TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014421.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.6 KB | 208 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 75

COVER STORIES

Hollywood's New Directions


No longer entrusted simply with "delicate" movies, women
directors have finally shown that they can do anything a man can
do -- and often do it better

By RICHARD SCHICKEL -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York
and Mayo Mohs/Los Angeles


    Martha Coolidge is happy this week. Not manic. Certainly
not smug. For the moment, and for a change, she is content with
her Hollywood lot.

    Her mood is understandable. Coolidge is the director of
Rambling Rose, and she has a well-deserved hit on her hands. Her
eighth film, it is a marvelously sexy and eccentric comedy. The
critics like it, and despite an absence of superstar names,
audiences like it too. In these circumstances, anyone would be
entitled to feel just fine.

    Yet something more than personal success colors Coolidge's
satisfaction. Though Rambling Rose is a singular artistic
achievement, it should not be regarded as one that is singular
professionally. For Coolidge, as well as for many of her female
peers, this is the good news. Rose is merely one in a rush of
major movies directed by women that have been released in the
past couple of months, and it presages an equal number of
equally significant films by women that will soon arrive at
theaters.

    To the women behind the cameras, this burst of activity is
a powerful signal. They are finally beginning to achieve
something more than token status as directors, and more and more
of them are starting to sustain coherent careers in Hollywood.
Best of all, the range of their work belies the conventional
notion that holds that women can be entrusted only with
delicately nuanced little films dealing with intricate personal
relationships. Most of them would agree that any director needs,
as Coolidge says, "a strong male side and a strong female side."
Good directors, she says, demonstrate "a nurturing ability," in
order to draw good work from their actors, as well as the
masculine ability "to be a tough decision maker and move things
along. Now, finally, it seems, we will have enough movies coming
out so that everyone will see that not all women are the same,
that we offer different points of view -- different from men,
but also different from each other."

    So far, so good. No one is likely to confuse Kathryn
Bigelow's sleek thriller Point Break, which improbably but
effectively combined cops and surfers (and grossed $40 million
last summer), with Randa Haines' The Doctor (late summer's
surprise hit), about an arrogant surgeon who becomes a befuddled
cancer patient in his own hospital and as a result humanizes his
practice. Says Bigelow, who directed a cleverly variant vampire
movie (Near Dark) and one about a gun-loving policewoman (Blue
Steel): "I like to make films that are provocative, that can
rattle your cage." Haines, who also directed Children of a
Lesser God, says, "I'm consistently interested in projects in
which the core of the story is communication and the struggles
of human beings to connect."

    Nor would anyone confuse Mary Agnes Donoghue's Paradise,
a well-acted, sweetly stated and emotionally predictable tale
of an estranged couple brought together by a visiting child,
with Rambling Rose, which portrays a much more genially
dysfunctional family involved with a randy and amiably obliging
serving girl played by Laura Dern. Based on a script that Calder
Willingham derived from his own novel, Rose's true preoccupation
is one that the movies always cater to slyly but almost never
directly confront: basic, down-and-goofy human horniness.

    The immediate future promises this sort of eclecticism on
a virtually month-by-month basis. After Jodie Foster's Little
Man Tate comes Joan Micklin Silver's dramatic comedy Stepkids;
Barbra Streisand's complex, epically proportioned psychodrama
The Prince of Tides; and Lili Fini Zanuck's Rush, about a pair
of undercover narcs who fall into addiction. Due next year are
Nora Ephron's directorial debut, This Is My Life, about a
divorced stand-up comic and her daughters, and Penny Marshall's
A League of Their Own, about an all-female baseball league.
Maybe by that time Mary Lambert's Grand Isle, an adaptation of
Kate Chopin's feminist novel The Awakening will have found a
distributor.

    Most appealing about this catalog is that it defies
convenient generalization. All of them could as well have been
directed by a man. And in times past, of course, they all would
have been. Until about a decade ago, the number of women who
enjoyed sustained directorial careers in the U.S. could be
counted in single digits: Lois Weber (Where Are My Children?)
in the early 1900s, Dorothy Arzner (Christopher Strong) in the
'30s, Ida Lupino (The Hitchhiker) in the '50s. As recently as
1975 Joan Micklin Silver and her producer husband Ray had to
release her first feature, Hester Street, themselves. A studio
executive told her, "It's hard enough to get a picture made and
marketed. Women directors are just one more problem we don't
need."

    In 1981 the Directors Guild of America formed a Women's
Steering Committee, largely on the basis of an astonishing set
of statistics: of the 7,332 features made in Hollywood between
1939 and 1979, only 14 were directed by women. Partly because
of pressure from the guild, partly because ambitious and
talented women simply would not be denied, the numbers have
improved -- a little. In 1990, according to the DGA, women
directed 23 of the 406 feature films produced under guild
contracts -- roughly 5%, only a small rise from the 4.2% average
they had maintained over the previous seven years.

    In other words, women are still fighting history. They may
also be fighting the diminished expectations that those years
bred into them. Donoghue recalls that when she was hired to
write Beaches for Disney, she asked, "When do I direct?" The
executive said, "You're the first woman writer who's asked me
that question. Every guy who ever wrote a script, it's the first
thing out of his mouth." Says Donoghue: "What I keep discovering
is that most women's expectations are really low. You've got to
get out there and ask for it."

    Now the talent pool is at least a little deeper, a little
more readily discernible to the Hollywood powers. "For the past
10 years or so," says Coolidge, "a certain number of women have
been developing filmographies. There was no exciting additional
number of films made by women, but we weren't standing still.
What you are seeing is the accumulation of experience."

    And, according to Bigelow, the accumulation of contacts.
"What's been achieved for women," she says, "is access." As the
Hollywood cliche goes, it's a relationship business, and all
directors, male and female, need what Silver calls godfathers,
studio executives who are sympathetic to their work. "Younger
studio executives are more responsive to women. They have
girlfriends, sisters, wives who work, and they are simply better
attuned to the problems of working women, which includes the
problems of women directors."

    It does not hurt that women like Penny Marshall (Big) and
Amy Heckerling (Look Who's Talking) have made megahits. And it
certainly helps that women have long since proved that they can
handle both temperamental actors and macho crews. The worst
problem Donoghue had on Paradise was a well-meaning guy who
called her "honey." It wasn't sexism, she thinks, but
regionalism -- he was a Texan and suitably abashed when the
error of his habitual ways was pointed out.

    That squares with the experiences of Donoghue's
colleagues. "It would be Pollyanna of me to say that sexism
doesn't exist," Randa Haines comments. "But I've been very
lucky. I haven't faced any real discrimination." Nor has
Bigelow, who says, "I've never felt I've been discriminated
against. There's been great support from the men I work with."

    Most of the women who are working more or less regularly
as directors feel they have reached a sort of plateau. Until
recently, Coolidge says, "there were so few of us that every
success for one of us was a success for all women, every failure
a failure for all women. That was sad."

    Are there movie realms into which women directors still
feel they cannot tread? Some women think studio executives are
uncomfortable trusting them with large-scale action and
special-effects pictures, but most are indifferent to this form
of discrimination. These movies are the biggest grossers,
Donoghue admits, but she's not interested in doing them. Silver
is reluctant to rule them out for women, "any more than I'd want
to say that a man can't possibly do a childbirth scene." Lili
Zanuck, whose Rush is said to be about as tough as movies come,
thinks crime drama somehow suits her. "You want to tell a story
you can tell best," and she likes "the reality, the element of
factual truth" in Rush. Besides, she believes that the movie has
strong box-office possibilities. "If you've got a commercial
movie," she says, cutting to the chase, "no one cares who you
are or where you come from."

    Ultimately, that's the answer for all directors, male or
female, newcomer or veteran. Nowadays, however, when American
movies seem locked into formulas that have never been
particularly stirring aesthetically and are not working terribly
well at the box office, one has to believe that Martha Coolidge
is posing the right question when she asks, "What can a woman
offer?" To that, she supplies the simple, truthful answer: "A
fresh perspective."