Women directors are MIA during this summer’s blockbuster season
Over the last year, women have seemingly gained ground in Hollywood with female directors leading the charge. But according to Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, “it is very easy to be misled by a few high-profile cases.”
“We see Ava Duvernay or the success of Patty Jenkins with ‘Wonder Woman’ or we see Greta Gerwig nominated for best director at the Oscars and we assume everything must be OK and women have achieved some sort of parity,” she said. “The truth couldn’t be further from that.”
Take the upcoming summer lineup, in which only two of nearly 50 films scheduled for wide release between May and August are directed by women: Susanna Fogel’s “The Spy Who Dumped Me” and Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s “The Darkest Minds” both open Aug. 3. That’s a worrying trend compared with last year, when there were fewer wide releases (around 40) but five were directed by women.
“My impression is that people believe in this notion of ‘creeping incrementalism,’ that things are getting a little bit better every year and that eventually this is an issue that will take care of it self,” Lauzen continued.
“But there is no evidence that that is the case.”
Each year for the last 20, Lauzen has written “The Celluloid Ceiling” with support from San Diego State University, where she is a professor. The study looks at the behind-thescenes employment of women in film.
Her 2017 analysis found that women constituted just 18 percent of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films domestically, a 1 percent increase from 2016 but nearly even with the number achieved in 1998.
Women accounted for 11 percent of the directors on the top 250 grossing pictures, a value on par with female director representation in 2000.
Last summer was notable for having five vastly different films directed by women receiving the 1,000-plus theater treatment: Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman,” Stella Meghie’s “Everything, Everything,” Lucia Aniello’s “Rough Night,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Megan Leavey.” (Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” came close but didn’t quite crack 1,000 engagements.) “Wonder Woman” would go on to become a record-defying blockbuster as the highest-grossing film of the summer and the third-highest-grossing film of the year at the domestic box office, and pulled in nearly $822 million worldwide.
Amid the “Wonder Woman” box-office reign, Fogel returned from Budapest where she was filming “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” an action comedy in which two best friends, played by Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon, unwittingly become part of an international conspiracy when one of the women discovers the boyfriend who dumped her was actually a secret agent.
Fogel called the new environment she returned to, in which Hollywood writ large was now looking to actually work with female filmmakers, a “culture shock.”
“The way I feel about female-driven content and women directors is just that there needs to be so many more movies like that,” Fogel said. “We need 10 ‘Wonder Womans’, 10 movies with different types of heroines.
“And while it gives this illusion that now we’re done, that progress is complete it’s never that easy and change takes much longer.
“And sometimes it’s more dangerous to think that we’re there when we’re not.”