In one of those curious American ironies, it is often the institutions that are the foundation of the political and cultural left that are the least diverse of all, and the motion picture industry is no exception. Today, one female director – Kathryn Bigelow – will be conspicuously absent from the Oscars. It is true that Zero Dark Thirty is a controversial film, but Bigelow’s effort was good enough to warrant inclusion. There is plenty to dislike about the movie’s message and what it portrays, but as a portrait of the US during the War on Terror it is so far unsurpassed. However, Bigelow won an Oscar in 2010 with The Hurt Locker – another film about our overseas adventures – so there may be the sense that she’s had her turn.
In The Atlantic, Govindini Murti writes that studio film directors remain overwhelmingly male:
At the Oscars ceremony this weekend, not only will Kathryn Bigelow’s name not be read out on the list of the nominees for a Best Director Oscar, but for the 81st time in 85 years, no other woman’s will be, either. And while blame for Bigelow’s Oscar snub is being laid on Zero Dark Thirty’ s perceived controversial politics, the lack of any other women nominees for a directing award exposes a more fundamental problem: the scarcity of women playing major roles both off screen and on screen in Hollywood.
Even though women buy 50 percent of movie tickets and form a majority of the U.S. population, only 4.4 percent of Hollywood’s top 100 studio movies are directed by women in any given year. The disproportionately small number of female directors in Hollywood seems to have a direct impact on the number of women seen on-screen. A 2010 USC Annenberg study led by Stacy L. Smith notes that movies with male directors featured only 29.3 percent female actors, whereas in movies with at least one female director, that number rose to 44.6 percent.
Although studio films are still a masculine preserve, independent films are reaching gender parity:
At the recent Sundance Film Festival, a record 50 percent of the films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition were directed by women. Overall, of the 119 films at Sundance this year, 34 percent had female directors. And for the second year in a row, a woman (Jill Soloway) won the Best Director Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, following last year’s winner Ava DuVernay.
A new USC Annenberg study co-authored by Stacy L. Smith, Katherine Pieper, and Marc Choueiti confirms that there are more opportunities for women directors in the indie world versus the studio world. Commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles, the study examined 820 feature films screened at Sundance from 2002 to 2012. The study found that 22.2 percent of the festival’s U.S. narrative-competition films and 41.1 percent of the U.S. documentary-competition films were directed by women.
What accounts for the gap between Sundance and Hollywood when it comes to women? Smith says that ingrained attitudes about female directors and stars play a big role: “In Hollywood, women in front of or behind the camera still seem to be perceived as a risky investment.”
At a Sundance panel on women directors, Naomi Foner (an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and the mother of Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal) described to me the difficulty she had in getting her directing debut Very Good Girls (starring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen) off the ground. Foner said she had been in meetings in which she pointed out the success of women-centered films like Sex and the City, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, and “the executive will say to you, ‘That was a fluke.’”
When I spoke with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past summer, she echoed what Smith and Foner said, telling me that “all the writers I know now, even right after The Hunger Games, go to meetings and have pitches for television series for female protagonists, and they’re told [Hardwicke mimics a deep male voice], ‘Well, we need a male protagonist.’ It’s so bizarre, it’s like there’s a disconnect.” Jerusha Hess, who co-wrote Napoleon Dynamite, has heard similar stories: “I’ve had friends who’ve done animation, and they’re told they can’t sell this because there’s not a boy in this fairy tale, and you’re like, ‘It’s a fairy tale—it’s supposed to be about a girl.’”
I wonder whether people in the American movie business are aware of the pink ghetto phenomenon, and are trying to preserve their dominance in the global movie industry. If the film industry were to become more female, like education, medicine and law, perhaps it would lose some of its vitality and prestige. Because the industry commands such awesome cultural power, its leaders are loathe to move in that direction.
Think about it: with the competition opened up to hordes of cheaper female labor, how much room would there be for mega-millionaire directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas?
