Hollywood's Femme Fatality Rate
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In the mid-'70s, when women (among them Claudia Weill, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Darling) were getting the chance to direct mainstream movies, Pauline Kael cautioned against expecting great things right away. Filmmakers needed a chance to learn and develop, she said, and there was always a chance they might not, or might simply become proficient hacks. It didn't matter, she was quoted as saying, whether there was a king or a queen on top of the garbage heap.
Daphne Merkin's profile of Nancy Meyers in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back was an attempt to claim that a Garbage Queen was a step forward. The trouble with the piece, as with almost every plight-of-women-in-film article, is that the relentless focus on Hollywood winds up saying that the women directors working outside the mainstream don't exist....
Thinking of the women who made films in the last year, I (Charles Taylor) came up with Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Agnès Varda, Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim, Catherine Breillat, Karyn Kusama, Havana Marking, Anne Fontaine, Drew Barrymore and Andrea Arnold. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty of others. And that list doesn't include other contemporary women directors like Sofia Coppola, Nicole Holofcener, Lynne Ramsay, Barbara Kopple, Darnell Martin, Stacy Cochran, Kasi Lemmons, Gillian Armstrong, Catherine Hardwicke, Allison Anders, Lynne Stopkewich, Kimberly Peirce and Patty Jenkins.
Those names carry their own untold stories, the years between projects (during which many got by on TV work), the films that didn't get released, the projects that went to more established directors (to think we lost Lynne Ramsay's "The Lovely Bones" only to get Peter Jackson's disaster). But it's not a list you come up with if your idea of a movie is limited to what's at the multiplex.
What's so insidious about making Nancy Meyers Hollywood's little-engine-that-could is that her films present perhaps a particularly retrograde notion of womanhood..."
Daphne Merkin's profile of Nancy Meyers in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back was an attempt to claim that a Garbage Queen was a step forward. The trouble with the piece, as with almost every plight-of-women-in-film article, is that the relentless focus on Hollywood winds up saying that the women directors working outside the mainstream don't exist....
Thinking of the women who made films in the last year, I (Charles Taylor) came up with Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Agnès Varda, Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim, Catherine Breillat, Karyn Kusama, Havana Marking, Anne Fontaine, Drew Barrymore and Andrea Arnold. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty of others. And that list doesn't include other contemporary women directors like Sofia Coppola, Nicole Holofcener, Lynne Ramsay, Barbara Kopple, Darnell Martin, Stacy Cochran, Kasi Lemmons, Gillian Armstrong, Catherine Hardwicke, Allison Anders, Lynne Stopkewich, Kimberly Peirce and Patty Jenkins.
Those names carry their own untold stories, the years between projects (during which many got by on TV work), the films that didn't get released, the projects that went to more established directors (to think we lost Lynne Ramsay's "The Lovely Bones" only to get Peter Jackson's disaster). But it's not a list you come up with if your idea of a movie is limited to what's at the multiplex.
What's so insidious about making Nancy Meyers Hollywood's little-engine-that-could is that her films present perhaps a particularly retrograde notion of womanhood..."
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