TY - JOUR
AU - Hatch, Kristen
AB - In 2018, despite increased calls for more female directors, a mere 15 percent of the directors of Hollywood's five hundred top-grossing films were women. Anyone concerned about Hollywood's lack of diversity should understand the history of feminist efforts to diversify Hollywood and the reasons why women have not come close to reaching parity with white men in most sectors of the commercial film industry. Maya Montañez Smukler's excellent Liberating Hollywood offers a thoroughly researched examination of a moment in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism gave voice and political power to women who sought to change Hollywood's production culture by putting more women in the director's chair. Liberating Hollywood is a dual history. The book begins and ends with detailed accounts of collective efforts to reform the film industry, describing the how feminists used legal action to pressure Hollywood to change an entrenched production culture that defined directing as men's work. The decade was preceded by threats of legal action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and this was followed by a class-action lawsuit for employment discrimination, brought by the Director's Guild of America against Warner Bros. Pictures and Columbia Pictures. Drawing on court documents, interviews, and trade publications, Smukler offers a compelling analysis of the feminist struggle to increase the number of women directors in Hollywood. The core of the book describes the career paths of the sixteen women who did manage to make commercial films—studio films, independent features, and exploitation pictures—screened in American movie theaters in the 1970s. The women range from Elaine May, who had enjoyed considerable success as a screenwriter and comedian before Paramount Pictures hired her to write, direct, and co-star (a money-saving tactic) in A New Leaf (1971), to Barbara Loden, whose magnificent Wanda (1970) won the award for best foreign film at the 1970 Venice International Film Festival, to Stephanie Rothman and Barbara Peeters, who made low-budget genre films after working with Roger Corman. Smukler describes the diverse ways these women secured funding and arranged distribution, their struggles to maintain artistic control, and their films' receptions. The book would have benefited from more analysis of the common barriers to their long-term success and the factors that enabled these women—all of them white—to make films in 1970s Hollywood. Without this synthesis, the book runs the risk of emphasizing the individual struggles of remarkable women rather than offering broader lessons for a new generation of directors. But perhaps the point is that each of these women had to cut her own path. Despite their individual successes, they did not change the culture of Hollywood. This engaging and timely book is a long-overdue corrective to the histories of 1970s Hollywood that have celebrated the iconoclasm of “new Hollywood” without also asking why that iconoclasm did not extend to changing Hollywood's production culture, and why, at the height of second-wave feminism, Hollywood continued to define media-making as men's work. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema
JF - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz828
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/liberating-hollywood-women-directors-and-the-feminist-reform-of-1970s-PJWT0WVB9c
SP - 1143
EP - 1143
VL - 106
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -