Why do you think that so many directors are men?

A

alexpw

I was just thinking about this: it seems to me like an awful lot of directors are men in comparison to the amount of women in the profession, both in hollywood and in the indie circuit. Why do you think this is?
 
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Alexpw,

Great topic.

I'm neither a social historian nor an economist, but I can tell you the root of this discrepency is probably socio-economic (and cultural). (how's that for both a qualifier and a disclaimer:D).

I can only speak from my experience of being a female brought up (working class) in the United States. First let me say, that this is one of the few countries on the planet where women have a chance to become successful as filmmakers...for that I am blessed.

Pardon the following generalizations, but for the most part (given contemporary experience) they appear to be true.

I believe 'girls' are raised to be seen (that THAT is where their worth lays) and not heard, this certainly affects choices in regard to professions. There is a (biological)attraction to supra-natural beauty which I'm sure is a factor in that socialization.

Girls who show artistic 'talent' are directed towards the 'non-technical' arts, moreso.

To paraphrase, female hands, still, mostly, rock the cradle.
 
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I think alot has to do with the fact that women are expected to be practical nowadays. Filmmaking is about as impractical an endeavor as they come. Also, people in general are not really encouraged to do anything artistic because it is too risky. You must be brave to do anything that could be considered out of the ordinary.

Also, I think that there is probably still a 'boys club' mentality to a certain degree. But I still think that the salvation of film across the board, meaning women, minorities or what have you, is independent film.

When you look at what is coming out of Hollywood, everything is a remake. Dukes of Hazard!?! I will NOT be going to see that. Starsky and Hutch, Charlies Angels, Walking Tall, Rollerball!?! I could keep going.

These films make money, but we all can see that the films that stay with people are the one's with substance or a new voice. Boys Don't Cry, Blair Witch, Memento, Big Night (a personal favorite). Frankly, who needs pay tv when you can have IFC and Sundance? I do not pine away for cable.

We need independent film. It is the voice of real people. The voice of new stories. And all us rebels who dare say something different at least have a chance on the soap box. We have to make of it what we can.

...I hearby turn the floor over to the next rant-ee....

--spinner
 
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Interesting topic. I'll throw my $0.02 worth of observations in.

My friend Hitomi in Japan is an independent filmmaker; an excellent director. But she's always looked down upon and shunned by the men in the industry there just because she's female. She's told to stay home and cook for respect, as she'll get none making a name for herself in film. She can't get theatrical showings or air time on television. It's pretty easy to see she's discriminated against just because she's a woman.

What's shocking here is that I see this happening here in the US also. Damn shame. I'm sometimes embarassed to be a part of the human race.
 
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This is circumstantial evidence, but most women I know have no interest in film. In fact, I've only known one woman in my life that I'd consider as a film lover. Of course, she is a painter and not a filmmaker, and we can either chalk that up to personal preference or to her feeling she would have been descriminated against if she tried her hand at film.

I think this just speaks to what Filmjumper said about men being hardwired to be storytellers, at least more so than women (this is a huge generalization I know).

I think a bit of it is what spinner said as well. But I would argue that women are not forced to be practical by society, they're simply practical from the get go.

It would be silly of anyone to say that there isn't a bias among execs towards women filmmakers. If a producer was given truth syrum and asked which he/she preffered, I'm pretty sure most of 'em would say men. I think the common (mis)conception is that men are easier to work with, as far as handling stress and being even headed goes.

I don't know if we'll ever see a time in our society where we don't see a person as lumped into a group. I know that I am not like every other white American male and my friend Diego isn't like every other Hispanic immigrant. My wife isn't like every other woman, and niether are her sister, her friends, or her co-workers.

Poke
 
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I might agree that men are 'hardwired' to tell linear stories and I think women may have an easier time making abstract connections. Men-a,b,c... Women-a,z, a- m,a-f. Kinda like classical cutting compared to montage.:D

And I'm a painter and a filmmaker.

BTW, I've been in line waiting to rent eqiupment and everyone thought I just wanted to use the restroom. (just one of MANY stories) I'd better stop myself before I start bashing.
 
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So they thought you wanted to clean the bathroom.. :D

I would agree with Filmy, as to the hardwired storytelling bit. Also generally men are better as visuallizing things spacially. That is, the can see (with their minds eye) in three dimensions better than (MOST) women... or so the studies I have heard of say.

So if you took a 3d object, and unfolded it into a flat drawing, men generally can picture the 3d object if it were folded back to its original shape easier than women. That can be good for storyboarding, blocking, etc.

There's always exceptions to the rules though, and in my opinion some of the best directors are indeed female, but my opinion has to be taken with a grain of salt since my favorite genre consists of films fondly refered to as 'chick flicks' (Romantic Comedy if you're wondering).

:D
 
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Will Vincent said:
Also generally men are better as visuallizing things spacially. That is, the can see (with their minds eye) in three dimensions better than (MOST) women... or so the studies I have heard of say.

So if you took a 3d object, and unfolded it into a flat drawing, men generally can picture the 3d object if it were folded back to its original shape easier than women. That can be good for storyboarding, blocking, etc.:D
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....huh?,....er, uh,....Huh?

maybe your comment is in 3-D and unfolded flat...and I'm tryin' to see it in its original shape.... :huh: :D :lol:

--spinner
 
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Just a plain article from my fave newspaper... no commentary from myself.

Part 1 of 2

April 24, 2005

Hollywood's New Old Girls' Network

By NANCY HASS

Correction Appended

LOS ANGELES

NOT long after the talent manager and television producer Brad Grey was named the new chief of Paramount Pictures this year, he did something that has become almost routine in Hollywood: he put a woman in charge of the show.

Last month Mr. Grey - who succeeded Sherry Lansing, 60, in Paramount's top job - named Gail Berman, a respected television executive, to lead the studio's creative team. As a woman deciding what gets to the world's movie screens, Ms. Berman becomes the latest player in a quiet revolution transforming a business that until recently was regarded as a male preserve.

Four of the six major studios have women in the top creative decision-making roles, as Ms. Berman joins Stacey Snider, chairman of Universal; Amy Pascal, chairman of Sony Pictures; and Nina Jacobson, president of Walt Disney Company's Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group. Earlier this month, Ms. Snider announced that Mary Parent and Scott Stuber, would be stepping down as vice chairmen at Universal to become producers on the lot; their replacement is Donna Langley, the Universal executive who oversaw "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" and "In Good Company."

Though men still figure most prominently in the corporate echelons of the media companies that own the studios, and talent agencies like William Morris and Creative Artists Agency are still male dominated, these women, who over the years have fought and fostered one another as part of a loose sisterhood, have finally buried the notion that Hollywood is a man's world.

So striking is the change that some now see Hollywood as a gender-balanced model for the rest of corporate America. "It's astonishing," said Elizabeth Daley, dean of the film school at the University of Southern California. "You don't see that kind of progress in any other industry."

Women have come to predominate in Hollywood at a time when less than 1 percent of chief executive officers in the Fortune 500 are female, and none of the nation's top 100 publicly held companies have a female chief. According to the National Association of Law Placement in Washington, 87 percent of the partners in law firms are male, although for two decades more than 50 percent of law school graduates have been female.

It's true that women have yet to own studios - there is no female Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone - and that executives like the Sony Pictures chairman, Michael Lynton, and the Walt Disney Studios chairman, Dick Cook, outrank their studios' female executives. But the power to buy scripts, hire directors and even to greenlight films has become so thoroughly vested in a generation of women that the very notion of a female power ranking, like the one done at the end of the year by The Hollywood Reporter, has been deemed quaint.

"That kind of thing may be vaguely interesting in other businesses, but at this point, here, separating the genders is, well, pretty silly," Ms. Snider said.

While it's true that women have been kicking around - and getting kicked around - behind the scenes in Hollywood since the beginning, mostly as story editors, they only began to infiltrate the power structure in the mid-70's. The names from that era are near legendary, from Marsha Nasatir (executive producer of "The Big Chill"), a New York book editor who came to Los Angeles at 40 and became vice president at United Artists, and Rosilyn Heller and Paula Weinstein who rose to be vice presidents at Columbia and Warner Brothers respectively.

Ms. Weinstein recalls the competition among them as "incredibly intense." While women in the rest of the country were having their feminist consciousnesses raised, she said, Hollywood was "quite retarded."

"A lot of the women had a sort of 1950's hangover," she continued. "They got together at Ma Maison and talked about engagement rings."

By the mid-1980's, as women were gingerly entering the executive ranks throughout corporate America, two female powerhouses emerged in Hollywood: Dawn Steel and Ms. Lansing. (Ms. Steel, who was president of production at Paramount and then president of Columbia, died of a brain tumor in 1997.) Lucy Fisher, a producer, said one reason that the two women were allowed to rise was Hollywood's "immigrant, outsider ethos."

"Here," she said, "if it makes money and you're a gorilla, you're in."

The competitive ethos among women seemed to have reached its apotheosis in the 1980's; to this day, few in Hollywood will mention Ms. Steel and Ms. Lansing in the same breath without quickly adding - as if the pugnacious Ms. Steel were eavesdropping on them from above - that both staked a claim throughout their careers to being the first woman to run a studio. (Ms. Lansing was the first to land a spot as president of production, at 20th Century Fox, in 1980; Ms. Steel became the first female studio president when she took over Columbia in 1987.)

By then, more women were making their way to Hollywood. They had grown up during the auteur 1970's, when Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola made films that set cinephiles' hearts on fire, and the Ivy League universities, with their newly minted film studies departments, proved a particularly fertile breeding ground. Studio jobs, with their unusual combination of high pay, glamour and artiness lured graduates away from more traditional career paths like investment banking and law, said Ms. Fisher, who made her way to Los Angeles soon after graduating from Harvard. She became vice chairman of Columbia during the mid-1990's before leaving to produce such films as "Stuart Little" and the coming "Bewitched" with her husband Doug Wick.

The roles of producer or of executive attracted women, she and others surmise, because they held the promise of a steady paycheck and a chance to work on a team. It was alluring, Ms. Fisher said, "to those of us who didn't have the heart for the all-consuming horror that is a director's life, but wanted to be intimately involved with movies."

Many of the women gravitated toward Warner Brothers, where Ms. Weinstein was a vice president, including Ms. Fisher and, later, the daughter of the puppeteer Jim Henson, Lisa Henson, who went on to become president of Columbia in 1993. Vanity Fair memorialized some of them in a photograph in the mid-1980's as "The Warner Sisters." By then, there were enough women around to spawn a more collegial attitude, said Ms. Fisher, who added that her own attitudes were shaped by Ms. Weinstein's generosity.

But it was not only women who nurtured the new generation of female executives. Two men at Warners, Peter Guber and his partner, Jon Peters - the producers of "Batman" - proved to be unlikely mentors. Although known for slash-and-burn machismo, Mr. Guber and Mr. Peters, who both eventually moved to Sony, regularly filled their staffs with tough, talented women.

"These guys loved women, in the wrong way maybe sometimes, but also in the right way," said Laura Ziskin, who worked for Mr. Peters in the 1970's and credits his tutelage for helping her become the founding chairman of Fox 2000 in 1994. "Jon Peters was a hairdresser, you know? These men had a tendency to get into fistfights with other men. They were less threatened by women."

Mr. Guber, who over the years hired Ms. Heller, Ms. Snider, Ms. Pascal and Ms. Fisher, said he saw in the young women an obvious temperamental advantage, especially when it came to the core of a producer's job: handling actors and directors. "Most men at the time, including me, just roughed people up, they had no governor on their testosterone," he explained in a recent interview. "These women used their power elegantly. And it turned out they were right. That's why they're on top now."

If there was a moment when the accumulated force of women in Hollywood began to show itself, it probably was during the spring of 1993 on the macho terrain of the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City.

As swashbuckling executives and producers including Mr. Guber, Mike Medavoy and Jonathan Dolgen clashed over Arnold Schwarzenegger's ill-fated, high-budget "The Last Action Hero," a cadre of ambitious female executives was massing. The women included Ms. Henson; Ms. Pascal, who was a newly minted vice president; Ms. Snider, who had come to work for Mr. Guber and Mr. Peters; and Laurie MacDonald, who later led DreamWorks SKG's movie division with her husband Walter Parkes. There was also a powerful stable of female producers on the lot, including Lynda Obst ("Sleepless in Seattle"), Wendy Finerman ("Forrest Gump") and Christine Peters ("How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days").

As the men sweated and screamed over Mr. Schwarzenegger's gold-plated action extravaganza, some of the women worked on a modest project that came to symbolize the new order: "Little Women." Made for $19 million and shot in Canada with a female director, Gillian Armstrong, and producer, Denise DiNovi, it made nearly $50 million in the United States, virtually the same amount that "The Last Action Hero," which cost $60 million, a fortune at the time, was able to eke out in the domestic market.

"I didn't realize it at the time, but those two films really represent the beginning of a real shift," Ms. Pascal, 46, said. "At that moment, the female talent at the studio was just amazing."
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Part 2 of 2

From there, the women fanned out to different studios, often employing one another. "There's a little bit of an old girls club at this point," Ms. Pascal said. By the late 1990's, female executives, particularly Ms. Fisher, who cut her work week to as little as three days when she had young children, had smoothed some of the edges off the industry's go-go, late-night culture. "We needed each other for cover, so we could cut out for that concert our kid was in and not seem like slackers," said Ms. Jacobson, who has a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. (Such habits spread: even Steven Spielberg has joked publicly about the joy of taking "a Lucy Fisher day" with his children.)

Today, some female executives gladly talk about how gender has affected their jobs and their choices, but others are uncomfortable with undue focus on them as women. Ms. Pascal, for example, is well known for her effusive personality and her outspoken support of other women. Ms. Snider, all business, quickly switches the subject to the financial nuts and bolts of running a studio. "She's always talking about moving units in the home video market, which everyone knows is immensely boring," a female executive said of Ms. Snider, "but she wants to make sure people know she can play with the big boys when it comes to the bottom line."

Despite the differences in their styles, Ms. Snider and Ms. Pascal frequently ponder a bigger question, one that hovers in the background of any discussion about women and the movies: whether their gender has much of an effect on what, in the end, gets made. "It can't help but have at least a subtle influence on your decisions." Ms. Pascal said. "When I first started, I wanted to do movies about girl bands. I still do."

Ms. Ziskin noted that the decline of the pumped-up action figure epitomized by Mr. Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal coincided with the rise of female executives. Tobey Maguire's character in the "Spider-Man" films, for example, which she produced under Ms. Pascal's aegis, was clearly a more multidimensional superhero, Ms. Ziskin said. While at Fox 2000, she pointed out with considerable pride, she had produced the ultra-violent "The Fight Club," which was hugely popular with young men, but ultimately questioned the futility of male aggression.

Even Ms. Snider of Universal, who is hesitant to say that gender influences her, agrees that her studio's "Bourne Supremacy" and "Bourne Identity," with Matt Damon, presented a protagonist who was more complex and more ambivalent than many of his screen predecessors.

But Stacey Sher, a president of Double Feature Films, who was a producer of "Along Came Polly" and "Pulp Fiction," said she believed that the Schwarzenegger ethos is still alive and well, albeit sometimes in drag. "The Bride is the new Arnold," she said, referring to the female assassin in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill." It's unclear, she added, whether that shift can be directly traced to women behind the scenes or is simply a mirror of society's increased acceptance of aggressive females.

But one thing the women can claim as their own is a new genre, the "tween" girl flick. "It's not an accident that I'm a woman and I have a daughter and we've had the 'Princess Diaries' and 'Freaky Friday' here," said Ms. Jacobson of Disney's Buena Vista group. Those two movies, produced on modest budgets, have taken in more than $300 million at the domestic box office. Ms. Jacobson, who keeps a slightly tattered VHS of "Little Women" on her desk as inspiration, says the genre was born in the wake of "Titanic" in 1997, a blockbuster whose success was attributed largely to the packs of young girls who saw it over and over. The market has grown to encompass less-than-sugary movies like "Mean Girls" and, for better or worse, helped created such stars as Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan.

Still, when it comes to the large-scale economics of making a studio profitable, whether Hollywood's women remain on top will depend on these executives' ability to serve a popular taste that demands new sensations. A female studio boss, even one whose business sense is as exquisite as her cinematic aesthetic, remains as much at the mercy of the moviegoing public as any mortal man. "We make as many good movies as bad movies," said Ms. Snider, who has had hits as big as "Meet the Fockers," and disappointments as troubling as "Van Helsing." "Ultimately you answer to the marketplace. It's a matter of what the audience wants to see, no matter who you are."

Directed by Mr. So-and-So

Women may have reached parity with men on the executive end of the movie business, but they are still rarely chosen to direct feature films. Only four of the top 100 films last year were directed by women, according to the Directors Guild of America, continuing a trend that has long plagued Hollywood.

"It's our No. 1 concern," said Elizabeth Daley, dean of the film school at the University of Southern California.

Some producers say the problem is a dearth of women studying directing in film school. "They just don't want a director's life," said Laura Ziskin, a producer who made the recent "Spider-Man" movies for Sony Pictures. "It's a 24-hour a day job. How can you go on a 120-day shoot when you have kids?"

Ms. Daley said the pipeline is indeed part of the explanation - only about a third of the women who come to the U.S.C. program are interested in directing - but not all of it. "There are talented girls who want to do this, but so far they haven't done what the boys do - band together and sacrifice everything to make a small film," she said. It's those films that eventually find their way into the hands of studio executives looking for the next hot young thing.

Young women are less likely to get support, both financial and emotional, from their parents, Ms. Daley added. "In my experience, parents of girls aren't as eager to give them their life savings to make a movie," she said.

But some executives, male and female, suggested that directing might require personal characteristics that few women possess. "The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless," said a woman who has been both a studio chief and a producer, but didn't want her name used for fear of alienating temperamental directors. "They have a cold streak that most women I know don't have and don't want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film."


Correction: May 1, 2005, Sunday:

An article last Sunday about women who are powerful executives in Hollywood misspelled the given name of a producer whose films include "The Big Chill." She is Marcia Nasatir, not Marsha.
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Also generally men are better as visuallizing things spacially. That is, the can see (with their minds eye) in three dimensions better than (MOST) women... or so the studies I have heard of say.
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So if you took a 3d object, and unfolded it into a flat drawing, men generally can picture the 3d object if it were folded back to its original shape easier than women. That can be good for storyboarding, blocking, etc.
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Ha, and my neighbor still can't friggin parallel park without jumping the curb or butting a bumper. :hmm:

I'm not sure what studies your referencing, but, again, speaking as a woman, and in my personal experience; I believe this aptitude has more to do with being an artist rather than a particular gender. For example: I had to take a 6-part battery test for a pilot program for a hugh corporation. 1000's took the test because the pay (for the positions) was the highest in the area. I tested 97% and up on all of these tests (most being comprehensive type like you describe) and I consider myself an artist but also an average woman. When I called the Job Service to ask when this company would be scheduling interviews, I was asked if I understood that 'so and so just layed off a couple hundred men who had families to support' and SHE hung up on me. In other words, those men, regardless of 'comprehensive skills ' would receive priority in consideration. But, seriously, this is nothing new.

).
"The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless," said a woman who has been both a studio chief and a producer, but didn't want her name used for fear of alienating temperamental directors. "They have a cold streak that most women I know don't have and don't want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film."
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Covered :lol: .
 
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I wonder if anyone stops to think about the kind of films being made today, their trashy, vulgar and just down right stupid, and with that said, i don't see a woman's name in the credits as to being a director. So........maybe if there were MORE women filmmakers maybe we would have some GOOD movies to watch. Just because i'm a GIRL nobody takes my film making passion seiously ("aww how cute she wants to try and be a director") but if a man does it ("ohhh good for him!!! way to go pal!) What do us women have to do to prove to this male dominated society, that what we do and say count too? (Just my opinion)
 
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The simple problem with this whole topic is generalization.

Everything gets generalized in society. If you say that more women directors would mean more good movies, then you are generalizing. I mean, define "good." Because what's good to you might not be good to me.

The same holds true for the idea that men are better storytellers - I think Nora Ephron is a better storyteller than Michael Bay, but Joe Bloe might not think so.

Our society is too diverse to be blanketed by simple statements.

Poke

P.S. Just so everyone knows, I'm a man, and I can parallell park like the gods.
 
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RoxyBright said:
But i'm still stickin to what i said.
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That's your right. And I'm not trying to tell you to stop thinking that you have a hill to climb to make it as a woman filmmaker. In fact, I think the metaphorical hills, whether real or imagined, we choose to see an climb are the things that make us great in life as well as filmmaking.

RoxyBright said:
...but if a man does it ("ohhh good for him!!! way to go pal!) What do us women have to do to prove to this male dominated society, that what we do and say count too? (Just my opinion)
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I am a man and it took me a long time before I was told, "Good for you!!! Way to go pal!" For many years I struggled to make people see I had talent and could make it as a filmmaker. I was born and raised in Waco, TX, and kids from Waco have about as much chance of making it in Hollywood as...well, as a Hollywood star has of "fitting in" in Waco. Add to that the fact that I am a Christian. Strike three is that growing up I was not known for my work ethic. So my folks, my friends, my relatives, everyone that knew me didn't think I could make it. I got no "attaboys" from them.

In fact, it wasn't until I joined this board that I felt good about my desire to be a filmmaker. And that's the message I pass to you. As long as you're here, you are a filmmaker, and that's how we'll view you.

Poke
 
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