see so few women directors who are finding work:
  

  “A lot of young women look at movie credits and think, ‘I’m going to spend $100,000 on school and then where am I going to go?’ From our vantage point, there’s a red line around the studios and it’s hard for women to get past that.”

• Women turn down offers to do dumb films. Where female directors do get their start is directing independent films… and a woman who gets her start directing a sophisticated independent film may not be eager to direct mainstream studio fare – especially of the sort offered women.
  

  First-time director Catherine Hardwicke got rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for “Thirteen,” a disturbing portrait of teenage girls. Her first studio offer? A film starring the Olsen twins.

• Structural barriers to being a mom and being a director. Directing is a 20-hour-a-day job. Male directors usually have wives at home who take care of the children; but very few women are willing to miss out on their children, or are married to a willing househusband. The peak child-rearing years are also the essential career-building years, and taking time off to raise children can be a career-killer.
• And let’s not forget the importance of plain old sexist discrimination.
  

  Most executives acknowledge that men get to fail more often than their female counterparts. And even when women make it onto the studio’s coveted A-list of potential directors, they still have to pass muster with the male stars who dominate the movie business, who often feel more comfortable working with a male authority figure.

So what do we make of all this? To me, it indicates how complex the job (and wage) gaps between women and men are. Simple, direct discrimination is part of the problem, but that’s not the whole thing. To a great extent, what we have here is a job category that came into being in a “Father Knows Best” world, and is still designed around the sexist assumptions of that world. Is that discrimination? No, but it is a kind of sexism.

For example, the reason that studios look down on a director who hasn’t had a hit in years is the assumption that they’ve spent those years directing flops (or, worse, films that never made it to theatrical release at all). But that assumption simply doesn’t apply to a woman (or, for that matter, a man) who had a successful movie, and then took several years off to raise children. But even though that assumption doesn’t make as much sense in today’s world as it did in Father Knows Best World, it can still ruin careers.

There’s a lot more to discuss in this article, but I have limited blogging time today… I may return to this in the future..