If a director battles through and makes these most difficult of movies, often she'll face problems with distribution. Sarah Kernochan, who won her second Oscar in March for her short documentary "Thoth," said that "after seven years of tireless hustling to get it done," her cult teen comedy "All I Wanna Do" was sabotaged because Miramax bought the film but had no idea what to do with it.

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Rachael Leigh Cook and Lynn Redgrave, the movie was set in a New England boarding school whose students were fighting a proposed merger with a nearby boys academy. Though Miramax paid $3.5 million for it, the company decided to send it straight to video. Kernochan begged for permission to use her own money to open the movie in New York and Los Angeles, and emptied her savings account to pay for weeklong engagements.

"They convinced themselves that there was no way to get an audience, no way to get teenage girls into theaters," says Kernochan, a Hollywood screenwriter who also won a directing Oscar for her 1972 documentary "Marjoe." The idea was that girls "always went to see the boys' movie."

Miramax executives had a slightly different interpretation of events. "There was a difference of opinion regarding the marketability of the project," says Matthew Hiltzik, Miramax's vice president of corporate communications. Kernochan "declined to make certain changes" that Hiltzik says were needed to make the film more appealing to all audiences, not just to boys. "We respected her passion for the project and offered her the opportunity to distribute it through other means," he says. "Ultimately, the film's performance suggests there was merit to our suggestions." (It also suggests that teen films can't take off without a marketing budget and a wide release.)

Nevertheless, "All I Wanna Do" finally did make money on video. "I know by the size of my residual checks that it's done well, because I'm getting checks bigger than anything I've made off studio movies I've written," Kernochan says. Despite that, and the fact that she's won Oscars for two of the three films she's directed, Kernochan has yet to find backing for the dark comedy she wants to direct next.

In fact, after all the barriers women overcome to make a first film, many times the real struggle doesn't begin until they want to do a second one. According to an analysis by the Guerrilla Girls and Alice Locas, by last year, 56 percent of the men who'd had films in the 1996 Sundance festival had made another movie. Only 33 percent of women had.

Even though Rebecca Miller's first film "Angela" won the Filmmakers' Trophy and the cinematography award at the 1995 Sundance, it took her until last year to make her second movie, "Personal Velocity," which won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. Five years passed between Nicole Holofcener's 1996 indie hit "Walking and Talking" (which the New York Times called "a date movie so enjoyably prickly it will seem funniest if you don't have a date") and her latest, "Lovely & Amazing." There was a seven-year gap between Alison Maclean's first movie, "Crush," and her fulsomely praised "Jesus' Son." Maria Maggenti hasn't made another film since her lovely, influential 1995 "The Incredible Adventures of Two Girls in Love."

Partly, says Allison Anders, whose movies include "Gas Food Lodging," "Grace of My Heart" and "Things Behind the Sun," this is a result of Hollywood's fetishization of the boy wonder. "There's always going to be some boy who they're going to be five times more excited about" than any woman director, she says. "There's never been a 'girl wonder' mythology."

Thus, no matter how well received a woman's first film is, it rarely generates the kind of frothing excitement with which Hollywood greets a parade of male prodigies such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson. "Male executives are looking for fantasy images of their younger selves," says Mary Harron, and this pertains to both the people and the films they celebrate.

At the same time, Anders says women are partly responsible for their failure to get second films done. As soon as a director makes her first movie, she says, "you have to have the next thing ready to go. I've been amazed watching people who are not ready with their scripts when they're getting a lot of attention. Preferably you should already be shooting your second one before the first one's out there. You've got to strike while the iron's hot. When 'Gas Food Lodging' was released I had already shot 'Mi Vida Loca.'"

For some reason, she says, women get caught unprepared more than men. "I don't know if women have this illusion that suddenly the doors are going to open up, but I think that women really have to be five times more conscientious about what they're going to do next. The doors are only going to open up for a second."

It's here that the issue gets complicated, because as much as some of these stories lend themselves to a straight-up feminist analysis, there are also internal barriers that keep women back. Despite her problems with Miramax, Kernochan also says her obstacles have been largely psychological (she also says that, at 54, ageism is a bigger problem for her than sexism). "In Jungian psychiatry it's called the spoiler, the voice that blames. It says, 'Of course this isn't happening for you, you're a woman, or your project isn't good enough.'"

Similarly, Alex Sichel, director of the sweet, searing 1997 riot-grrl lesbian film "All Over Me," is still workshopping material for a follow-up. She talks about feeling anxious once her work was out in the world and of struggling with writing. Women, she says, sometimes need "a different process to come out with their ideas."

And then there's that old bugaboo of successful women -- balancing work and children, which both Nair and Choy cite as their biggest hurdle. "It's difficult to raise children when you have to be on the set for six weeks," says Choy, noting that after leaving her family for a three-month shoot in Namibia, she had to face her own guilt and her husband's resentment, and she decided that "on my next project I wouldn't go so far away."

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