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September 05, 2004"Hey, where all the directin' women at?"
It's usually pretty easy to notice when somebody's taken something from you. It can be a lot harder to sense the absence of something you never had in the first place.
I was watching "Near Dark" this evening with a friend's cat. I’m house-sitting, the friend's other cat ran away recently, and I don't want the remaining cat to get too lonely while his mom is on vacation. Anyhow, the cat and I are enjoying "Near Dark," which I picked up (used) on VHS for $5 at Blockbuster. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good—good enough that you can see how/why subsequent writers and directors tried to incorporate elements from it into the likes of "Vampires" (which, heaven help me, I love—the film and the guilty-pleasure novel both) and "The Forsaken".
I looked "Near Dark" up on IMDB.com to find out more about the cast, since everybody but Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton were unfamiliar to me, and found out that it was directed and co-written by a woman, Katheryn Bigelow. She also directed "K-19: The Widowmaker" and "Strange Days"—the latter of which fell into the cinematic ocean with nary a ripple, but which I've always keenly enjoyed. Can I get a little more gritty cyber-punk with my dystopia? Yeah, that's the stuff.
It's not often that you see a woman directing a horror film, and it got me to thinking about the female director of "Ravenous" (another odd favorite), Antonia Bird. I looked her up on IMDB, also, and while she had other credits, "Ravenous" was the only project I'd ever heard of.
Katheryn Bigelow and Antonia Bird. She doesn’t do horror, but Nora Ephron makes three.
Okay. Where are the rest of the female directors?
It's simple. They basically don't exist.
According to a very interesting article on Salon, only four percent of the films coming out of Hollywood are helmed by women. That's bad enough as it is, but as the article goes on to mention, many of the films in that meager four percent are romantic comedy or "chick films"—the only sorts of projects Hollywood thinks a woman can direct, apparently. Imagine the outrage if Hollywood pigeon-holed men the same way—only letting them direct Westerns and brainless shoot-em-up movies, say—and had eunuchs or asexual aliens direct everything else.
Hollywood's defenders and detractors both so often paint a picture of it being an enclave of liberal thought that doesn't really reflect the rest of the country's mores (for better or for worse), but on the issue of gender equity, the nation at large has Hollywood beat: Nine percent of the country's senators are women, to Hollywood's four percent of women directors.
And apropos of nothing, here’s an intriguing tidbit of trivia from Lance Henriksen’s IMDB biography. Apparently, he was illiterate until age thirty, at which point he used film scripts to teach himself to read.
Posted by patrick at September 5, 2004 02:48 AM
CommentsIn defense of Hollywood's Liberal Enclave status standing in the face of the meager showing by women (and other minority) directors, remember this. The creative people are, for the most part, liberal. It's the money people who are conservative, and they greenlight directors.
So -- everyone and his dog on the creative side may think that Jane Doe is the only person who can direct the next big budget action flick, but some suit in an office looks at her credits, thinks, "Hm. Chick flicks..." and calls Rene Harlin or Michael Bay.
The joke is, some of the more memorable films I've seen have been directed by women, genre be damned. Just one example: Julie Taymor's Titus, one of the finest of the Shakespeare adaptation films -- and a pretty bloody, gory, violent, sexy piece.
And, ultimately, all of this is a big turnaround from the early days of Hollywood. In the 20s and 30s, there were a buttload of women who wrote and directed for the big studios. But that was because the big name Broadway directors didn't want to mess their hands with film, and "writing" a script was seen as little more than being a glorified typist.
Of course, I can't completely claim that conservatives won't hire women to direct. Hitler's favorite director, after all, was a girl...
Posted by: Jon Bastian at September 6, 2004 09:01 PM
In a word, wow. I haven't heard or read mention of Near Dark in a long while. Sure, even the good actors sometimes let it show they weren't getting paid as much as they did for Aliens, and the set direction and cinematography looks as if it were done by second-year film students, but Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart. Maybe it's the way they have vampires driving around in the day, surviving by spray painting black the windows of a beat-up station wagon. Maybe it's the way in which Lance Henricksen's and Jeanette Goldstien's characters, as they are about to die, recall with fondness the violent way in which they met and fell in love. Maybe it's because Near Dark has what so many contemporary movies lack: Style.
Speaking of Lance Henriksen, I read an interview with him in Fangoria or something similar a decade or so back. He mentioned how he went to the read for the Terminator all decked out in black leather jacket and jeans, hair oiled and slicked back, foil wrapped over all his teeth, walked right past the secretary and kicked in the door to the interview room. Sure, it may be a legend of his own creation. Then again, this Lance Henriksen fan prefers to think otherwise.
Posted by: Mad Monarch Voards at September 6, 2004 09:06 PM
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