For Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue a few years back, photographer Annie Leibovitz created a classic image of a film director at work. Posing beneath a stormy sky, George Clooney stood with his shirt ripped open, trousers tucked rakishly into his boots, arms outstretched – a young Orson Welles meets Michelangelo's vision of God. His crew were a crowd of female models in flesh-coloured lingerie; not the obvious costume for a camera operator, but there you are. This was the auteur as masculine genius, a warrior amid a sea of passive women.
This has long been the archetype of the film director, but over the last few months a host of women have been making waves: Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy, Lone Scherfig with An Education, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank. Then there are Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, both trailing Oscar buzz for The Hurt Locker and Bright Star respectively.
So, is this a new era for female film-makers? Unfortunately, the numbers suggest otherwise. In a study published last year, Professor Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University found that only 9% of Hollywood directors in 2008 were women – the same figure she had recorded in 1998. If Bigelow is nominated for the best directing Oscar in March, it will be only the fourth time a woman has been nominated, out of more than 400 director nominations altogether (the other three were Lina Wertmüller in 1976, Jane Campion in 1993, and Sofia Coppola in 2003). No woman has ever won. No wonder, then, that last year Campion entreated aspiring female directors to "put on their coats of armour and get going".
Once, the dearth of women directors could be traced to the small numbers entering film school. These days, that's not the case. Lauzen says women are now well represented in US film schools, while Neil Peplow, of the UK training organisation Skillset, says women make up around 34% of directing students in Britain. That translates into a large number of female graduates making short films, but few moving on to features.
Over the years, this failure to progress has often been blamed on a chauvinist culture; and certainly, talking to established directors, it's easy to uncover tales of overt sexism – from the mildly disconcerting to the downright illegal. The British film director Antonia Bird (Priest, Mad Love) says dryly that on her first directing job, "I was the only woman there, and all the guys just assumed I was the producer's PA. That was good." Director Beeban Kidron (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) once sacked a male assistant director who called her "the little lady". At the extreme end, US film director Penelope Spheeris, who made the $100m-grossing Wayne's World, remembers meeting an executive at the Beverly Hills Hotel when she was at the start of her career. "And the guy was pretty drunk, and he ripped some of my clothes trying to take them off me, and when I got up and started screaming he said, 'Did you want to make this music video or not?'" She pauses. "You say sexist, I say felony."
When it comes to sexism, Martha Coolidge – director of Rambling Rose and Real Genius, as well as the first woman president of the Directors Guild of America – has heard it all. There was the story of the female president of a major studio who said "no woman over 40 could possibly have the stamina to direct a feature film. I've heard people say that the kind of films they want to make are too big, too tough for a female director. The worst was when my agent sent another woman director in for an interview, and afterwards the guy called up and said, 'Never send anyone again who I wouldn't want to fuck.'"
There are signs that this culture is changing. A 2009 report – carried out by the UK networking organisation Women in Film and Television (WFTV) and Skillset – found that, while "a number of older participants reported direct experience of overt sexism, none of the younger participants [did]". But Coolidge insists that the film industry – and Hollywood specifically – remains a minefield, because "there is such a sexual component for the men who go into it. If all they wanted to do is to make money, they could just go to Wall Street. If you're a male executive, a producer – and I'm not talking about everybody, but the vast majority – you're there partly because you're surrounded by gorgeous girls. And that means that the older a woman is, the less they want them around. A woman would disrupt the flow of their lives." Coolidge and others point out that this is as true for black, working-class, and gay film-makers – in fact, anyone outside a small circle of privilege.
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