The Paucity of Female Directors in Hollywood
May 20th, 2008 by Andre Soares
Patrick Goldstein’s "Wanted: More female directors" in the Los Angeles Times:
"When people are underrepresented in Hollywood, conspiracy theories abound. [...]
"It’s especially hard to cry discrimination about female directors when women flourish in so many other areas of the business — Hollywood is loaded with powerful female producers, studio executives, managers and publicists. By and large, the track record of hiring women directors is no different at any studio, whether the studio is run by a man or a woman.
…
"The paucity of female directors seems rooted in a variety of hard-to-define issues, including lifestyle choices, aesthetic interests and personality differences. But one key contrast stands out. While there is a sizable number of women working in indie films (Sofia Coppola, Mira Nair, Nicole Holofcener, to name just a few), when you ask studio chiefs to name women who would be on their list to direct a mainstream summer movie, they offer up Nancy Meyers, Nora Ephron and — well, then they start to run out of gas."
***
Considering that nearly all big-studio movies made today are geared toward braindead teen males, it should come as no surprise that women, firing neurons or no, wouldn’t be thought of as having the required touch to pull in that crowd.
That said, from the late 1910s to the late 1940s, a time when Hollywood movies were in large part geared toward adult women, there were just as few female film directors as today. In fact, in the 1930s and 1940s major female directors in Hollywood (or elsewhere, for that matter) were all but nonexistent.
Granted, female screenwriters thrived during those years (and not always writing "women’s movies"), but the only female directors to make a real — albeit limited — splash were Lois Weber and (the mannish) Dorothy Arzner (photo).
Sundance Institute’s 2008 Independent Producers Conference
British Cinema in the 1970s in THE GUARDIAN
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL: Great To Be Nominated
AMERICAN GANGSTER at THE STRADDLER
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD Academy Screening
SHEPHERD OF THE NIGHT FLOCK Screening
2001 in 2008: A Cinematic Odyssey
The Art, Science and Psychology of Production Design
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