Calling Their Own Shots

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ah, Hollywood! Barbara Boyle, former senior vice president at Orion Pictures, dubs the place "Boys Town." Director Martha Coolidge calls it "the land of the starlet." Hollywood, though, has always been an industry in which powerful men made films starring beautiful women. The guys ran things--as producers, directors, bosses--and the highest-paid females were so much screen sirloin. The very job descriptions were sexist: cameraman but script girl. And ruling the set, in his safari jacket and jodhpurs, was the director--an amalgam of Da Vinci and De Sade, Patton and Hemingway. A man's man. No girls needed apply.

They are now, though. Women have started demolishing Hollywood's most honored typecasting: the macho movie director. They have done it the old-fashioned way, by making movies that make money. Amy Heckerling's National Lampoon's European Vacation earned some $50 million at the box office and finished among 1985's top-ten-grossing pictures. Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan raked in $27.5 million on a $5 million budget and graced many a ten-best list. Now that, as Seidelman notes, "women directors are no longer looked at as novelty items," their more established sisters can get back into the act. Barbra Streisand, 43, the all-around auteur of 1983's Yentl, will soon direct an adaptation of the AIDS play The Normal Heart. And Elaine May, 53, an early-'70s trailblazer with her comedies A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, is currently directing Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar--at $30 million, the most expensive film ever entrusted to a woman.

Women are scoring in the low-budget action and independent markets as well, directing movies that can serve as calling cards to the major studios. Penelope Spheeris, 40, has two grungy, turbulent melodramas in release this month, Hollywood Vice Squad and The Boys Next Door. At the other end of the fringe, Donna Deitch, 40, won the Jury Prize at this year's U.S. Film Festival with Desert Hearts, a tale of Sapphic love in Reno that plays like The Women hyped on estrogen. The festival's Grand Prize went to Joyce Chopra's Smooth Talk, which opened in New York City recently to critical raves.

Smooth Talk, based on a Joyce Carol Gates short story, illuminates the traditional contours of a woman director's film--the leisurely portraiture of an ordinary family--then shockingly reveals a mysterious fable of fear and longing. Connie (Laura Dern) is a coltish California girl trying to cope with her brand-new woman's body and its desperate urgencies. She sasses her angry mom, cruises the mall with her girlfriends and dreams of a boy who will hold her close and sing to her. Enter Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), an older man whose silky threats mesmerize the girl into taking his dare. Arnold is Connie's demon lover, a nightmare image of every male she has ever vamped, and the price he exacts is her realization that 15 is too young to grow up and old.

Chopra's narrative style, which draws authentic, seductive performances from Dern and Williams, is not show and tell but observe and discover. It is the style of a director in no hurry to prove she can do everything at once. And yet Chopra, 48, has waited 15 years for even this $1 million opportunity. "I knew women who tried to break into the studio system," Chopra says, "and they seemed miserable. So instead I made documentaries; I had a child. I'm a patient person, and I'm not up for punishments."

The plaint is familiar. "Very few women thought they could join a country club they knew was restricted," says Susan Smitman, co-chairwoman of the Women's Committee of the Directors Guild of America. Five years ago the D.G.A. negotiated an affirmative-action clause with the studios; they would make "good-faith efforts" to hire women and minorities. D.G.A. women did increase their numbers, but often in menial positions like second assistant director. And lawsuits are unlikely to encourage more liberal hiring practices. "In today's political climate," says Smitman, "talk of affirmative action is like talking about incest."

It was not ever thus. One of the very first story films, The Cabbage Fairy, was directed by the pioneer Alice Guy-Blache, in Paris in 1896. In the heyday of the Hollywood silent film (1913-27), more than two dozen women directed movies. Among them were successful actresses such as Lillian Gish, Nazimova, Mrs. Sidney Drew, Mabel Normand, and the prolific Lois Weber, who directed the incendiary birth-control drama Where Are My Children? (1916). By the '30s, however, the only sturdy survivor was Dorothy Arzner; she dressed in male ties, slacks and coiffure and made movies about willful women (Craig's Wife, Christopher Strong). In the postwar decade, one more token emerged: Ida Lupino, who spelled her acting career by directing some deliciously sordid B pictures (notably The Bigamist). Lupino was a lonely exception. Between 1949 and 1979, only one-fifth of 1% of all films released by the major studios were directed by women.

For a new generation, new heroines are emerging from film schools and the independent movement with the trumpet sounds of feminism in their ears. When Joan Micklin Silver, 50, was rebuffed by the studios and the networks in the early '70s, her husband Raphael raised the $370,000 needed for Hester Street, a bittersweet portrait of immigrant Jews (1974). The film earned commendatory reviews and a little money, but she waited five years to see one of her films (Chilly Scenes of Winter) released by a major studio. Now Silver, whose 25-year-old daughter Marisa directed her first feature, Old Enough, in 1984, has the perspective to gauge the winds of change in Hollywood. Says she: "What you hear now is people asking you to supply 'a woman's point of view.' But I don't want to represent 50% of the people on this planet. I just want to represent myself."

This is the voice of middle-level power speaking. It has cried out and been heard; now it can demand more. Chances have been taken, gambles won. Seidelman, 33, notes, "Desperately Seeking Susan had a female director, a female producer, a female writer, two female stars and a female executive, Barbara Boyle, who helped us get the go-ahead. If the film had bombed, it would have presented a broad target. Failure is a luxury not yet afforded to women." But Susan succeeded, and its momentum helped reduce the risk factor for hiring first-time women directors. Randa Haines, 41, won an Emmy for the TV movie Something About Amelia, but was untested in feature films until she was tapped to direct Children of a Lesser God, starring William Hurt. "It's a business of the strong male directorial voice," Haines says, "and it takes people a long time to rethink that image. At first I wondered, Who's that high voice saying 'Action' and 'Cut'? But I soon got used to it all, just by not letting myself think about the millions of dollars riding on my back."

That selective amnesia requires an effort of will by the women directors, and of good will by the male bosses who employ them. "I never look at gender or hair color or clothing," avers Steven Spielberg, who chose women to direct three of the 24 episodes for his Amazing Stories. "I look at talent." But every baby mogul knows he must be a businessman first, a booster second. Says Mark Canton, president of production at Warner Bros.: "Nobody hires a woman just because she's a woman. The stakes are too high to be an idealist."

Or a feminist. Coolidge, 39, who helped make Valley Girl a sleeper hit of 1983 and directed Tri-Star's Real Genius last year, recalls the hazing she underwent to direct City Girl in 1981. "The first thing the producer said to me," she recalls, "was, 'Are you a feminist?' Well, of course I'm a feminist. But I knew that if I said yes, I'd lose the job. So I said no." Other first-time directors, like Actress-Director Lee Grant (Tell Me a Riddle), were cowed with tough-guy analogies: a director must be a field marshal, a quarterback, a boardroom Svengali. "This producer asked me, 'But can you be the captain of a ship?' I was taken aback at the Captain Ahab image of dealing with sailors in a muscular world. Everyone can be a different kind of captain on a different kind of ship and bring in different kinds of results. You do have to be a damned good sailor, though."

A few of the sailors are captains now, but the seas are still rough. Women directors are free to make "people pictures" with women as sympathetic protagonists--as Deitch says, "We can't leave it all to Woody Allen"--or, like Spheeris and Heckerling, they can turn out action adventures as subtle as a Bigfoot truck at a demolition derby. Time and the accretion of power should help erase the stereotypes of women and their films. And be cause the system is changing, not just the women, the next generation of women may not need to exert so much of their energy and talent just to get through the studio gate. The goal for women directors is to persuade the male power elite that they are not some exotic Other, not the Not Quite Us. Just moviemakers.

That millennium has yet to arrive. Says Amy Jones, 32, who directed her Love Letters (1984) while pregnant, and gave birth while editing the film: "You don't hear people saying, 'Ah, Martin Scorsese--there's an interesting male director. Look what a man can do!' " --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York, Denise Worrell/Los Angeles