For the past seven years, I’ve been on a kind of media diet to force myself to watch more movies made by women. I made a rule: half of everything I watched had to be written or directed by women. I started this diet in late 2017, because I was furious when the Harvey Weinstein allegations came to light. That was a wake-up call for me to think more deeply about the sexism of the film industry. I also started a blog, Thelma & Alice, to track and review the films I watched. I thought I would do it for a year or so, but I ended up keeping my media diet for seven years. I decided to write about the experience here, in a series of posts called “Notes on Watching Women.” Here are links to the previous posts: Intro, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
Today I’m looking at the obstacles women face in making films. This is the penultimate post in this series. Next week I will offer some final reflections. Thanks for reading along and please feel free to leave comments or email me directly with any thoughts.
A Boys’ Club
I started following contemporary cinema in the late 1990s when I was in my teens. This was the indie era, the Weinstein era. There was a new, young vanguard of American directors that people were excited about: P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, and of course, Quentin Tarantino. It was a boys’ club, and I really didn’t notice. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and thirties that I discovered some of the women in that generation: Sofia Coppola, Debra Granik, Nicole Holofcener, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Kelly Reichardt, and the late Lynn Shelton. These women debuted in the late 90s and early 00s and continued to make movies over the years, but they have dealt with more career gaps than their male counterparts, and as a result, it’s been harder for them to build a body of work. Most of the women listed above are still working independently. Most of the men worked independently early in their careers but gained the backing of big studios after one or two movies. Obviously, these men worked hard and had to jump through a lot of hoops to make their films. I’m only pointing out that the women listed above were just as promising as the men when their features debuted (compare Walking & Talking to Hard Eight, both released in 1996). To this day it is unusual for a woman to be entrusted with a studio feature, and it’s notable when a woman is nominated for a major award.
Why Women’s Careers Stall Out
Here are some reasons why women’s careers tend to stall out, gleaned from articles and interviews with women directors.
1) Films not distributed well, not marketed as aggressively, and dumped in doldrum months.
2) Female filmmaker not given the benefit of the doubt; rarely are the viewed as showing potential or hidden genius.
3) Hollywood is a boys’ club. Access to power depends on your personal connections. Men are less likely to mentor women and there aren’t as many women at the upper levels who can guide younger women.
4) Agents not putting forth women as candidates for studio film projects. Their names are not in the mix as much.
5) Women not considered qualified to direct movies about war or superheroes. There’s the sense that women don’t really understand weapons, fighting, or aggression—these subjects are not “natural” to them. There’s also an assumption that women don’t read comics or play video games.
6) Most screenplays penned by white men; women not considered as appropriate to direct a screenplay focusing on male characters (especially if the novel is about war or politics).
7) Stories concerning women over the age of 30 not considered interesting or marketable.
8) Private funders, studios, and VCs less likely to fund female directors because they are uneasy about women in leadership role on set. VCs less likely to fund female-led firms and women in general.
9) Related to #8: Women directors not trusted with large budgets, so their careers stall out with low-budget films.
10) Women less likely to win awards because voters are less likely to watch screeners starring women—especially if the lead is a woman of color. Male viewers feel the movie isn’t “for” them.
Millenial/Xennial Women
It’s possible that female millennial directors are experiencing fewer career gaps than their Boomer/Gen X counterparts. There is a cohort of millennials/Xennials who have been steadily building careers and learning their craft for the past decade: Maggie Betts, Chinoye Chukwu, Lena Dunham, Emerald Fennell, Greta Gerwig, Marielle Heller, Eliza Hittman, Sarah Polley, and Olivia Wilde—to name just a few. A new generation of slightly younger directors seem to have gotten over the hurtle of making a second film: Nia DaCosta, Rose Glass, Megan Parks, Halina Reijn, and Emma Seligman—again, naming just the ones that come to mind, I know there are more out there. The next twenty years will be very telling as these women settle into their talent and have the skills and connections to realize their biggest ambitions. Will they be able to navigate Hollywood more easily than previous generations?
The Bar is Higher for Women of Color
As I mentioned in my introductory notes, most of the movies I screened were made by white women. It was harder to find films made by women of color and over time I began to feel like the bar was just a lot higher for filmmakers who chose to center their stories on characters who were not white or enmeshed in white society. I felt this especially after seeing Kasi Lemmons’s debut feature, Eve’s Bayou, a complex and layered family drama that was praised by Roger Ebert as “a film of astonishing maturity and confidence.” If a young man had come out of the gate with a film as impressive as Eve’s Bayou, I think he would have been hailed as a singular talent and hired for any number of big projects. Lemmons continued to work as a director, but there are significant gaps between her films, and it wasn’t from a lack of ideas on her end. Instead, it was Hollywood’s ongoing struggle to accept that films centered on Black characters have universal appeal.
Black Women Directors Have Not Gotten Their Due
Looking at Gen X, filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees debuted features in the 90s and 00s but were not able to build on their success as quickly as their white counterparts. These women have continued to make ambitious films, but their efforts have barely been recognized. A Black woman has never been nominated for best director and Selma is the only film directed by a black woman (Ava DuVernay) to be nominated for Best Picture. As critic Robert Daniels pointed out, the exclusion of Black female directors from awards nomination was especially irritating last year, when both The Woman King (directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood) and Saint Omer (directed by Alice Diop) were ignored. These films are very different in terms of reach, but both were ripe for awards consideration. The Woman King was the kind of epic, star-driven financially successful studio film that the Academy likes to honor. Saint Omer was a French film with a much smaller audience, but it was a critical favorite with standout performances. It could easily have been nominated in the best foreign film category.
Women’s Successes Are Regarded as One-Offs
When a woman makes a great movie, has a promising debut, or earns a ton of money, her success is seen as a fluke. This has happened most recently with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a musical comedy that brought women of all ages to the theater. (Men came, too.) It was colorful, splashy, fun, and Gerwig had a big budget and a ton of marketing ahead of the film’s release. You’d think this would be a wake-up call for Hollywood to make more movies specifically for women and advertise them aggressively. Recent reporting indicates that Barbie, as with other female-directed successes, is regarded as a unicorn event: “Ask around Hollywood and the consensus seems to be that “Barbie” is a singular success, a gargantuan feat helmed by particular talents, the writer-director Greta Gerwig and the star Margot Robbie.” Maybe it’s still too early to say what will happen with Barbie long term, but we’ve seen this story before, where the unexpected success of a female-led movie is a “game-changer” that changes nothing. (See: Thelma & Louise, Clueless, My Big Fat Greek Wedding).
Hollywood Does Not Value the Female Gaze
Related to the above, the industry always seems surprised when women turn out for genres they enjoy, starring men they like. The sleeper hit Anyone But You is an example of this, as well as the hit TV series Nobody Wants This (their titles are weirdly interchangeable). Both of these rom-coms (written by women) are notable for showcasing male leads (Glen Powell and Adam Brody) who seem to genuinely like women, a winning trait that Anne Helen Petersen described in her post “A Unified Theory of Glen Powell:
Star image is always an amalgamation of roles and “real life” public performance, so some of this overarching feeling [for Glenn Powell] stems from the way he looks at Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You, but also the way his character flirts in Everybody Wants Some and how he relates and defers to Daisy Edgar-Jones’ character in Twisters and his extended eye contact with Adria Arjona in Hit Man. It’s different than knowing you can get women, or wanting to control women, or even loving women. He likes them. He appreciates them. He enjoys their company.
Sexism in Film Criticism
This is a bit of a tricky topic, but one of the reasons that female filmmakers do not make headway is that they are ignored or poorly reviewed by male critics. I’m not talking about mean-spirited reviews, or even pans. This isn’t about malevolence or anyone’s political agenda. What I see, instead, is a tendency to regard a movie made by a woman with mostly female characters as smaller in scope. Reviewers won’t engage with the movie on a deeper level either because they assume that they can’t, that it’s a film “for women,” or else they don’t see that there is another level (as I wrote about earlier when discussing the movie Tully). It’s a critical blind spot, not a moral failing, and if there had been more female critics (with their own blind spots), it wouldn’t have such a devastating effect on female filmmakers.
Exhibit A: Nancy Meyers
Nancy Meyers isn’t exactly underrated—she’s a household name—and yet, she doesn’t really get the credit she deserves. Her movies are throwbacks with lovely sets and wardrobes, snappy screenplays, and charming performances by big stars, yet she gets the most backhanded compliments you’ve ever seen. Her aesthetic crime? Making movies she knows will appeal to middle-aged women. Here’s Peter Bradshaw, from The Guardian:
All around me in the cinema, women and men of a certain age – my age, in fact – were jabbing Ms. Meyers's feelgood-needle into their veins, and slumping into their plush seats with the classic smackhead sigh of submission while their jaws slackened and their eyeballs rolled back into their heads. And I must now shamefacedly admit her new escapist romcom is expertly put together, like a screenplay masterclass from Satan, and the lead performance from Alec Baldwin is very good.
Roger Ebert was similarly dismissive:
“It's Complicated” is a rearrangement of the goods in Nancy Meyers' bakery, and some of them belong on the day-old shelf. Oh, how I hate food analogies in reviews. In a season of blessings, there are several better choices than this one. Truth in criticism: I must report that I expect “It's Complicated” will be terrifically popular with its target demographic, which includes gal pals taking a movie break after returning Christmas presents.
And here's Scott Tobias’s opening to a pan of Nancy Meyer’s screwball Christmas rom-com, The Holiday: “
Nancy Meyers” isn't a real person. “Nancy Meyers” is a robot invented by the studios as a cost-cutting measure to produce the most synthetic romantic comedies imaginable.
I know there’s something a bit unfair about cherry-picking in this way; we want to hear a critic’s honest reaction, however annoying. I guess I wonder if these men really hate Meyers as much as they claim. When you peruse Meyers’ reviews over the years you’ll see the same caveats over and over from male critics as they note that yes, the actors give great performances and yes, the films are technically accomplished, and yes, the art direction is cohesive and yes, they were entertained, but all of this, they argue, is the result of cheap, banal appeals to fantasies of comfort and abundance. There’s a reluctance to succumb to the pleasure of a movie like The Holiday, as if the fantasies contained within are just too feminine and soft. Underneath this judgement is the assumption that these romantic fantasies are easy to conjure and have little to do with Meyers’ directorial talent.
Why Am I Going On So Much About Nancy Meyers?
I’m not about to argue that The Holiday is a masterpiece of American cinema. I remember seeing it in the theaters with my sister when it came out and thinking that was fun, and not much else. I probably would have agreed with some of the disparaging reviews at the time. But over the years, as with so many of Meyers’s movies, I’ve rewatched it several times, enjoying it even more on repeat. That’s the thing about her movies: they are incredibly rewatchable. And it’s not by accident, even if the streamers seem to operate from that principle, producing milquetoast rom-coms with bland sets and tepid dialogue, hoping people won’t notice how generic they are. Meyers always respected her audience, even if the critics didn’t.
A Positive Note Before I Delve Into the Dark Heart of Misogyny
I don’t have numbers, but I’m pretty sure there are a lot more female film critics than there used to be, even ten years ago. In print journalism, there are more female staffers writing about TV and film. Online, there are lots of women writing about film, and I’m also hearing more female voices on film podcasts. The emergence of a new generation of critics seems to be the biggest and most positive change in the cinematic landscape post #metoo, and I think it has already begun to shape the discourse, bringing new and different filmmakers into the conversation.
The Biggest Obstacle
The biggest obstacle for female filmmakers, and the most nebulous, is Hollywood’s belief that stories centered on women do not have the ability to reach a large audience. Sometimes women are told this outright, but often the feeling is barely conscious, just a vague sense that a story about a woman is less important and worthy of investment.
Tyranny of the Hero’s Journey
Hollywood loves “The Hero’s Journey,” a narrative blueprint popularized by Joseph Campbell and embraced by George Lucas and other filmmakers, who saw it as the key to creating stories with universal appeal. Many, many films are organized around the trials and tribulations of a male protagonist who is called to adventure and must go on a quest to achieve a particular goal. Often, he is a warrior or becomes one. Unfortunately, women are not a big part of the hero’s journey, and Hollywood hasn’t, in general, embraced female archetypes with the same fervor as masculine ones. In her essay, “I Don’t Want to be the Strong Female Lead,” actor, writer, and director Brit Marling observes that even when women become protagonists in heroic narratives, they end up enacting an essentially masculine role:
It would be hard to deny that there is nutrition to be drawn from any narrative that gives women agency and voice in a world where they are most often without both. But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power.
Although there are plenty of myths and fairy tales focused on women, the hero’s journey has become, for many screenwriters, the template for a truly epic story. Which only adds to the feeling that a movie focused on women is inherently smaller in scope and not as universal—or financially lucrative.
The Presumed Inflexibility of the Male Imagination
One of the things I’ve realized, in toggling between movies with a lot of female characters and those with just one of two token women, is that I don’t usually identify with the female characters in mainstream movies. I don’t see myself as the wife, waiting by the phone, or as the dream girl. Definitely, I don’t see myself as the murder victim. But that’s ok, because I often find the male characters more relatable, anyway. (Maybe because the male characters are written with greater feeling and humanity, hmm.) I think it’s very good for women to identify with men. It expands the mind, giving women a way into stories that might ordinarily exclude them. It would be nice for men to have the chance to identify with female characters, too. In television, we’ve seen the success of this model, with shows that contain a multitude of female characters, but in mainstream movies, women are still largely defined in terms of their sexual availability or their vulnerability. The prevailing logic seems to be that if a movie had too many women in it, audiences would consider it to be “for women only,” an assumption that diminishes the male imagination as well the female one.
The Essence of Misogyny
Of course, there’s something naïve in what I’ve written. Even if women were written with greater humanity, some men would still not want to identify with female characters because they are trained, from boyhood, not to see themselves in girls and women. Misogyny isn’t men thinking to themselves, I hate women. It’s men feeling ashamed to identify with women, thinking—actually, it’s probably more of a feeling than an articulated thought—I can’t be anything like a woman, because that would make me less of a man.
I loved this one. I am thinking about the hero narrative as it relates to the book I'm writing--or I guess I am considering, only right now, how I am using it and rejecting it for my female character. So thanks! Also, I make a concerted effort for my kids, esp with my boys, to read books with girl protagonists so that they can find themselves in those different POVs: Dory Fantasmagory, El Deafo--in fact there are tons of great graphic novels with girl protagonists that my oldest son has loved. TV shows--Bluey, Hilda--are great for this too. All of my kids got into Inside Out, Seeing Red. Even so: My oldest had a story he told himself at bedtime with a female heroine but at a certain point he was embarrassed that he was "writing" a girl for his quest. Fascinating.