Film Clips: Hollywood's a Bad, Bad Boyfriend

Carrie Rickey wrote an interesting piece for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists' site summarizing the stats of women in film in 2006. The stats she writes about include:

60% of Oscar nominated documentary features are directed by women,
40% of Oscar nominated foreign-films are directed by women,
25% of Sundance 2007 features and shorts are directed by women
10% of best-picture Oscar nominees are directed by women (although Little Miss Sunshine is co-directed by Valerie Faris)
6.25 % of top-250 domestic box office grossers in 2006 are directed by women
1.8 % of top-1000 domestic box office grossers in 2006 are directed by women.

Rickey doesn't posit anything based on these stats; she simply presents them as they are and then asks the question: what do we think those stats mean? Several of my fellow AWFJ members have responded with their own astute observations, so I thought I'd toss my own two cents on the subject into the pot.

Are the stats Rickey highlights good news or bad news for women? As with most stats, it depends how you look at it, really. Perhaps the more relevant question to ask is, do the vast majority of female filmgoers simply prefer well-marketed mediocrity to intelligent filmmaking? Take a look at the numbers. In 2006, only 6.25% -- that's 15.625 out of 250 movies -- were directed by women. Stepping aside from the issue of the gender of the person at the helm, if you just look at the Top 20-grossing films of 2006, here's how it breaks down: four of the 20 top-grossing films of 2006 -- a full 20% -- were animated family films. Of those four (Cars, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Happy Feet, and Over the Hedge), only two -- Ice Age and Happy Feet were even decent films.

Manly action-adventure flicks dominated the Top 20 as well: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men:The Last Stand, Superman Returns, Casino Royale, and The Departed -- raked in 25% of the Top 20. Night at the Museum, The Davinci Code, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahkstan, The Pursuit of Happyness, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Click, The Devil Wears Prada, The Break-up, Dreamgirls and Scary Movie 4 round out the top 20.

To be fair, there are some decent films in the Top 20. Many of them I gave good or at least decent reviews, and I'll even concede Happy Feet as at least being not the worst of kiddie fare for the year. But let's look at the rest of the 2006 top grossers: there are some astonishingly bad films on the list. Parents taking their kids to every animated flick that comes down the pike are clearly among the biggest box office offenders; among the big moneymakers of the year we find The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, Eight Below, Eragon (I'm still annoyed at how badly that one came out) and Barnyard. Among the films for grown-ups, we find RV, Big Momma's House 2, Little Man, Jackass Number Two, Date Movie, Lady in the Water, Snakes on a Plane -- that's just to name some of the top money makers of the last year that, in a perfect world, would have gone straight to DVD -- or, better yet, never been made at all.

Now take a moment to ponder the collective millions -- billions if you factor in concession stand snacks, kiddie-meal toy tie-ins and the like -- represented herein. The issue is not just how many women are behind the cameras or in the fancy offices at the studios. That's just the symptom of the underlying disease that permeates Hollywood, and what perpetuates the disease are the women who collectively make decisions around what movies to spend money on at the multilplex. The problem is, moms spending millions a year taking their kids to lousy kids' films (and I'm not giving the dads a free pass here, but I'd bet if you took a poll, it's the women making these decisions more than the men), which in turn encourages studios to pour more millions into making even more bad kids films.

The problem is also women accepting the tragically low bar of the Hollywood chick-flick as movies that we will shell out our hard-earned income for when we step out for a girls' night out. It's in how we excuse that mediocrity with a shrug and a "well, it was kinda cute, I guess" when we walk out of the theater feeling we've just been had -- again. It's the acceptance of multiplex dreck on date night rather than insisting on a really good film at the arthouse theater. Women need to speak out with their bank accounts and stop supporting dreck, period. We work, we earn paychecks, we have spending power, and how do we use it? We spend it on the kind of mediocrity that permeates the list of top grossing films with one hand, while bitching about how women are underrepresented in film with the other.

What's the standard for success here? Do we want more women at the top in Hollywood, even if all they do is churn out the same crap the men have been giving us for decades? (And no, of course not all men make bad films, nor do all male studio heads make bad decisions, but the fact is they do dominate Hollywood, and therefore they own a lions' share of the blame for what comes out of it.) There's quantity, and then there's quality, and I'd rather seen women representing 10% of Hollywood -- but 90% of what they make being great work -- than the other way around.

Women have been upping the ante in the documentary realm. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have Oscar's attention for the second year running; last year their excellent film Boys of Baraka (which should have been nommed) was on the Oscar shortlist, and this year Jesus Camp made it to the Final Five. Amy Berg knocked everyone's socks off with her stunning doc Deliver Us From Evil, and Laura Poitras' My Country, My Country, about an Iraqi doctor running for office, equally deserves its spot among the nominees.

If we want to support more women filmmakers making good narrative films (see: Sarah Polley's astonishing directorial debut with Away From Her, or Tamara Jenkin's carefully-crafted The Savages) , more actresses taking on challenging, non-traditional roles (see: Kate Winslet in Little Children, Ellen Page in Hard Candy, Jess Weixler in Teeth, Nicole Kidman in Fur, Tamara Podemski in Four Sheets to the Wind -- I want to see a LOT more of her -- or Toni Collette in pretty much anything), then we need to get off our collective duffs and stop accepting less.

The relationship women have with Hollywood is no different than the relationships we have with the men (or women) in our personal lives; if you accept being emotionally manipulated, marginalized, and told this is the best you can and should expect from the relationship, and you keep coming back for more, then that's what you're going to continue to get. It's time for some tough love tactics. We women need to use the collective bargaining power of our bank accounts to take control over the dysfunctional relationship we have with the lousy boyfriend Hollywood has been for years, and set our standards higher by refusing to spend money on anything less. Money is the only language Hollywood really speaks, and not spending our money on the mediocre is the only way Hollywood will ever sit up and take notice.

None of this is to say that women only ever want to see serious documentaries or more-intellectual-than-thou arthouse cinema, but for pity's sake, isn't there a middle ground out there somewhere of women directors who can make intelligent romantic comedies that don't paint women into the typical female roles of victim, shrew, sexpot, or chronically neurotic 30-something with a ticking biological time bomb? Can't women filmmakers -- and studios -- raise the bar just a notch or two? You know when we'll know women have really made it in Hollywood? When we no longer have to write articles about how few -- or how many -- wonen behind cameras there are, and can instead focus on purely critical assessment of their work, and not on their gender.