Female movie producers had a record year
Women shut out for best-director awards, but representation is there
LOS ANGELES— Since the start of Hollywood’s awards season, the question has plagued the industry: where’s the recognition for female filmmakers?
For the second year in a row, no women were nominated for best director at the Oscars. Female directors were also shut out of the BAFTA nods, helping prompt a widespread backlash and soul searching within the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Producer Shannon McIntosh, who is nominated for best picture for her work on “Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood,” agrees that the film industry has a severe problem when it comes to providing opportunities for women behind the camera. Still, she couldn’t help getting annoyed by one aspect of the conversation about female representation.
“What’s wonderful is there are a lot of us female producers, so around the Golden Globes, I got a little upset when people were saying no women were nominated,” McIntosh said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m a woman.’”
McIntosh has a point. At this year’s Oscars, which take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre, eight of the nine best-picturenominated films have at least one credited female producer. That’s the most since the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began nominating up to 10 best-picture contenders about a decade ago. Since the early 1950s, the top honour has been presented to the film’s producers, whereas previously the award went to the production company.
Martin Scorsese’s crime epic
“The Irishman” was produced by two women, Jane Rosenthal and Emma Tillinger Koskoff, who is also nominated for Warner Bros.’ “Joker.” Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures’ First World War epic “1917” also counts two female producers: Pippa Harris and Jayne-Ann Tenggren.
Chernin Entertainment executive Jenno Topping produced “Ford v. Ferrari” with Peter Chernin and James Mangold, while Chelsea Winstanley produced the Nazi comedy “Jojo Rabbit” with her husband, Taika Waititi, and Kwak Sin Ae produced Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean thriller “Parasite.” Meanwhile, former Sony Pictures film chief Amy Pascal is the sole nominated producer of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.”
Producers, especially female producers, are easy to overlook, partly because most people have only a vague understanding of what they do. They figure out how to bring a filmmaker’s vision to the big screen, performing a wide array of crucial but unflashy functions, such as overseeing script development, managing budgets, devising production schedules, assembling crew and serving as a communiqué between the director and the studio.
Despite their pivotal role in these Oscar-nominated films, Hollywood still gives short shrift to the contributions of female filmmakers.
Women have historically had a greater presence in producing jobs than in the director’s chair. Of the Producers Guild of America’s more than 7,000 members, 43 per cent are women, many of whom get into producing after years of working as filmmaker assistants and studio executives. Tillinger Koskoff, for example, worked for power players such as talent manager Rick Yorn, actress Uma Thurman and director Ted Demme before joining Scorsese.
In contrast, the Directors Guild of America’s membership, which includes professionals such as assistant directors and stage managers, is 24 per cent female.
The lack of women directing high-profile films is even more striking, despite recent gains. A January study by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that 10.6 per cent of the directors of last year’s 100 highestgrossing movies were women. And that was a big jump from 4.5 per cent in 2018.
Harris, who co-founded Neal Street Productions with “1917” director Sam Mendes in 2003, said that the pace of change has been incredibly slow, something she has noticed through her years working in the British media industry. Risk-averse studios have seen women directors as risky bets, despite the success of multiple female-led movies. That fear increases as budgets escalate.
“Certainly, when I was starting out in the business, I worked with only one female director, but I worked with dozens of female producers, female heads of drama and heads of channels at the various broadcasters,” said London-based Harris, who previously served in major roles at the BBC and other companies. “So I think it’s always been the case that there have been role models for people like me, whereas there weren’t those role models for female directors. That doesn’t explain today why there still aren’t female directors being recognized.”
The Oscars’ lack of women directors was particularly striking given the number of acclaimed female-helmed pictures in 2019, including Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” Lorene Scafaria’s “Hustlers” and Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart.” Even Gerwig, whose “Little Women” is up for best picture and five other awards, couldn’t get a directing nod.
That’s despite efforts by the academy to shake up its voter pool. In its latest effort to diversify its ranks, the academy in July added 842 new members (it now has 9,500 members). With its latest class, which is 50 per cent female, the representation of women in the organization grew to 32 per cent. Ten branches of the academy invited more women than men this year, including, for the first time, producers, directors and screenwriters.
“The fact that there’s such a paucity of directors represented is on all of us, and everyone has to do better,” said Topping, the “Ford v. Ferrari” producer.