FILM; Even in Independent Film, A Suit Is a Suit Is a Suit

WHATEVER happened to Lizzie Borden? Claudia Weill? Joyce Chopra? Donna Deitch? Whatever happened to Julie Dash, Tamra Davis, Stacy Cochran, Leslie Harris, Kelly Reichardt? What all these women share is that each directed at least one — and, in some cases, two or more — provocative, critically acclaimed independent films, only to essentially disappear from the scene. With the exception of Ms. Davis, who went from the sexy neo-noir ”Guncrazy” in 1992 to directing slobbering studio comedies like ”Billy Madison,” most of these women have spent most of the last decade relegated to near obscurity, cable television or developmental limbo. Not one of these women has the sort of sustained filmmaking career enjoyed by their male counterparts, independent directors such as John Sayles, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Hal Hartley, Gregg Araki and Richard Linklater. Not one has graduated from footnote status to chapter heading.

It isn’t fashionable to talk about the alarmingly low number of American women directing independent features. In fact, the tendency is to insist that things are nowhere near as bad as they seem, if for no other reason than to avoid facing uncomfortable truths. It’s the sort of collective denial practiced by women and men alike that results in those preternaturally optimistic women’s film panels that clutter so many festivals, the endless special editions of magazines that haul out the usual suspects like Jodie Foster as evidence that, really, women don’t have it so bad, or even worthy celebrations like the New York Women in Film and Television retrospective, ”The Feminine Eye: Twenty Years of Women’s Cinema,” which began Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The problem with this sort of drumbeating is that it paints an entirely false picture of the contemporary independent film scene. It’s no small coincidence that the news media blitzes that turn first-time directors like Mary Harron (”I Shot Andy Warhol”) and Tamara Jenkins (”Slums of Beverly Hills”) into this month’s indie pinups tend to obscure the truth that independent film is no more hospitable to female directors than Hollywood is. If anything, sometimes it’s worse, a boy’s club where few girls are allowed.

There is no greater index of the state of independent cinema than the Sundance Film Festival, which ends today. This annual conflagration of hype, heat and hubris in the last few years has done more to alter the landscape of American film than all the Hollywood studios combined. Since 1984, the year it started, Sundance has gone from a cozy first stop for films such as Marisa Silver’s ”Old Enough” which won the Grand Jury Prize in the festival’s first year, to a high-stakes market for up-and-coming talent. The shift between then and now is directly traceable to 1989, the year Steven Soderbergh’s ”Sex, Lies and Videotape” won the festival’s newly created Audience Prize, signed on with a pugnacious distribution company named Miramax and went on to prove that there was money to be made with independent films. A shift, not so coincidentally, that can also be limned by the number of female directors who won the Grand Jury Prize for the dramatic competition during the 1980’s (four) and the number of female directors who won that same prize during the 1990’s (none).

”It would be dishonest to say that there was no boys club,” says Tom Ortenberg, co-president of Lions Gate Films. ”Not to play the prude, but I’m constantly shocked by some of the stuff I still hear. To think that people in the independent film world are more educated or more sophisticated, are not engaged in the same sort of locker-room mentality that unfortunately pervades society at large, would be naive.” While Mr. Ortenberg’s comments might seem obvious, it’s important to remember that originally the very definition of independent cinema was inseparable from a sense of esthetic and political opposition to the mainstream. It’s a sensibility that has all but disappeared with the indie film explosion of the 1990’s, with independent film turning out to be more an exercise in radical chic than an outlet for creative or political change.

Rachel Rosen, a programmer at the highly regarded San Francisco International Film Festival and a panelist on the Independent Feature Project’s Someone To Watch Award committee, calls the current profusion of independent film ”an irrational fad,” comparing it to the ”garage bands of the 80’s.” Although most indie filmmakers are, like the vast majority of garage bands, bound for nowhere, that hasn’t stopped legions of young men from picking up a 16-millimeter camera, or this year’s must-have digital video camera, and turning their sights on a deal with Miramax or any of the aggressive pretenders to its throne. Peter Broderick, president of Next Wave Film, a subsidiary of the Independent Film Channel that provides finishing funds and other support for filmmakers, says that while his company has received about 500 submissions over the last two years, the percentage of proposals originating from female writers and directors has been ”pretty low.” ”I wonder,” he says with an uneasy laugh, ”if women have better things to do in their lives?”

Ms. Rosen’s theory is ”that women are hedging their bets,” which explains why more women aren’t directing features while no comparable dearth exists for women working in documentary, video or experimental film. ”It’s a big gamble to be an independent director, and I think that historically women have not made those kinds of big gambles. I don’t know a single woman filmmaker who would charge a movie on a credit card. Women are self-censoring their irrational dreams.”

The longtime producer Polly Platt, who moves between the independents and studios, calls directing ”really, really, really a difficult job. Women are generally nurturing, that’s why they become producers rather than directors, they tend to pour oil on troubled waters.”

She likens directing to ”having a kindergarten with about 100 little children running around, 100 drunken children. That should make it very suitable for women, but it isn’t just the drunken children, it’s all the executives and painful decisions you have to make before you shoot the movie. It’s an unbelievably terrifying job.”

In 1989, the year in which ”Sex, Lies and Videotape” changed everything, the film that actually won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance was a tough, funny picture called ”True Love,” written and directed by Nancy Savoca. This month, Ms. Savoca was back at Sundance with her fourth film, ”The 24 Hour Woman,” financed by the scrappy New York-based Shooting Gallery. (Her film opened the Women in Film and Television retrospective last week.)

Like a lot of directors, the New York-based Ms. Savoca doesn’t draw too many distinctions between the independent film world and Hollywood: what matters is who’s filling the suit. When Ms. Savoca was making her second film, ”Dogfight,” for Warner Brothers, she and her husband, the producer Richard Guay, were summoned to Los Angeles for a meeting.

”They were trying to get us to change the ending of the film,” Ms. Savoca recalls. ”They flew me and my husband out for what ended up being a three-hour screaming match in which they did all the screaming. I was a good girl, I sat and listened. I could appreciate that they were looking at something that they could push versus something that they couldn’t sell. Finally I said, ‘Look, if you feel this strongly, how about taking my name off the movie?’ I guess they felt they didn’t want that story running around town that they had beat up this little independent filmmaker. The conversation ended with this one executive who, red in the face, said, ‘You know, this has been the worst meeting I’ve ever had in my life, fighting with you has been like fighting with my wife. Her name is Nancy, too.’ My jaw dropped. I walked out, turned to Richard and said, ‘Well, there you go.’ ”

NOBODY doubts that the independent film world is a boys’ club; what everyone disagrees about is just how exclusive a club it is. ”It may be a boys’ club,” contends Susan Glatzer, an acquisitions executive at October Films, ”but girls can still play.” Ms. Glatzer has been working in independent film for eight years, the last four at October. ”There are times when I look around the room, and not just at my company, and I’m the only woman in the room.”

Ms. Glatzer, who was the first at her company to spot Lisa Cholodenko’s minor art-house hit, ”High Art,” at last year’s Sundance, points out that October has a number of production deals with women, including with Ms. Cholodenko for her next feature. Ms. Glatzer acknowledges that a glass ceiling for executives does exist in indie filmmaking: only one of the nominal indie film companies is led by a woman, Ruth Vitale, the former head of Fine Line who now runs Paramount Classics. But she believes that as more women call the shots and more female-oriented films are released, change is inevitable.

It won’t be easy. There are enough female filmmakers out there already who are familiar with executives who turn down projects because they don’t get it, don’t want to get it or don’t think that their (male) boss will get it. All of which, naturally, presupposes that a woman is going to screw up the courage and single-mindedness to get a movie going in the first place. ”In a way,” says one entertainment lawyer who did not want her name used, ”part of my job is helping women gain a greater sense of entitlement. Many of the women I see don’t feel that right away.” Then this lawyer has to protect the women from those who call them ”hysterical and high-strung.”

Even the most enlightened observers occasionally ask whether women have what it takes to direct, or are willing to sacrifice their sense of what it means to be female in order to become an independent filmmaker. Without question, the prototype for the independent American movie director remains overwhelmingly male: The monomaniacal visionary caught between genius and madness who sacrifices everything to direct. The choice for female directors is clear. Either to accept that male model, and risk being damned for behaving the same way your male counterparts are rewarded for behaving every day, or try to forge a new path. The danger with the latter choice is that you just might get jeered off the set, which is more or less what happened to one female director who years ago decided to ask the opinion of everyone on the set before she began shooting.

”I don’t think women think there’s any danger anymore,” says Allison Anders, one of the few indie female directors to have ridden out the 1990’s intact, and who thinks that too many women believe that the war has already been won. ”Blacks are constantly reminded that their status is always in jeopardy,” Ms. Anders says. ”Spike Lee is never comfortable with his status.”

After enduring some public struggles with Miramax over the 1995 anthology, ”Four Rooms,” Ms. Anders returned to basics with her most recent film, ”Sugar Town,” a sexual roundelay, which had its world premiere last week at Sundance. Ms. Anders was the co-writer and co-director of the film with her close friend Kurt Voss and shot it in the homes of various friends. In adopting the do-it-yourself mode of filmmaking, Ms. Anders actually embraced an approach that is similar to the radical film collectives of the late 1960’s. That model, says Next Wave’s Peter Broderick, ”with a group of people making the decision to go through hell or high water together — I can see women finding that more appealing.”

If that example doesn’t match our image of the obsessive indie film director hustling his way into meetings, hustling his way into a deal, hustling onto a set and then into Sundance and, finally, hustling into the ever expanding legend of the young boy wonder, then perhaps it’s time to re-examine that image. Perhaps it’s time women took the little boy’s baseball cap away.