Hollywood's New Directions

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Martha Coolidge is happy this week. Not manic. Certainly not smug. For the moment, and for a change, she is content with her Hollywood lot.

Her mood is understandable. Coolidge is the director of Rambling Rose, and she has a well-deserved hit on her hands. Her eighth film, it is a marvelously sexy and eccentric comedy. The critics like it, and despite an absence of superstar names, audiences like it too. In these circumstances, anyone would be entitled to feel just fine.

Yet something more than personal success colors Coolidge's satisfaction. Though Rambling Rose is a singular artistic achievement, it should not be regarded as one that is singular professionally. For Coolidge, as well as for many of her female peers, this is the good news. Rose is merely one in a rush of major movies directed by women that have been released in the past couple of months, and it presages an equal number of equally significant films by women that will soon arrive at theaters.

To the women behind the cameras, this burst of activity is a powerful signal. They are finally beginning to achieve something more than token status as directors, and more and more of them are starting to sustain coherent careers in Hollywood. Best of all, the range of their work belies the conventional notion that holds that women can be entrusted only with delicately nuanced little films dealing with intricate personal relationships. Most of them would agree that any director needs, as Coolidge says, "a strong male side and a strong female side." Good directors, she says, demonstrate "a nurturing ability," in order to draw good work from their actors, as well as the masculine ability "to be a tough decision maker and move things along. Now, finally, it seems, we will have enough movies coming out so that everyone will see that not all women are the same, that we offer different points of view -- different from men, but also different from each other."

So far, so good. No one is likely to confuse Kathryn Bigelow's sleek thriller Point Break, which improbably but effectively combined cops and surfers (and grossed $40 million last summer), with Randa Haines' The Doctor (late summer's surprise hit), about an arrogant surgeon who becomes a befuddled cancer patient in his own hospital and as a result humanizes his practice. Says Bigelow, who directed a cleverly variant vampire movie (Near Dark) and one about a gun-loving policewoman (Blue Steel): "I like to make films that are provocative, that can rattle your cage." Haines, who also directed Children of a Lesser God, says, "I'm consistently interested in projects in which the core of the story is communication and the struggles of human beings to connect."

Nor would anyone confuse Mary Agnes Donoghue's Paradise, a well-acted, sweetly stated and emotionally predictable tale of an estranged couple brought together by a visiting child, with Rambling Rose, which portrays a much more genially dysfunctional family involved with a randy and amiably obliging serving girl played by Laura Dern. Based on a script that Calder Willingham derived from his own novel, Rose's true preoccupation is one that the movies always cater to slyly but almost never directly confront: basic, down-and- goofy human horniness.

The immediate future promises this sort of eclecticism on a virtually month- by-month basis. After Jodie Foster's Little Man Tate comes Joan Micklin Silver's dramatic comedy Stepkids; Barbra Streisand's complex, epically proportioned psychodrama The Prince of Tides; and Lili Fini Zanuck's Rush, about a pair of undercover narcs who fall into addiction. Due next year are Nora Ephron's directorial debut, This Is My Life, about a divorced stand-up comic and her daughters, and Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own, about an all-female baseball league. Maybe by that time Mary Lambert's Grand Isle, an adaptation of Kate Chopin's feminist novel The Awakening will have found a distributor.

Most appealing about this catalog is that it defies convenient generalization. All of them could as well have been directed by a man. And in times past, of course, they all would have been. Until about a decade ago, the number of women who enjoyed sustained directorial careers in the U.S. could be counted in single digits: Lois Weber (Where Are My Children?) in the early 1900s, Dorothy Arzner (Christopher Strong) in the '30s, Ida Lupino (The Hitchhiker) in the '50s. As recently as 1975 Joan Micklin Silver and her producer husband Ray had to release her first feature, Hester Street, themselves. A studio executive told her, "It's hard enough to get a picture made and marketed. Women directors are just one more problem we don't need."

In 1981 the Directors Guild of America formed a Women's Steering Committee, largely on the basis of an astonishing set of statistics: of the 7,332 features made in Hollywood between 1939 and 1979, only 14 were directed by women. Partly because of pressure from the guild, partly because ambitious and talented women simply would not be denied, the numbers have improved -- a little. In 1990, according to the DGA, women directed 23 of the 406 feature films produced under guild contracts -- roughly 5%, only a small rise from the 4.2% average they had maintained over the previous seven years.

In other words, women are still fighting history. They may also be fighting the diminished expectations that those years bred into them. Donoghue recalls that when she was hired to write Beaches for Disney, she asked, "When do I direct?" The executive said, "You're the first woman writer who's asked me that question. Every guy who ever wrote a script, it's the first thing out of his mouth." Says Donoghue: "What I keep discovering is that most women's expectations are really low. You've got to get out there and ask for it."

Now the talent pool is at least a little deeper, a little more readily discernible to the Hollywood powers. "For the past 10 years or so," says Coolidge, "a certain number of women have been developing filmographies. There was no exciting additional number of films made by women, but we weren't standing still. What you are seeing is the accumulation of experience."

And, according to Bigelow, the accumulation of contacts. "What's been achieved for women," she says, "is access." As the Hollywood cliche goes, it's a relationship business, and all directors, male and female, need what Silver calls godfathers, studio executives who are sympathetic to their work. "Younger studio executives are more responsive to women. They have girlfriends, sisters, wives who work, and they are simply better attuned to the problems of working women, which includes the problems of women directors."

It does not hurt that women like Penny Marshall (Big) and Amy Heckerling (Look Who's Talking) have made megahits. And it certainly helps that women have long since proved that they can handle both temperamental actors and macho crews. The worst problem Donoghue had on Paradise was a well-meaning guy who called her "honey." It wasn't sexism, she thinks, but regionalism -- he was a Texan and suitably abashed when the error of his habitual ways was pointed out.

That squares with the experiences of Donoghue's colleagues. "It would be Pollyanna of me to say that sexism doesn't exist," Randa Haines comments. "But I've been very lucky. I haven't faced any real discrimination." Nor has Bigelow, who says, "I've never felt I've been discriminated against. There's been great support from the men I work with."

Most of the women who are working more or less regularly as directors feel they have reached a sort of plateau. Until recently, Coolidge says, "there were so few of us that every success for one of us was a success for all women, every failure a failure for all women. That was sad."

Are there movie realms into which women directors still feel they cannot tread? Some women think studio executives are uncomfortable trusting them with large-scale action and special-effects pictures, but most are indifferent to this form of discrimination. These movies are the biggest grossers, Donoghue admits, but she's not interested in doing them. Silver is reluctant to rule them out for women, "any more than I'd want to say that a man can't possibly do a childbirth scene." Lili Zanuck, whose Rush is said to be about as tough as movies come, thinks crime drama somehow suits her. "You want to tell a story you can tell best," and she likes "the reality, the element of factual truth" in Rush. Besides, she believes that the movie has strong box-office possibilities. "If you've got a commercial movie," she says, cutting to the chase, "no one cares who you are or where you come from."

Ultimately, that's the answer for all directors, male or female, newcomer or veteran. Nowadays, however, when American movies seem locked into formulas that have never been particularly stirring aesthetically and are not working terribly well at the box office, one has to believe that Martha Coolidge is posing the right question when she asks, "What can a woman offer?" To that, she supplies the simple, truthful answer: "A fresh perspective."

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Mayo Mohs/Los Angeles