Celluloid Ceiling

By Michelle Goldberg, Salon. Posted August 27, 2002.

Towering over the corner of Highland and Melrose in Hollywood last March was a billboard featuring the "Anatomically Correct Oscar." Pallid and stocky rather than sleek and golden, he stood covering his crotch next to the tag line, "He's white and male, just like the guys who win!" A project by art-world activists Guerrilla Girls and Alice Locas, a recently formed, secretive group of female filmmakers, the billboard highlighted the fact that a woman has never won the Oscar for best directing. In fact, only two have ever been nominated -- Lina Wertmüller for "Seven Beauties" in 1976 and Jane Campion for "The Piano" in 1993.

After the breakthrough best actor and actress wins by Denzel Washington and Halle Berry at this year's Academy Awards, Hollywood reveled in self-congratulation for its ostensible progressiveness. Yet just as black filmmakers remain marginalized and decent black roles remain scarce, the situation for women making movies is grim. As stickers from another Guerrilla Girls campaign proclaimed, "The U.S. Senate is more progressive than Hollywood. Female Senators: 9 percent, Female directors: 4 percent." That's according to a study undertaken at San Diego State University, and it suggests the extent to which the dreams that radiate off theater screens and into our culture are still almost exclusively the dreams of men.

At a time when film schools are graduating almost equal numbers of men and women, why is the movie business still such a closed shop? Many women from every stratum of the directing world -- established Hollywood types and shoestring independents, celebrated art-house stars and creators of light teen comedies, film school deans and movie historians -- tell remarkably similar stories of deep-rooted prejudices, baseless myths and sexual power struggles that litter the path to the director's chair with soul-wearing obstacles. "It is absolutely consistently more difficult for women from the beginning to the end," says Debra Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit organization Women Make Movies.

And things might just be getting worse. According to a study by Martha M. Lauzen, a San Diego State professor who studies the role of women in film and TV, women directed 7 percent of the top-grossing 100 films released in 2000. (In a sample of the top 250 films, the percentage was a little higher, at 11 percent.) Last year, that already dismal number plummeted. "We're just putting together preliminary figures for films released in 2001. The percentage [of the top 100 films] has gone way down. It looks like 4 percent, which means it's below 1992 levels."

Adds Martha Coolidge, president of the Directors Guild of America and director of such movies as "Rambling Rose" and "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," "I'm not seeing the hiring of women directors improving at all. It's a terrible testament to where the industry is going."

Contrary to expectations, things aren't much better in the indie world than in Hollywood. Using a sample of 250 films, Lauzen compared the top-grossing 50 films with the bottom-grossing 50, which tend to be indie films. "We've never found a significant difference in terms of women behind the scenes" in the bottom category, she says.

These numbers are important in understanding the problem because, as any male director will tell you, moviemaking is a brutal business for all involved. Mary Harron, director of "I Shot Andy Warhol" and "American Psycho," is married to director John Walsh, who has had a far more difficult time in the business than she has. "It's very difficult for women or men if what you're doing doesn't fit into industry standards of what people expect from a movie," she says.

Famed screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, whose movies include "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," adds, "I always think every movie should begin with a logo that says, for example, 'Warner Bros. did everything in its power to keep from making this movie.'"

Nevertheless, Harron says of the situation for women directors, "It is not all OK. It really isn't. It's still much harder for women to get started." The reasons why are a complex mix of economics, sexism, the tastes of executives and even self-sabotage.

Often, the hurdles start with discouragement in film school. When Coolidge applied to New York University's film school more than 30 years ago, she says she was told that she couldn't be a director because she was a woman (though she was accepted anyway).

One would like to think things have improved a lot since then, but according to Christina Choy, chair of the graduate division of NYU's film school, the mostly male faculty there still discourages female students in unconscious ways -- largely because its members don't relate to their work.

"I remember one student who made a beautiful film," says Choy. It was a short about a woman eating lunch alone in a park and being harassed by a man. "The camera showed he was playing with his dick. The male directing teacher went nuts and said it was pornography. If it was vice versa and you saw a woman lying on a bed, having a sexual arousal, that's no longer pornography," she says.

In the hallways of San Diego State, says Lauzen, "I have heard male professors say to female students, 'Don't even think about directing or being a cinematographer. Get into producing.'"

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