Oddly, someone like Callie might have found a warmer reception in the earliest days of cinema, when it was the bastard child of the arts in a new century. Filmmaking welcomed innovators, inventors, outsiders, immigrants—all the sorts of nervy geeks who latch onto a new technology in its semiamateur phase. This unexplored territory was wide open for women, too, like Lois Weber, a writer, director and performer from 1907 through the early twenties. More prolific than D. W. Griffith, Weber owned her own studio and scandalized audiences with stories that championed birth control and temperance and opposed abortion, poverty and religious hypocrisy. Dorothy Arzner, the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild, broke in as a writer and editor on such smoldering projects as 1922’s Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino but threatened to leave Paramount in the late twenties unless she could direct, which she did, outfitted androgynously in pants and a coat.
Some of the foremost pioneer screenwriters were women as well. Anita Loos applied her sharklike wit to well over a hundred scripts by 1915, more than a decade before she published the gal-pal novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Frances Marion chalked up more than three hundred film credits, writing roles for no less than Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich and Myrna Loy. These women made boatloads of money, which was when the trouble started. Once filmmaking ceased to be a lark and turned into a business, studios modeled themselves after businesses everywhere else—hierarchical and run by men.
It’s hard to believe that from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s, scholars identify only two women directors: Arzner, who quit in 1943, and Ida Lupino, who started six years later. Lupino was a former film noir trouper who had held her own on-screen with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. Unable to get the juicy roles she craved, she formed her own production company in 1948 and went on to direct seven steely melodramas like the rape-themed Outrage in 1950 and Hard, Fast and Beautiful in 1951, all while pretending to know less than she did around the crew. Lupino professed, “You don’t tell a man, you suggest to them, ‘Let’s try something crazy here. That is, if it’s comfortable, love.’”
As for actresses, at the peak of the studio era the moguls recognized that stories about women filled seats, so stars like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell shone clear and bright. “These women were the center of the universe in their films, and they did stuff,” says film historian Jeanine Basinger. “They ran corporations, they flew airplanes, they edited newspapers, they were doctors, lawyers, judges. When you think about the great women stars of the thirties, forties and into the fifties, those women dominated the films they were in, and in order to do that, they had to do something.”
A few women writers also still made the cut, like Leigh Brackett, first hired by Howard Hawks when he assumed from her name that she was a man, but kept on to contribute to features like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo. Yet somehow the idea took hold that directing was the province of men.
—
THE COLLAPSE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM should have opened more doors for outsiders, but female luminaries got left on the other side. “Women just disappeared out of the business,” says Basinger. By then, the all-male central command was so ingrained, it might as well have been inscribed on tablets handed down unto Moses, or at least Charlton Heston.
A complete shake-up of the industry in the sixties didn’t help. No one seemed to be fully in charge anymore. The freedom could be intoxicating, an invitation to play for writers, directors and actors who, with a wave of a wand, morphed from hired help to free agents. But there were virtually no women writers or directors by then anyway, so none were in place to seize the new opportunities. And once studios stopped grooming their careers, even actresses lost what little stature they’d enjoyed. The remaining studio bosses, impressed by the success of subversive statements like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in 1967 and Easy Rider in 1969, threw up their hands and ceded unprecedented power to their insurgent directors.
This new Hollywood glorified auteurs, writer-directors who abandoned stodgy concepts like old-school glamour and straightforward narrative in favor of personal expression, which, because all the auteurs were men, necessarily skewed far to the masculine, heterosexual point of view—dramas about moody outlaws or comedies about hapless, insecure nebishes befuddled by the sexual revolution. There was little regard for stories that didn’t arise from the subterranean urges and priorities of the male psyche. Sexual-fantasy girls fleshed out the movies while the female aviators, journalists and lawyers of the old studio pictures got the hook.
“When women do get parts at all, they are usually cast as prostitutes, empty-headed blondes, sex kittens or neurotic housewives,” the New York Times reported during a conference about the issue in 1974. Male speaking roles outnumbered female ones by twelve to one, and the only bankable female star was Barbra Streisand, who for four years in the early seventies was the sole actress on the top-ten list of box-office stars in polls of theater owners.
By the mid-seventies, the new generation of film school auteurs—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma—set off so many pyrotechnics that roles for women devolved into an afterthought at best. Critical and commercial smashes like The Godfather, The French Connection and M*A*S*H shifted the balance of Hollywood power further into the camp of the young male countercultural renegades.
The social milieu that trailed in their wake didn’t do women any favors. As filmmaking as an art form caught fire, with hedonism as the fuel and cocaine the accelerant, no behavior was off-limits, just as no artistic choice was out of bounds. “A lot of talented people came along and then got plied with gobs of money and drugs,” says Martha Coolidge, who was spinning her wheels trying to gain traction as a director. “They lived in a bubble of indulgence that will probably never be seen again.”
None of this engendered much respect for the women in town, many of whom, whether they aspired to act, direct or write, were treated more as sexual playthings than professional colleagues. “I was appalled at the men of my generation, my age, who went around with the hookers and dopey girls and had group sex and did a lot of coke,” says Paula Weinstein, who arrived in Hollywood in 1973 as a script reader for Jane Fonda and by 1981 had made it as head of production at United Artists. “There was this essentially secret club of guys who all hung out and didn’t take women seriously at all.”
Few women gained admission to the club. Between 1966 and 1979, the number of women directing a studio-backed film was a whopping one, Elaine May, the former comedy partner of Mike Nichols, director of The Graduate. May was a true auteur who wrote, directed and starred in the 1971 black comedy A New Leaf, a commercial and critical hit. She followed up the next year by directing the similarly successful The Heartbreak Kid, written by Neil Simon. Despite this double triumph, May ran over budget, filmed interminable retakes and dithered over the smallest decisions. When her third feature, Mikey and Nicky, tanked in 1976, she wasn’t given another chance until the disastrous Ishtar ended her directing career eleven years later. The argument could be made that male wunderkinds indulged in similar feats of excess and turned out similar flops (see Sorcerer by William Friedkin), but May’s former assistant Todd McCarthy acknowledged, “I do really believe that she set back the cause of women directors in Hollywood by ten years.”
—
DURING THE SEVENTIES AND EARLY EIGHTIES, only two women in town had real clout, the kind that could get a movie made with a complex female at the center of the story. They were Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda, leading actresses who leveraged their box-office power to develop their own projects.
Following a Best Actress Oscar for Funny Girl, Streisand was reduced to playing, yes, a prostitute in the middling comedy The Owl and the Pussycat. The experience spurred her to form her own production company as a means to seek out more up-to-date material. Her first effort, Up the Sandbox, a 1972 comedy about the liberating fantasies of a housewife, didn’t catch fire, but her next, the 1976 rock ’n’ roll remake of A Star Is Born, racked up $140 million, her biggest box-office take for several decades.
Still, she wanted more, namely to direct. Even though many actors had been given the nod—Paul Newman, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood, to name a few—years passed as studios balked at backing Streisand, in spite of her box-office punch. When she secured a deal to direct Yentl, an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a girl who poses as a boy to study the Talmud, Streisand had to swallow a deal that took away the routine powers and perks granted to her peers. “I had to eat shit, put it that way,” she said in a magazine interview at the time. The studio trimmed Streisand’s usual salary for acting, granted her only the guild minimum for directing and built in all sorts of hair-trigger penalties if she ran over time or budget. All that, and she had to give up casting approval, script approval and final cut.
“It was as if they had this very antiquated notion of an actress as this frivolous creature,” she recalls. “How could she be financially responsible? How could she handle a movie crew? How could she make all the myriad decisions that go into making a film? It just didn’t compute for them. It was a man’s world.”
Yentl earned a solid $40 million at the box office on its release in 1983, and five Oscar nominations, although none for Streisand. It satisfied her jones to direct, but her acting career faltered afterward. Following an unprecedented run as one of the top-ten bankable stars for ten out of twelve years, she disappeared from the list in 1981, never to return.
—
FOR A TIME, JANE FONDA wielded her own kind of authority, not by directing but by cannily producing projects that made gutsy statements and gave her central roles. At first, even a member of Hollywood royalty like Fonda had struggled to find her place. Despite an Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1970 and a win for Klute in 1972—as, yes, a prostitute—she kept fielding offers for witless sex comedies that featured the requisite empty-headed-blonde part.
She formed her own production company in 1973, vaguely aware that Mary Pickford and Streisand had done so, and assuming that others had, too. Fonda reasoned that because she was famous and a respectable box-office draw, she could get movies made by agreeing to star, and she was savvy enough to understand how to make projects commercial. “If you’re going to do a story about Vietnam vets, make it sexy and make it a love story. If you’re going to do a story on nuclear energy, make it a suspense thriller.” Her first project, 1978’s Coming Home, turned into a surprise hit in which Fonda, playing the wife of a gung-ho soldier, had an affair with a paraplegic veteran played by Jon Voight. Released ten months before The Deer Hunter, Coming Home was the first Hollywood production to take a serious look at the morality of the Vietnam War. The film scooped up eight Academy Award nominations and won three, including Fonda’s second for Best Actress. The following year, she scored another Oscar nomination and another hit with the The China Syndrome, playing the part of a reporter who uncovers the dangers of nuclear power plants.
Producing her own movies launched Fonda to a new level of stardom. Starting in 1978, she landed among the top-ten box-office stars for five years in a row, one of only eight women to make the list throughout that stretch. She also fought to slip women onto the crews of her movies, but she didn’t think about recruiting women to direct. “A movie about Vietnam, are you kidding?” she says. “These were hard enough movies to get made, let alone if I was insisting on a woman director who wasn’t proven.” Fonda didn’t regard herself as a trailblazer for others. In fact, she was surprised when Sally Field asked her for advice on how to set up a company. Why does she have to come to me? Fonda thought. “I didn’t consider myself an expert or particularly good at it.” Like most other women trying to crack the industry, Fonda didn’t realize how alone she was.
Nevertheless, as the eighties began to unfold, more women were angling to produce, direct, write—or at least try. But there wouldn’t have seemed to be much chance for a former waitress from Paducah, Kentucky, who worked in the vaguely scuzzy world of comedy clubs and music videos. Not unless she came up with one hell of an idea.