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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Once women make contact with backers, received notions about the filmgoing audience make female-centered projects seem less lucrative. Over and over, directors say they've run up against the Hollywood assumption that girls and women aren't a sufficiently lucrative market, despite the overwhelming success of chick flicks such as "The First Wives Club," "Waiting to Exhale," "Clueless" and "Bridget Jones's Diary."
The conventional wisdom, says Coolidge, is that men make moviegoing decisions for themselves and for their girlfriends. "The audience that studios have cultivated are young men. Young men, they feel, are easy to please. They seek out action, and then they'll take girls on dates." Similarly, when Sarah Jacobson brought her do-it-yourself sexual awakening triumph "Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore" to Sundance, distributors told her, "Girls don't go to the movies without their boyfriends. It's just not a viable market."
Never mind that pair-dating is virtually obsolete as a social ritual, that teen girls were the ones who turned "Titanic" into a monolith, or that, as Coolidge says, "the adult female audience is the biggest audience in the world." The industry, she says, "is run primarily by young men who understand the audience that runs out on a Friday night and sees movies that have violence or sexual exploitation in them. When you get to making a movie from a girl's point of view, they don't know what to make of it."
This is also true, arguably, of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board. "Coming Soon," Colette Burson's comedy about satisfaction-seeking high-school girls, was initially slapped with the deadly NC-17 rating despite having no nudity or violence whatsoever. At the same time, as Michelle Chihara wrote in the Boston Phoenix, Joel Schumacher's "8mm," a movie about snuff films that took place in the S/M demimonde, had no problem getting an R rating, which allows a film to play in normal multiplex theaters and be advertised in heartland daily newspapers.
Given these prejudices, it's not surprising that a study done by Women Make Movies found, according to Zimmerman, that "women who were trying to make films about women were getting the lowest amount of money" of any prospective filmmakers.
Not every woman wants to make specifically female films. Then they run into other problems. Women don't get to do blockbuster movies, and those rare exceptions, like Mimi Leder, who directed the George Clooney action spectacular "The Peacemaker," and Kathryn Bigelow, director of "K-19: The Widowmaker," simply prove the rule.
"Many, many times I've gone to a studio or producer with the idea of doing a movie that I'm passionate about and found that they can't conceive of a woman doing material that is not completely chick-centric," says Coolidge. She badly wanted to make a movie about Johnny Spain, a mixed-race member of the San Quentin Six who was too black for white society and too white for the Black Panthers, but was told it would be un-PC for a white woman to direct a film about a black man. (Few flinched when Michael Mann beat out Spike Lee for "Ali.")
According to Mira Nair, director of the acclaimed "Salaam Bombay" and the wildly successful "Monsoon Wedding," no one will come out and tell a director that she's not being considered because she's a woman, but it's easy to sense. "Once I was very keen on a political thriller," she says. "I went out to L.A. to lobby for it and I got the vibe that they were humoring me."
Harron notes that while she's happy with her career, "'American Psycho' made a huge amount of money. It did very, very well in Europe and tremendously well on video, and I think if I was a guy I would have had a lot more offers having made that film. It doesn't bother me so much because I do my own work and I have two small children, but if I was younger and single, it would be very frustrating to wonder why Darren Aronofsky [director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream'] gets offered some huge thing and I don't."
Regardless of what type of film they make, says Lauzen, there's no evidence to suggest films by women earn less in the domestic market than films by men. "In Hollywood there's this perception that films made by women do not earn as much as films made by men, and that actually is not true," she says. "We have done the statistical analysis on box office grosses, comparing films that had women behind the scenes with others. The notion that films made by women don't earn as much just doesn't hold up."
But those analyses don't take the foreign market into account, and Ephron says that market's importance is a crucial reason why action movies -- which many women don't want to direct, while those who do are rarely permitted to -- dominate studio output. "The movies that make the most money are aimed at a subliterate market. By which I mean not just teenage boys, but the entire Third World. The effect of the foreign market on the movies that are getting made is huge." The movies that do well in those markets, she says, "are very much like video games. They have very little dialogue and a great deal of action and explosions. They do very well, so you're always going to find people more receptive to making movies like that."
The people in Hollywood, says Ephron, "are always looking for the safest thing they can do. The safest thing a studio can do is pay $20 million to a male star who is big in Asia. If you aren't making a high-budget action movie with one of those male stars, everything you are doing gets harder and harder going down the scale, until you get down to independent filmmakers trying to make a $1 million movie about a woman."
