Behind the Lens

Screenwriter Carol Eastman was talking with friends recently about her upcoming debut as a film director. "What," asked one, "are you going to wear--a muumuu, a Gestapo uniform or a terry-cloth robe, mules and pin curls?" Miss Eastman, who wrote Five Easy Pieces, was understandably annoyed. "I turned to a man who had just directed his first picture and said, 'Did they ask you what you were going to wear?' "

The gaffe pointed up a fact of movie life. American women have been active underground film makers (notably Shirley Clarke, who directed The Cool World), and there are a number of successful European women directors, but in the Hollywood scheme of things a woman director is still an oddity. Dorothy Arzner started making pictures in the 1930s (Craig's Wife, The Bride Wore Red), as did Ida Lupino in the 1950s (The Hitch-Hiker, The Bigamist), but they hardly began a trend. Stage and TV Director Francine Parker, a spokeswoman of the two-year-old Film Committee of Women for Equality in Media, charges that in movies, "if anyone has to choose between you and a man, any man, it will always be the man. You just don't look right to a man if you're a woman director."

Equally Tough. Still, several women nowadays are getting the chance to take over control of films from directors' chairs, and a larger number are attaining considerable influence as scriptwriters. This change may partly offset the long-entrenched discrimination of the movie industry. It may give some deserving talents a break. But will it make any significant difference in the kind of movies that result?

No, says Elaine May, who should know. She wrote and directed last year's A New Leaf, and is currently on location in Minneapolis to direct her second film, The Heartbreak Kid. A comedy scripted by Neil Simon about a man who expects perfection from a wife and is twice disillusioned, it stars her daughter Jeannie Berlin. "Directing is a way of looking at something and then communicating it," Miss May says. "It would be hideous to think that either sex took a script and in any way pushed it toward any point of view other than the author's. I don't think it's important whether you're a man, a woman or a chair." Nor does she believe it is any tougher for a woman to get the all-important first assignment than a man. "You know so little the first time that you could not be the lowliest member of the crew. You could only be hired as the director."

Similarly Carol Eastman, who is writing and plans to direct an as yet untitled film starring her close friend Jack Nicholson and Jeanne Moreau, rejects the notion that anything in her work is specifically feminine. "All the people in my writing are different aspects of myself," she says, "and each of us has feminine and masculine components in our nature."

True enough. But freelance Film Critic Sandra Shevey, who conducts an adult course at New York University called Myth America in Movies, argues that masculine components dominate contemporary culture to the detriment of all art--including films. "The consistencies of a patriarchal society are science, reason and law," Miss Shevey says, "and in a matriarchal society they are art, magic, spir ituality and mystery. These are the qualities that women could bring to films." Critic Shevey maintains that the image of women in movies has hardly improved since D.W. Griffith's damsels in distress, and is still stuck in the axis between sex object and wifemother figure. Even in the new, "liberated" films, s he says, women are depicted as cooks and baby makers, "either imperiled or hard as nails."

These are precisely the stereotyped categories that Barbara Loden, actress and film maker, set out to shatter in Wanda, a lowbudget, highly autobiographical effort released last year. Says Miss Loden, who wrote, directed and starred in the picture: "Wanda was the prototype of the unliberated wom an. She had hardly any overtly redeeming qualities. Usually a girl like that would be fixed up to be more at tractive or be made witty. But I wanted to show a real woman from a certain milieu of our society. All my films will probably be fictionalized sociological studies about women and their relationships with men, because this is what I know."

Screenwriter Eleanor Perry, who recently came to the end of both her marriage and her collaboration with Director Frank Perry (David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife), is perhaps the most zealous of all the ad vocates for a feminine point of view in films. "Why are male directors so in volved in showing how barbaric man is?" she asks. "I can't imagine a woman making either Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs. Women would bring to the screen something that celebrates life, that investigates its wider possibilities instead of exploring depravity. My whole approach to films since the beginning has been from a woman's angle. I've never portrayed any wom an as a demeaned object."

Mrs. Perry may take her first directorial plunge this summer with her original screenplay Cruise. "The principal characters are roommates on a singles cruise," she explains, "an older woman whose husband left her for a young girl, and a young woman who has just left a married-man situation. I can see both women's sides because I've been in both situations." Another pet project is a script that she hopes will be the first "Women's Lib western," in which the principal character is not the usual prostitute or schoolmarm, but "a recognizable human being, an independent, thinking, feeling woman.

"There's an untapped audience whose potential the industry has ne glected," Mrs. Perry maintains. "They are women who are tired of watching men's fantasies on the screen. It took Hollywood a long time to realize the potential in the black audience. When it did, it began letting black filmmakers talk to their own. I feel certain that in the next five years the industry will see the value in a mass female audience and look to women to direct and produce films too."

The industry has a long way to go, however. Soon to be released is Stand Up and Be Counted, billed as the first serious movie about Women's Liberation. Its director is a man, Jackie Cooper.

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