Opinion Behind the camera, an absence

Those doing the hiring used to be almost all men. In 1987, Dawn Steel became the president of Columbia Pictures, making her the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. Since then, women have held power positions throughout the industry and two women now help run studios and others head up divisions. For years, I thought more female executives would mean more female directors. Yet sexism in the workplace doesn’t necessarily surface in clear, crude ways, and it’s unusual for anything damning or actionable in the movie business to leak out. Sexism there often works like a virus that spreads through ideas, gossip and stories about women, their aesthetic visions and personal choices, and doubts about whether they can hack it in that male-dominated world. Of course, the end result is that female directors don’t get hired.

There isn’t a backroom cabal of cigar-chomping male — and female — executives conspiring against female directors, at least that I know of. Rather, the reluctance to hire women seems symptomatic of a conservative, fear-driven industry that recycles the same genres, stereotypes and impoverished ideas year after year. So, exactly like the outside world, the movie business clings to dusty stereotypes as when insiders refer to directors as generals and ship captains, as if today women don’t have those jobs. All that said, it remains surprising that the industry fails to grasp that women, on screen and behind the camera, are good for the bottom line. The evidence — Waiting to Exhale, Mamma Mia, Sex and the City, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Frozen — is indisputable.

Women in power, often the beneficiaries of male munificence, tend to be treated harshly when they betray that gift by failing. That may help explain why female executives as a group are not better advocates for female directors. What makes this situation even more alarming is that women sometimes seem close to becoming an endangered species on American screens. The researcher Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, found that in 2013, female characters made up just 15 per cent of protagonists and 30 per cent of all speaking characters in the top 100 grossing movies. Female directors tend to make more movies about women than male directors do — but they need the money or a job to tell those stories.

Scholars have theorised that women were squeezed out of the industry once the business of movies became big business. Money — getting it, keeping it and putting it on screen — remains one of the biggest barriers that female directors confront. The producer Cathy Schulman (Crash) is the president of the production company Mandalay Pictures and of the advocacy group Women in Film. She has a history of success. But, she blurted out in an interview in August, “My success rate is horrific in getting the movies with female directors made.” It was such a surprisingly candid admission that I asked her to repeat it. She did, adding: “I can’t get the money. It’s not the projects, it’s not the development, it’s not the writers, it’s not the directors and the actors. It’s the money.”

The producer Cassian Elwes, who’s helped get movies like Dallas Buyers Club off the ground, said that equity financiers want to make good movies. The “tricky part,” Elwes said, is that foreign sales companies provide the presale estimates for the value of a movie in territories outside the US. Producers are able to borrow money against those estimates to help finance the movie. “And the moment that you mention that it’s a female director” to foreign sales companies, Elwes said, “you can see the eyes start to roll.” He added: “The buyers want action films and they don’t see women as action directors. That’s where the whole thing kind of blows up.”