A Change in Direction? : Women Directors Make Slight Inroads in Film, TV

More than half of the population is female. Women make up 51% of the nation’s journalists, 22% of lawyers and 11% of the U.S. Armed Forces. But of 207 feature films produced last year, only 11, or 5.3%, were directed by women, and women directors accounted for only two of the movies made for TV.

But things have been so bad for so long for women in Hollywood that even 11 out of 207 looks like progress to some people.

“For a long time, they didn’t allow women to direct at all,” said Penny Marshall, whose successes with “Big” and “Awakenings” have made her one of the industry’s few sought-after female directors. “Eleven (films made by women) is a lot more than the year before.”

In fact, according to statistics compiled by the Directors Guild of America, the 11 women who directed features last year marks an 11-fold increase over 1979 when Joan Tewkesbury went out alone with “Old Boyfriends.” Of the 7,332 features made during the three decades before that, women were in charge of just 14.

And women are working. Marshall is taking only a short breather after “Awakenings” before tackling “A League of Their Own,” about female baseball players. A Barbra Streisand film, “Prince of Tides,” is slated for release this fall. Amy Heckerling’s “Look Who’s Talking, Too” recently completed its run, as a sequel to her enormously popular “Look Who’s Talking.”

“More women are getting their first shot, and a very small number of us are doing repeat work,” said Martha Coolidge, who is directing the film “Rambling Rose” for Renny Harlin’s Midnight Sun production company. “But it still seems to be that only a small percentage of the people in the industry openly accept women as directors.”

When the Directors Guild first started gathering statistics on women directors 10 years ago, “if women weren’t getting work, they individually thought it must be them, that they weren’t good enough,” said Michelle Jackman, co-chairwoman of the women’s steering committee of the DGA. “But when we put the statistics together, it showed that nobody was getting the work. It showed that maybe there was some sexism.”

Producer Lawrence Kasanoff, who hired Kathryn Bigelow to direct “Blue Steel,” a thriller about a rookie policewoman, said that both men and women in the industry expressed surprise about his decision to work with a woman.

“People are fascinated by it,” said Kasanoff. “Some people asked, ‘Do you think she’ll be able to handle the crew?’ ” he said. “Because there are a lot of construction worker-type guys in a crew. Then people asked, ‘Isn’t this an action movie? Won’t it be soft?’ The final question was, ‘Come on, aren’t you really doing this as a publicity stunt?’ ”

Kasanoff said he was also asked, directly or by implication, whether he was interested in Bigelow romantically.

Harlin said his decision to hire Coolidge to direct “Rambling Rose” was greeted with snide remarks and skepticism from male colleagues.

“Men usually think they’d rather have a male director,” Harlin said. “What I heard a lot during the making of the movie and after was, ‘So what kind of a job is Martha doing?’ They approached me (with the attitude), ‘I’m sure you have your work cut out for you because you are working with a woman director.’ ”

David Hoberman, president of Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures, thinks the roots of the problem are more subtle. It’s less that the men running the studios are overtly prejudiced, he suggested, and more that hiring women hasn’t been made a priority.

“We need to be more cognizant of hiring women in a positive way, and keep it on our minds,” said Hoberman, whose hiring of Randa Haines as director for the upcoming film “The Doctor” marks the first time Disney has worked with a woman.

Indeed, most women directors interviewed said that they had not encountered many direct expressions of prejudice. But, they said, a little practice at reading between the lines reveals more subtle discrimination.

“People don’t walk up to you and say, ‘You’re a woman, I wouldn’t hire you,’ ” said Coolidge. “It’s not in your face. But it’s just around the corner.”

The women directors say it’s not what would-be employers say to them, but what isn’t said--the jobs women are never called for, the length of time between projects, the sudden firings that make women wonder if sexism isn’t at work.

“When someone else gets the job who’s not so great, then you wonder,” said Lesli Glatter, who is nominated for a Directors Guild award for directing the avant-garde ABC television drama “Twin Peaks.”

It typically takes longer for women to accumulate the track record needed to be trusted with a feature or a major television project. Those women who have shot one or two features are in or approaching their 40s, while men may take on the same jobs much younger.

Victoria Hochberg, a highly respected television director who has not yet directed a feature, estimates that her career is 10 to 15 years behind where it might have been if she were not female. “Of course, by now I would have directed a feature,” Hochberg said. “There are certain ways to learn a business. But if you’ve never been hired because you have the wrong genitals, you’re not getting tracked. You’re not moving up.”

One area where women directors have been more successful at breaking the barriers is television. About 11% of television directing jobs went to women, according to the Directors Guild. Very few of those, however, were for high-priced programs or movies. Most women worked on programs that were shot on tape instead of film, an indicator of a lower budget. And very few females directed programs that were longer than a half-hour or an hour.

“A producer once said that he was torn between helping women and protecting his show,” said Hochberg. “That is a classic mindset which means that if a woman is directing a show it is (automatically) endangered. And this guy thinks of himself as very liberal.”

And when women are successful, they tend not to get the accolades bestowed on men. No American woman has ever been nominated for an Academy Award for best director, even though two films by women--”Children of a Lesser God,” directed by Haines, and “Awakenings,” directed by Marshall--have been nominated for best picture.

There are, however, small signs that some of the prejudice is breaking down.

“The same people who questioned a woman’s ability to do the job didn’t say a word after watching Kathryn (Bigelow) on the set,” said producer Kasanoff.

“It’s a very natural place for women, directing a film,” said actress-turned-director Sondra Locke.

“It’s a lot of endless detail, it requires the ability to focus on a lot of things at once, and it takes a lot of nurturing,” traits typically assigned to women, Locke said. “And the stories deal with people and emotions, something women have an affinity for.”

What will it take to bring women up to par with men?

More role models, for one thing, giving women something to strive for and men an awareness that females can do the job.

“Part of the problem with women is that they’re always new,” said Haines, who did receive a DGA nomination for “Children of a Lesser God.” “It’s so rare for a woman to complete a body of work that she herself has chosen.”

The other part of the solution, according to those interviewed, must come from the industry itself, from the depths of the old networking and mentoring system that speeds the progress of some while ignoring others.

Disney’s Hoberman said he would instruct his staff to be more sensitive to the industry’s dearth of women directors. “If we get 12 calls from agents for men who want to make a movie, and none from women, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Why aren’t we hearing from women on this?’ ” Hoberman said. “There’s nothing at all to lose by it.”