By MANOHLA DARGISPublished: March 10, 2010

KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director and best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t just punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it has also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can and should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, especially for women who make movies and women who watch movies, two groups that have been routinely ignored and underserved by an industry in which most films star men and are made for and by men. It’s too early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so good.

No matter if they’re a source of loathing and laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now more than ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or uninteresting news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was almost as important as her double win.

Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all too often not working — was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise”rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.

Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics and audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover and one very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Report a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking and driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma and Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.

Thelma and Louise didn’t need to tote around “The Second Sex” to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Ms. Bigelow, who doesn’t like to talk about being a feminist touchstone — she doesn’t need to, she has been one for decades — much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies she makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma and Louise, Ms. Bigelow refuses to behave the way she’s supposed to.

A recent failed takedown of Ms. Bigelow in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?” and written by Martha P. Nochimson exposes some of the issues at stake. The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow and her “masterly” technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured “summary dismissal.” The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, “reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.”

Putting aside whether “Julie & Julia” is organic or crammed with artificial flavors, it’s too bad Ms. Nochimson didn’t choose a brilliant director who makes films about women, likeJane Campion, rather than lesser talents like Ms. Meyers and Ms. Ephron to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any more than it’s her fault that these days female directors and female stars in Hollywood are too often ghettoized in romantic comedy.

Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they should be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. One of the lessons of Ms. Bigelow’s success is that it was primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce “Strange Days.” But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next two features, “The Weight of Water” and “K-19: The Widowmaker.” It wasn’t until she went off to the desert to shoot “The Hurt Locker,” just as she had when she directed “Near Dark,”her 1987 cult vampire western, that she found a movie that hit on every level.

It was a long time coming, as Ms. Bigelow suggested when she appeared on “60 Minutes” on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which she was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (“the desire to watch and identify with what you’re watching”). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that “the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.”

It’s instructive that she didn’t say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Ms. Bigelow as a whiner, as in whiny woman. Unsurprisingly, she again had to share her few minutes with Mr. Cameron, whose name Ms. Stahl invoked within seconds of starting and not only because he had directed two of the largest hits in history, including “Avatar.” He was the ex-husband, a powerful director and a representation of male authority who could vet Ms. Bigelow. “How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex-husband,” Ms. Stahl asked. “You couldn’t have scripted it,” Ms. Bigelow laughed. As she has these last months, she played it carefully. She seemed well-behaved.

Her cool has disturbed some, who have scrutinized Ms. Bigelow up and down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height and willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are accessible to nosy interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of and behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Ms. Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is intelligent conversation and her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a quiet yet profound form of rebellion. She might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation — or even engage with it — she is asserting her right to be simply a director.

One of the strange truths of American cinema is that women thrived in the silent era —Mary Pickford was one of the first stars and helped start a studio, United Artists — but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women’s voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work and beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner starting in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn’t gotten better. According to Martha M. Lauzen, an academic who annually crunches numbers about women in American movies: “Women comprised 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors.”

It’s impossible to tell what Ms. Bigelow’s Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the American movie industry. Perhaps Amy Pascal, the Sony studio co-chairwoman who once suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Ms. Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or she can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Wendy and Lucy,” for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Maybe Sandra Bullock will take all the good will and power she has rightly accrued and, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDanielbiography that Mo’Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made and, you know, a total chick flick.

photograph from NYT.com

By KIM ELSESSER

Published: March 3, 2010

MANY hours into the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, the Oscar for best actor will go to Morgan Freeman, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth or Jeremy Renner. Suppose, however, that theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented separate honors for best white actor and best non-white actor, and that Mr. Freeman was prohibited from competing against the likes of Mr. Clooney and Mr. Bridges. Surely, the academy would be derided as intolerant and out of touch; public outcry would swiftly ensure that Oscar nominations never again fell along racial lines.

Why, then, is it considered acceptable to segregate nominations by sex, offering different Oscars for best actor and best actress?

Since the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, separate acting Oscars have been presented to men and women. Women at that time had only recently won the right to vote and were still several decades away from equal rights outside the voting booth, so perhaps it was reasonable to offer them their own acting awards. But in the 21st century women contend with men for titles ranging from the American president to the American Idol. Clearly, there is no reason to still segregate acting Oscars by sex.

Perhaps the academy would argue that the separate awards guarantee equity, since men and women have received the exactly the same number of best acting Oscars. And the academy is not alone in this regard: the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the British Academy of Film and the Independent Spirit Awards all split acting nominees by sex as well.

But separate is not equal. While it is certainly acceptable for sports competitions like the Olympics to have separate events for male and female athletes, the biological differences do not affect acting performances. The divided Oscar categories merely insult women, because they suggest that women would not be victorious if the categories were combined. In addition, this segregation helps perpetuate the stereotype that the differences between men and women are so great that the two sexes cannot be evaluated as equals in their professions.

Today, the number of female-run production companies, female directors and great roles for women continues to increase. Four of the five films represented in this year’s best actress category center on strong female characters.

As women gain more influence in Hollywood, even the term “actress” is disappearing. Just as stewardesses are now called flight attendants, many actresses now prefer to be called actors. The Screen Actors Guild has eliminated the term “actress” in the presentation of its awards, instead using “female actor.” Perhaps, as the term “actress” falls further out of favor, the award-granting organizations will be forced to acknowledge that male and female actors do indeed have the same occupation.

Collapsing two major categories into one would have the added value of reducing the length of the awards show, a move that many viewers would laud. But if the academy wanted to preserve the number of acting awards, it could easily follow the lead of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which has, since 1951, offered genre-based Golden Globe honors, for best performances in dramatic, and comedic and musical roles.

For next year’s Oscars, the academy should modify its ballots so that men and women are finally treated as full equals, able to compete together in every category, for every nomination. And if the academy insists on continuing to segregate awards, then it should at least remain consistent and create an Oscar for best directress.

Kim Elsesser is a research scholar at the Center for Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Producer Neda Armian of Rachel Getting Married, and many other films !  She joins the cast of 82 Women tomorrow !!

MOLLY HASKELL author and critic…

She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian UK, Esquire, The Nation, Town and Country, The New York Observer and The New York Review of Books. She has served as Artistic Director of the Sarasota French Film Festival, on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, as associate Professor of Film at Barnard and as Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University.

She is married to the film critic Andrew Sarris. Her books include From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1973; revised and reissued in 1989); a memoir, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (1990); and, in 1997, a collection of essays and interviews, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists. Her newest book, part of the Yale University Press’s American Icon series, is Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited.

http://mollyhaskell.com/

We at 82 Women are thrilled that Robin Hessman is a part of our project !

Bio from http://filmmakerscollab.org/filmmakers/robin-hessman/

Robin Hessman

Robin Hessman has been a documentary filmmaker and producer for the past 15 years. She graduated from Brown University with a joint degree in Russian and Film and received her graduate degree in film directing from the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, Russia. Throughout the 1990s she lived in Russia making documentaries and working for the Children’s Television Workshop as the on-site Producer of Ulitsa Sezam, the original Russian language Sesame Street.

In the US, Robin co-produced the Peabody-award winning documentary Tupperware! (directed by FC member Laurie Kahn-Leavitt.) She also co-produced a one-hour PBS biography of culinary master, Julia Child Julia! America’s Favorite Chef which aired on PBS on the series American Masters.

She began working on her current film, My Perestroika in the fall of 2004 as a Filmmaker in Residence at WGBH Boston.

The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 as part of the US Documentary Competition. It will be broadcast in 2011 on the PBS independent film series, POV, marking the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR.

Robin is also the director of Documentary Programming for the American Film Festival in Moscow, an Associate of Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Stacy Smith Associate Professor, USC Annenberg

Results from a USC/Annenberg study on 100 Top-Grossing films from 2007

Last week, my research team and I released a study on gender in 100 top-grossing films in 2007 (Key Findings). A few main results emerged, which I would like to highlight here. First, females do not represent “half the cinematic sky.” Any moviegoer knows this. But, the findings make the point crystal clear. Out of 4,379 speaking characters coded in our study, only 29.9% are female.

Not only are females lacking visibility in film but they also are rarely employed behind-the-scenes (b-t-s). A total of 1,273 individuals are listed on IMDbPro as directors, writers, and producers of the 100 top-grossing films theatrically released in 2007. Only 17% of these jobs were filled by women: 3 female directors (109 males), 35 female writers (278 males) and 174 female producers (674 males). This calculates to a ratio of five b-t-s males to every one b-t-s female. Are females equivalent in film? No. Are they oppressed? Perhaps.

Despite this, b-t-s females matter. They may be small in number, but they are large in influence. For each film in our study, we looked at whether a woman in one of these sacrosanct titles affected the number of females appearing on-screen. They do, especially female directors. When only males were at the helm, the percentage of females on-screen was 29.3%. For films with a female director, the number jumped to 44.6%! A higher percentage of females on-screen (30.8%) occurred in films produced by one or more women than those produced only by men (26.4%). Compared to the percentage of on-screen girls/women when all-male writing teams penned the script (28.1%), the percentage of girls/women on-screen (34.9%) was significantly higher when one or more females were involved in the writing process. This last finding is notable given that the recent Writers Guild Report shows that the median for female film writers’ self-reported income in 2007 was over $40,000 less than the median for male film writers.

Our data show meaningful differences. Let me illuminate how significant they may actually be from an employment perspective. The percentage of females in film increased by 15.3% in 2007 when a woman was involved directing. If women were at the helm of 33% of all 100 movies in this sample (rather than 3), the number of jobs for female actors could have potentially increased by 213.75 in the 100 top-grossing films in 2007. This would mean an additional 1,068.75 major, minor, and inconsequential speaking roles for female thespians in the top-grossing 100 films across 5 years and 2,137.50 across 10 years. Economically, this is no small effect for working female actors. And this only addresses employment consequences in the top 100 films. The numbers would rise dramatically if we looked at how these figures would play out across the total number of films released per year in the United States.

Besides increasing jobs for female actors, b-t-s women may also change how a story is told on-screen. Studies show that the ways characters talk, look, and relate to other characters are different when one or more females are directing, writing, or producing properties for TV/film. Gender also can affect the way war is covered in the media. Examining war stories airing the first 100 days across three different conflicts (Bosnia, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan), Cinny Kennard and Sheila Murphy found that female correspondents are more likely than male correspondents to tell news stories focusing on victims of war, abuses to human rights, and soldier profiles.

This last study underscores the idea that females may tell stories about violence or conflict differently than their male peers. Isn’t that the story of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker? Isn’t it possible that part of the film’s critical acclaim may be due to the fact that a female directed it, presenting a different angle on the atrocities of war? Could it be that the choices Bigelow made from behind the camera amplified the film’s resonance with males and females in the audience — thereby increasing desirability and word of mouth across different quadrants of movie goers?

Surely, a lot of work still needs to be done on behalf of females in film. It just doesn’t make sense that females are 50% of the population but less than a third of all characters shown on-screen, and less than a fifth of all producers, writers, and directors in top-grossing films from 2007. Box office revenue can’t be used as the sole scapegoat any longer to explain gender differences across all speaking characters on-screen and people employed behind the camera.

To illustrate, Anemone Cerridwen and Dean K. Simonton’s recent research on 914 films examined the relationship between production costs and the involvement of female directors, writers, producers, and actors. The researchers found “that as the percentage of females involved in a project increases the size of the budget decreases.” And, exploring the IMDbPro website for the 10 most profitable films from 2007, nine featured a female on the writing or producing team. Further, a full 78% of the top-grossing films in 2007 employed at least one female producer. Taken together, these findings suggest that b-t-s females not only cost studios less to employ (this is a problem for a different reason), but they are involved with properties and franchises that are generating the most visibility and revenue for the major media conglomerates.

Given that it is 2010, I am surprised that so little change has taken place for females in the film industry over 60 years. Perhaps the dawn of a new day will break on March 7 with Kathryn Bigelow winning a historic Academy Award. Independent of that day, the data presented in this blog suggest that advocacy and activism are still needed for a representational sea change to take place for working females on-screen and behind the camera in film.

Dear Friends,

We are young filmmakers and recent Brown graduates producing a short tribute documentary in tandem with the 82nd Academy Awards to celebrate the accomplishments of women in film and television.

In recognition of your valuable time, we are conducting 3-minute-interviews via Skype, AND circulating the questions in advance so 3-5 minutes really means 3-5 minutes. We are asking the following questions:

If you had unlimited funds to direct a feature film, what would you make? 
What is the professional achievement you are most proud of?
Which women have inspired you?

We intend to highlight the diversity and strength of women’s engagement in this industry and would love to have your participation. If you are available, please respond with your Skype address and a 5 minute period this Saturday or Sunday (Feb 27 & 28) during which we could reach you. 

We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely and with thanks,

Megan, Katrina, Nina, and Samantha

82Women@gmail.com

By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: June 18, 2009

THE take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies, the kind with big guns, scenes, themes and camera movements as well as an occasional fist in the face, a knee to the groin. Sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Her latest is “The Hurt Locker,” a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centers on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand day and night disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it opens Friday), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn’t come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had “excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.”

“The Hurt Locker” doesn’t traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like “Top Gun” and “Transformers,”but neither is it an antiwar screed. It’s diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow’s previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema.

She might live and sometimes shoot within driving distance of the major studios that have distributed if not financed her films. But in many respects she remains an industry outsider.

“I’ve never made a studio film,” Ms. Bigelow gently reminded me during a leisurely conversation here not long ago. Although most of her movies have been released by studios, they have been bankrolled by independent companies, which nonetheless don’t necessarily grant the autonomy any artist seeks. The experience of making “The Hurt Locker” — the “purity” of it, as she puts it — marks her return to liberating conditions under which she thrives. She hasn’t had this kind of freedom since her 1987 breakthrough,“Near Dark,” an erotically charged vampire movie made on the cheap, or her 1995 science-fiction thriller “Strange Days,” which came with some heavy protection courtesy of one of its producers: her former husband, James Cameron.

It’s hard to imagine Ms. Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She’s unfailingly gracious — and tends to speak in the second person, preferring “you” over “I” — but there’s a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn’t realize how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.

At first that space wasn’t on screen but on a canvas. An only child, she was born in 1951 and raised in a town, San Carlos, 25 miles south of San Francisco, where she first nurtured a lifelong love of art and horses. (When we meet again her arms are flecked with bruises after a perilous ride on her mare.) She was a student painter at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, where she studied with Vito Acconci and Susan Sontag. She joined a conceptual art group, appeared in the feminist movie “Born in Flames” and earned her master’s in the film division of theColumbia University School of the Arts, where she immersed herself in theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle.

“Film,” she says, “became the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting.”

As she moved between uptown and down, she also made her first film, “The Set-Up”(1978), a short in which two men (Gary Busey included) fight each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over. Although she now plays down the film, it seems like a template for much of her later work, with its emphasis on men, masculinity, violence and power. A few years ago she elaborated on its themes: “The piece ends with Sylvère talking about the fact that in the 1960s you think of the enemy as outside yourself, in other words, a police officer, the government, the system, but that’s not really the case at all, fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time.”

That enemy lurks in the anomie of the motorcycle biker (Willem Dafoe in his screen debut) who motors through her 1982 debut feature “The Loveless” (made with Monty Montgomery) and in the bloodstream of the young cowboy initiated into a gang of vampires in “Near Dark,” the western-horror hybrid that made her a cult favorite. It sneaks into the head of the undercover F.B.I. agent in “Point Break” (1991) who’s philosophically seduced by the koan-spouting leader of some bank-robbing surfers. And it slips into the rigid body of a devout 19th-century immigrant wife in “The Weight of Water”(2000), who, after sharing a chaste bed with another woman, responds to her awakened sexual desire with a murderous swing of an ax.

Much as she does in her far-out 1990 feminist freak-out “Blue Steel,” about a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) literally seduced by a male killer who fondles her gun with lethal results, Ms. Bigelow isn’t just playing with genre. She’s having her unruly way with gender, sometimes by inverting traditional masculine and feminine roles, as in “Strange Days,” a future shock love story that also explores voyeurism and the pleasures of violent spectacle. Shot in a Los Angeles still hurting from its 1992 civil unrest, it features Angela Bassett(whose bare, sculptured arms outmuscle those of Michelle Obama) rescuing a hapless white man (Ralph Fiennes) who, despite being the narrative’s center, never becomes its hero.

“Strange Days” originated with Mr. Cameron, who wrote the first draft before handing it over to her. With Jay Cocks, she finished the script and made the film her own. (She and Mr. Cameron divorced in 1991; she’s now in a relationship she prefers to keep private.) It was poorly released by its studio, which seemed unsure of how to sell it (kinky sex? millennial meltdown?), and it flopped. “The Weight of Water,” a trickily plotted drama that toggles between two bad marriages in separate time periods, and notably her only movie to touch on matrimonial life, followed and disappeared on impact. Two years later, in 2002, she returned to blockbuster form with “K-19: The Widowmaker,” an unnerving, very human thriller about the first Soviet nuclear submarine. It too died a quick box-office death.

She had to scale back for the next one. “I definitely wanted to have full creative control and final cut,” she says of “The Hurt Locker,” which was written by Mark Boal and based on his experience working as an embedded journalist in Iraq. She wanted up-and-coming actors who weren’t so famous that their characters couldn’t die, even if their names wouldn’t mean much in the ads. She also wanted to shoot in the Middle East. Her security detail talked her out of filming in Iraq, though she inched close to the border. Given her demands and the scant interest that American audiences have expressed in fiction films about the war, she looked outside the country for financing. The French company Voltage Pictures gave her money and control.

jezebel.com

“I usually maintain a fairly even temper about Hollywood because I couldn’t do my job otherwise,” Manohla Dargis told me today. But the formidable NY Times film critic has fighting words for Hollywood and how it treats women.

Dargis’ “fuck them” - the first of several - refers specifically to a fact she highlighted in her piece this weekend on the lack of progress in Hollywood films for and about women: Two major studios, Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, didn’t release a single movie directed by a female, even in a year of renewed prominence for women in film. One bright spot: The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow (pictured above) is sweepingthe early critics’ awards: in the past two days alone she and her film have gotten top accolades from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, The New York Film Critics Online, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

In a wide-ranging conversation this morning on women in Hollywood, Dargis, who has been a chief New York Times film critic (a title she shares with A.O. Scott) since 2004, had similarly strong words for Hollywood conventional wisdom and the studio system overall. “My tendency is not to talk in sweeping terms, but one thing I can say in sweeping terms is that there’s a lot of sexism in the industry,” she says. Here are some of the other highlights from the conversation.

On why women in Hollywood aren’t faring any better: This business is really about clubby relationships. If you buy Variety or go online and look at the deals, you see one guy after another smiling in a baseball cap. It’s all guys making deals with other guys. I had a female studio chief a couple of years ago tell me point blank that she wasn’t hiring a woman to do an action movie because women are good at certain things and not others. If you have women buying that bullshit how can we expect men to be better?

On working within the system: For me the most sobering thing of the last ten years is that there really was a point where four of the studios were run by women… and you would have thought that would lead to an uptick of women directors. I’m not saying I’ve done a systematic analysis, but it doesn’t look like it changed very much… Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

On director Kathryn Bigelow’s success (achieved in part by getting funding outside of Hollywood, detailed in Dargis’s June profile of her): Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important. Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy – and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy – we’ll see. We know that because women are allowed to make romantic comedies that they can make romantic comedies. That’s in everyone’s comfort zone. The idea that a woman can be a great action director is not is everyone’s comfort zone. That’s [Bigelow’s] exceptionalism.

On Bigelow’s chances for Oscar or future commercial success: The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That’s why they’ll be interested in something like The Hurt Locker. She’s done so well critically that she can’t be ignored.

Let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially… I’ve learned to never underestimate the academy’s bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

On male and female directors being held to different standards, as Dargis suggested in comparing Bigelow and Michael Mann in her piece: Do you think that a woman would have been able to get forty million dollars to make a puppet movie the way that Wes Anderson has been able to make, bringing to bear all the publicity and advertising budget of Fox? After two movies that didn’t make a lot of money? I think this is true for a lot of black filmmakers too – they’re held to a higher standard. And an unfair standard. You can be a male filmmaker and if you’re perceived as a genius – a boy genius or a fully-formed adult genius – that you are allowed to fail in a way that a woman is not allowed to fail.

On whether there’s an essential difference between male-made and female-made movies: Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. That’s all we need to say about that. But I do think as 51 percent of the population we should be given a chance… It’s very boring to watch the same people coming from a certain kind of background make the same kinds of movies.

On Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron: I personally don’t think either of them is a good filmmaker — they make movies for me that are more emotionally satisfying but with barely any aesthetic value at all. I really like Something’s Gotta Give, but I don’t think it’s a good movie…. I’m of two minds. Sometimes I think what women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.

On Sandra Bullock, whom she recently wrote should use her production company to “start giving female filmmakers a chance to do something other than dopey romances”: Use your power for good, Sandy!

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they’re morons, three they’re insulting panderers who think they’re making movies for the great unwashed and that’s what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don’t know what’s happening. I think it’s depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they’re about men. All power to Apatow, but he’s taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. ….We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow. But what are his movies supposed to be about? Nominally about the relationship between a man and a woman, but they’re really buddy flicks. Funny People was supposed to have an important role for a woman, but she was uninteresting and an afterthought.

On representations of women onscreen: There’s a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It’s a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She’s Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.

On women being taken seriously as moviegoers: It’s a vicious cycle. We’re not going to movies because there aren’t movies for us. Therefore we’re not seen as a loyal moviegoing audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…

That’s why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City’s a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what’s going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We’re 51 percent of the audience.

On this quote from a box office analyst for Hollywood.com, in The Washington Post: Fuck him. What an asshole. Yes, that’s what I want! That’s exactly what I want. If Angelina Jolie had been cast in a movie as a good as The Bourne Identity with a filmmaker like Paul Greengrass, I would have gone out to see it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone. That is absurd. That’s blaming female audiences – you get what you deserve? Is that what he’s saying?

On being a female critic reviewing and featuring women’s films: I wanted to get [Bigelow] on the cover of ‘Arts and Leisure’. I wanted this fantastic woman director to get her face on the front of the New York Times…[But] I am an equal opportunity critic. I will pan women as hard as men. I’ve had testy people imply that I should go easier on women’s movies. I find that incredibly insulting. Are you kidding me? I don’t want to be graded on a curve. None of us want to be a good woman writer.

I don’t want to be the woman critic. I don’t want to be the feminist critic. I don’t want to be the shrew. What I want to do is talk about the art that I love and point out, every so often, inequities….It’s a weird balancing act and I’m not saying there aren’t contradictions.

On whether the prominence of women-directed films in 2009 will change anything, even if they’re not statistically significant compared to other years: It’s pretty shitty right now. Anything positive can only help a little bit. How’s that for optimism?

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 10, 2009

IN March 1993 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that hands out Oscars, decided it was a good time to celebrate women. It wasn’t an original idea: 1992 had been popularly known as the year of the woman in politics, partly because of the number of new women elected to the Senate that year (4!) and the House (24!). Now the academy was joining the fun with the show “Oscar Celebrates Women and the Movies.” The host, Billy Crystal, rose to the occasion with quintessential Hollywood class. “Some of the most-talked-about women’s parts,” he joked, bada-boom, “are Sharon Stone’s in ‘Basic Instinct.’ ”

It should be more difficult for Oscar and his pals to ignore women’s non-pulchritudinous contributions to cinema when the awards roll around this March. Certainly women have been a considerable force this year, whether flocking to “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” in record numbers or helping to turn “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” from an unknown quantity into the most passionately debated women’s picture in memory. Meryl Streep (in“Julie & Julia”) and Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) have scooped up loads of critical love. And Sandra Bullock, at 45, has hit gold with “The Proposal” and, more recently,“The Blind Side,” in which she plays a sexy Christian mother who, from her faith to her high heels and gun, is right out of the Sarah Palin playbook.

“New Moon” and “The Blind Side” might not make a lot of critics’ Top 10 lists, but their popularity with audiences is good for women in film — and might be too great for even Hollywood to ignore. For years the received wisdom, both in the industry and the press that covers it, has been that women don’t go to the movies and can’t open movies. Although recent hits like “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Sex and the City” and “Mamma Mia!” have helped put a dent in that thinking, it will take more than millions of teenage girls (and their moms) squealing in delight at sparkly vampires and hairy beasties with swollen deltoids before real change will come to American movie screens. Women need to develop their own muscles.

I’m not talking about those buff babes who pop up in adolescent fantasies, licking their lips as they lock and load; I’m talking about movies made for and with women. I’m also talking about movies directed by women. Here’s a little history: Only three women have been nominated as directors by the academy in 81 years:Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” in 1976; Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993; andSofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation” in 2003. None won. At a glance this year looks promising, with high-profile titles like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” Lone Scherfig’s “Education” and Ms. Campion’s “Bright Star,” all of which have been too successful, critically and commercially, to dismiss.

Sounds good. Sounds like progress too. Yet the closer you look at the list of female filmmakers from this year, and the more you separate the breathless hype about the better-known “femme-driven pics,” to use a favorite Variety locution, the worse the numbers get. Of the almost 600 new movies that will be reviewed in The New York Times by the end of 2009, about 60 were directed by women, or 10 percent. Some are foreign directors, like Claire Denis (“35 Shots of Rum”) and Lucrecia Martel (“The Headless Woman”); others are documentary filmmakers, including Agnès Varda (“The Beaches of Agnès”) and Aviva Kempner (“Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg”). Many received modest releases; I bet you never heard about, much less saw, most of them.

Bigger, not surprisingly, doesn’t mean better, at least for women. Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had “Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama) and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had “Amelia” (Mira Nair), “Post Grad” (Vicky Jenson) and “Whip It” (Drew Barrymore).Anne Fletcher directed “The Proposal” for Disney, while the studio’s once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released “An Education” (Ms. Scherfig), “Coco Before Chanel” (Anne Fontaine) and “Sugar” (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures hasNancy Meyers’s “It’s Complicated”; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.

Feeling queasy yet? Resigned? Indifferent? A little angry? The usual line on Hollywood is that it cares only about box office, which is at once true and something of a convenient excuse. Money makes the movie world go round, sure. But there are exceptions to this perceived rule, as some of my favorite male directors, including Michael Mann, have routinely proved with various box office disappointments. Released in 2001, Mr. Mann’s“Ali,” a well-regarded if not universally beloved biography of Muhammad Ali with Will Smith, brought in nearly $88 million in global receipts. (The production budget, partly paid for by Sony, was an estimated $107 million.) The next year Ms. Bigelow’s independently financed “K-19: The Widowmaker,” a submarine adventure movie withHarrison Ford, was released to solid reviews, raking in just under $66 million globally (with a $100 million production budget).

What did a $22 million difference in box office mean for the directors of “Ali” and “K-19”? Well, Ms. Bigelow didn’t direct another feature until 2007, when she began “The Hurt Locker,” a thriller about a bomb squad in Iraq that was bankrolled by a French company and is said to cost under $20 million. For his part Mr. Mann directed “Collateral,” a thriller with Tom Cruise, for Paramount and DreamWorks (with a budget of $65 million and global box office of more than $217 million), and “Miami Vice,” a reimagining, withColin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, of Mr. Mann’s popular 1980s television series. Paid for by Universal, that movie cost $135 million and is considered a disappointment with about a $164 million worldwide take.

I imagine there are a host of reasons why Mr. Mann has been able to persuade executives to keep writing such large checks. He’s a dazzling innovator, and big stars keep flocking to his side, despite his reputation for difficulty. But Ms. Bigelow is one of the greatest action directors working today, and it’s hard not to wonder why failure at the box office doesn’t translate the same for the two sexes.

I hope the big checks keep coming for Mr. Mann. But I also hope that the money people, including Ms. Bullock, whose production company actually makes hits, like “The Proposal,” start giving female filmmakers a chance to do something other than dopey romances. (Good romances would be a nice start.) Every so often a new female filmmaker grabs the spotlight — remember Kimberly Peirce, the director of “Boys Don’t Cry”? — only to sputter and fade. If you have ever wondered what ever happened to Susan Seidelman,Penny Marshall, Martha Coolidge, Amy Heckerling, Nancy Savoca, none of whom had the career they should have had, you’re not alone. Come back, Barbra, we miss you! But does Ms. Streisand, who was never nominated for best director, miss Hollywood? I doubt it.

This isn’t just about money, or even male sexism. There have been women running studios on and off since 1980, when Sherry Lansing became the president of 20th Century Fox. But trickle-down equality doesn’t work in Hollywood, even when women are calling the shots and making the hires, as they presumably did a few years ago, when four out of the six big studios were run by women. Fat good it did the rest of us. Now, there’s just Amy Pascal, a co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. In the 1990s Ms. Pascal made movies like “Little Women” and “A League of Their Own.” In recent years, however, Sony has become a boy’s club for superheroes like Spider-Man and funnymen like Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow.

It’s hard to know why women have fared so badly in Hollywood in the last few decades, though any business that refers to its creations as product cannot, by definition, have much imagination. The vogue for comics and superheroes has generally forced women to sigh and squeal on the sidelines. Even the so-called independent sector, with its ostensibly different players and values, hasn’t been much better, as we know from all the female directors who have made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival only to disappear. New digital technologies and the Internet have leveled the field — though usually it seems as if it’s sheer grit that pushes filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy”) along the hard road from idea to distribution.

In 1920 an American actress turned director named Ida May Park published an essay for a book titled “Careers for Women,” in which she warned other women about her chosen path. “Unless you are hardy and determined,” she wrote, “the director’s role is not for you. Wait until the profession has emerged from its embryonic state and a system has been evolved by which the terrific weight of responsibility can be lifted from one pair of shoulders. When that time comes I believe that women will find no finer calling.”

There are women who would agree with Park’s conclusions, or would if they could get the chance to direct. The problem is, 90 years later, women have advanced while much of the movie industry has not.

Historic number of them could be nominated

By David Friend

Denmark’s Lone Scherfig, director of ‘An Education,’ got a lesson of her own on the status of women directors in Hollywood.

Female helmers have captured plenty of attention in the early days of award season and sparked optimism that, this year, more than one could land a spot on the director’s list for the Oscars. It would be a landmark event: Only three women have ever been nominated for the Acad’s coveted prize.

Some advocacy groups say women directors should use the spotlight to their advantage rather than focus on past setbacks.

“In order for the game to change, it’s going to take a seismic shift in mentality on two fronts,” suggests Jacqui Barcos, a board member of the Alliance of Women Directors, a nonprofit organization for female helmers.

“These days, when adult drama and indies can barely get arrested, women directors are going to have to reinvent the rules or they are going to find themselves sitting on the sidelines. And studio heads need to expand their shortlist of directors and cut women a break.”

“More important than anything, it demonstrates that a woman director can deliver a commercially successful film that is outside the romantic comedy ghetto,” says Barcos, a helmer herself.

“Ghetto” is a good word, as most of the established women directors contacted for this story didn’t want to be shoved into the “gender category.”

Barcos has sidelined some of her own projects to focus on pics she considers more sellable, including an action film and a hip-hop animation project.

However, like many of her peers, she recognizes that snagging high-profile jobs, namely tentpole pics, is one of the greatest challenges for women because studio heads often don’t consider them as the most obvious choice.

Kimberly Peirce, scribe and helmer of “Stop-Loss” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” says an assortment of genre screenplays come across her desk. Most recently, they’ve run the gamut from gangster pics to her current projects: an erotic thriller and a Judd Apatow-produced comedy.

“I’ll read any script, and if it’s a good story I’d love to do it,” she says. “I’d love to do an action movie.”

Peirce also recognizes that she may be an exception in the biz and that it’s difficult for her to speak as a barometer for the industry.

“To ask somebody who has been fortunate enough to even get a career, ‘Have you been limited by being a woman?,’ it’s a very hard thing to say,” she says. “It’s not like we need to verify that there’s a problem — there is a problem.”

Martha Lauzen of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film monitors the employment of women in Hollywood, and her most recent study found that they directed 9% of the 250 top-grossing American films in 2008, up a bit from 6% the previous year and in line with results from 1998.

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig, who helmed “An Education,” says she sees things differently from outside the Hollywood studio system.

“In this part of the world, film is still considered an art form,” she says, speaking of Europe. “I think that makes a big difference, because it would always primarily be the story that is supported. It would often be films that maintain the language and describe the culture, and some of those would come from women.”

The helmer adds she hasn’t felt much pushback since she first began a career in commercials.

“It struck me this time, traveling the United States, that people assume if you’re a woman and a film director, that combination is a very important issue for you, and to me it’s not,” she asserts. “I’m finding out �that it’s a privilege to not have that concern.”

FISH TANK

Everything changes for 15 yr old Mia (Katie Jarvis) when her mum brings home a new boyfriend.
Andrea Arnold’s FISH TANK (2009) opens In UK Cinemas 11 September. UK Official trailer.