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Home , Adrienne Shelly, Arlene Dahl, Ashley Judd, A Question of Silence, Big Wednesday, Carol Kane

by Jennie Rose

I start at the beginning, with this simple fact: women have been in the motion picture business as long as men have.

Thelma & Louise

As the film industry grew from the ground up, the ratio of women to men in positions of power shifted disproportionately. But in spite of a heavy dose of paternalism in the film industry, every generation grows in skill and talent as more women inside - and outside - make movies. With the arrival of each new decade comes the arrival of new challenges for women to find their places again, as the changing nature of the business makes new rules and, hopefully, breaks the old ones.

A tougher pill to swallow is the notion of how female characters are written in the movies. That we are expected to believe these roles is distressing. The truth is, with a few exceptions, American male directors and writers have a skewed angle on what women are like and not like. And thus we have a fair share of stereotypes based on some oversimplified ideas about womanhood, like the domestic goddess, the success, and the screw-up.

In over a hundred years of film history, variations on the female image have been winnowed down to a few archetypes: the pillar of virtue ( in The Pajama Game [1957]), the domestic goddess ( [1986]), hard-headed dames ( High Sierra [1941]) or gangster gal ( Boxcar Bertha [1972]), the ( The Lady From [1948]), liberated woman ( Klute [1971], featuring 's Academy Award-winning performance), women in jeopardy (anything with ), and scrappy, single moms ( Goodbye Girl [1977], Erin Brockovich [2000]).

Women's films have often tried to deal with other themes, broadening the scope and the concept of narrative, but not as much in Hollywood as outside. Claudia Weill's milestone, Girlfriends (1978), deals with differences in friendship. Thelma and Louise (1994) is a parable of freedom as is 's My Brilliant Career (1979) with the amazing . , Not a Pretty Picture and are all efforts to tackle the subject of rape. Female community, as a theme, is addressed by Daughters of the Dust .

But everyone knows that Hollywood can suck the juice out of themes that stray outside a formula. For instance, the Hollywood spin on women and community can be seen in the 1995 movie How to Make An American Quilt , a coming of age romantic drama offering a superficial treatment of a premise that could go much deeper. It ends with a classic scenario in which a boy and a girl fall in love after a great deal of whining. Themes of empowerment and identity were still being denuded by Hollywood's fluff treatment.

Suffragette City: The Silent Era

In the silent era, the movie industry was a very different place, with more collaboration, innovation and openness than can be found in the industry of today. In the "start-up" era, women worked at every level of the filmmaking process. In fact, women worked on equal levels in Hollywood long before they even had the right to vote. A major body of work from as early as 1912 bears the female imprint on it. But until recently, you might never have known it; working in early film have been buried in the dustbin of history.

In 1995, the collective project " Women Film Pioneers " was spearheaded by Duke University's Professor Jane Gaines. A major subject of research is , the first woman to direct a feature film ( Merchant of Venice [1914]). She later became one of the top- salaried filmmakers in Hollywood. Because of her financial success, Weber pursued independent productions of her own; her first indie, To Please One Woman (1920), amounted to a sermon about the sin of selfishness. Her droll satires How Men Propose (1913) and Too Wise Wives (1921) appear on this disc of the Origins of Film set.

With the suffragette movement in full swing, women in Hollywood produced films like Mothers of Men (1917), which was remade as Every Woman's Problem in 1921. In 1917, "Women got the vote and the barbers got our hair," wrote , the hardest working scriptwriter in Hollywood, prodigiously cranking out hundreds of memorable screenplays. Marion, just one of many successful women in the business at that time, was freakishly gifted. She became a leader of the early union movement that resulted in the creation of the Screenwriter's Guild and was a creative influence on both silent films and the talkies. At the advent of sound, Marion easily made the leap. In November 1930, she received an Oscar for writing the prison expose The Big House , a technically groundbreaking film because of its use of sound. By that time, Marion had 100 films to her credit.

Today, Marion has the reputation for creating some of the best films about relationships ever written. Her work includes the romantic (1930), starring , the box office star who helped keep MGM in the black during the Depression; The Champ (1931) about a son and his father; and Dinner at Eight (1933) with an aging Dressler. Also known as the "queen of adaptations," Marion wrote The Scarlet Letter (1926), which starred as Hester Prynne, the best of the multitude of Letter adaptations during that era. Perhaps the biggest feather in Marion's cap was writing and directing the beautiful and neglected silent classic, The Love Light (1921). A highly insightful documentary about her is Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood (2000).

Mary Pickford and Frances Marion

Marion wasn't the only female writer of that era to make it big. Women wrote half of all the films released in 1920; among these writers were ( Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1921]]), Lora and Theda Bera, Florence Vidor, , and Ada Roger. All of these women were Frances Marion's friends, and they socialized regularly at salons. The boys club was fine, as long as the girls could have theirs too. Frances Marion left a parting thought about solidarity when she wrote, "I owe my greatest successes to so many women who gave me real aid when I stood at the crossroads." During the backlash against feminism in the 1980s, the Hollywood women who weren't hiring other women could have used this reminder of professional sisterhood.

In the 20s, women in film sat at the top of the food chain with nary a shark bite, occupying niches equal in the hierarchy with men. In the years 1912 to 1920, female stars controlled about twenty film companies. 's , , directed some of the Little Tramp's first films at Keystone, while Gale Henry wrote, directed, and produced several two reel shorts for Century Comedies. Women who headed up production companies in the included Nell Shipman, Lois Weber, Dorothy Davenport (often credited as Mrs. Wallace Reid) and Norma Talmadge. And then there was Frances Marion's best friend, . Pickford owned her own production company, and was the only woman involved in founding the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927.

Women often worked as film editors and cinematographers, two fields of the industry nowadays considered to be typically male- dominated. , the stalwart of MGM from the 1920s to the , is still credited today for her fluid and classic Hollywood cutting style. Booth's editing style can be seen as late as the 1973 box office The Way We Were (for which she was supervising editor).

1930s: Screwball Women and Screwy Subtexts

The Great Depression of the brought people to movie theaters in droves. For 15 cents, Americans could escape their worries for two hours. In fact, audience demand for entertainment led to the industry's output of more than 400 movies a year. Everything from screwball comedy to melodrama, morality tales to gangster films, rolled out of Tinseltown in the 30s.

This was also the second full decade in which women had voting rights, and the new freedom found its way into the subtext of many screwball comedies. Perhaps because more of the film audience was made up of women, men in these comedies were often either eye candy or the comic foil. In The Lady Eve (1941); Nothing Sacred (1937) with screwball queen Carole Lombard ; The Palm Beach Story (1942); (1940) with a fast-talking ); and in The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne , ladies got the upper hand in situational gender bait and switches.

The Women

My favorite actor from the era, Rosalind Russell, played in one of my favorite movies of the era: 's version of Clare Booth's play The Women (1939). Adapted by and , The Women features no men, and also seems to feature no plot. But who cares? The film's ensemble cast - which also included , , , Paulette Goddard , and at least one hundred other women - dis, argue, gossip and bitch about each other at break-neck speed. It's a riot, though feminist film theorists might have something to say about the apparent paucity of sisterhood.

Hays Code

During this era, the oppressive Hays Code dampened some of the riotousness. The Hays Code (also known as The Motion Picture Production Code) imposed in 1934 moral standards on film artists and demanded that the subject of sex and inference to any so-called "sex perversion" be strictly regulated. Film writers and directors resorted to mere suggestion, doing their best to subvert the Hays Code by writing sexuality into their stories. For instance, they merely hinted at homosexuality through a character's mannerisms and behavior. Since the heart of the screwball comedy was usually romance and lust, it had to be handled with double entendre and euphemism. The result was often very clever dialogue.

It is also interesting to look at Hays Code era films in which sexual themes were entirely suppressed. In 1935, the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to 's controversial play The Children's Hour , which featured a lesbian character. Rather than have the censors harass her about the script, Hellman erased the lesbian from her play. Directed by William Wyler , the 1936 version of this film, These Three , stifled the lesbian theme; the film is now considered something of a bore. Wyler remade The Children's Hour with and Shirley MacLaine in the 1960s, which brought lesbianism out of the closet somewhat, though the subject was not effectively confronted in this version either.

Hepburn and MacLaine in the later version of The Children's Hour

Working behind the lens in the 1930s was the first woman to enter the Director's Guild, ( Get Your Man [1927], Working Girls [1931]), who peppered conventional sex roles with a suggestion of lesbianism. Set in a women's hostel, Working Girls shows women dancing together and winking flirtatiously at each other. As usual in films of the era, double entendres are used to broach sexuality (i.e., the protagonist is hired by a lecherous professor, mostly because he feels she can give him "satisfaction.") Arzner also directed Craig's Wife (1936), a morality tale of the sort that was popular at the time, this one focusing on a bad marriage between a domineering woman and the rich man she marries to further her own ambitions.

Queen Christina (1933) featured an androgynous based on the actual Queen of Sweden, who was a bisexual. In this version of the story, the Queen never finds a suitable love match, but any lesbian undertones slipped under the radar of film censors. Garbo's cross- dressing and disguises, her romantic attraction to her own lady-in- waiting, and a notorious bedroom scene supposedly troubled Hays Code film censors, but the film remained intact.

1937 saw the best "sacrifice everything for your child" melodrama: Stella Dallas (which is sadly out of print on DVD). In this classic weepie, plays a single mom who would lie down on train tracks for her daughter. But Stella sends the girl to live with her father when she recognizes her shortcomings as a parent. Stanwyck gave dignity and intelligence to a scrappy, underprivileged character. A fair share of similar melodramas would follow (such as Mildred Pierce [1945]) - while in the 1990s, they morphed into the single mom story, a subset of the "Chick Flick" (including a tepid remake, Stella [1990]).

1940s: Femme Fatales

Usually when we think of women and , we think of femmes fatales like 's Gilda (1946), a calculating woman who spends all of her time manipulating men. This sex role stereotype is so blatant it verges on parody, but Gilda , thankfully, is only a glimmer of the whole picture. Some noir buffs think it a mistake to believe women were always presented as femmes fatales and point to examples such as Nora Prentiss (1947) and Criss Cross (1949); both show sympathetic women, while it's the men who make the bad moves.

A major force behind noir was writer-turned-producer Joan Harrison . A Hitchcock protegé and writer on films like (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Saboteur (1942), Harrison also wrote Dark Waters (1944) for the remarkable André De Toth . Like many of the talented women in Hollywood, Harrison bloomed as a producer, and produced five noir films: Ride the Pink Horse (co-written with Dorothy B. Hughes in 1947); They Won't Believe Me (1947); Nocturne (1946); The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945); and Phantom Lady (1944).

The many faces of

Following in the footsteps of 1920s director Lois Weber, Ida Lupino made pictures dealing with issues of female sexuality and independence. She signed with Warner Brothers in the as an actress but soon became the heroine of American independent cinema as a director. As an actress, Lupino played ambitious headstrong dames in such noir classics as (1940) and High Sierra (1941); she even called herself "the poor man's ." Her role in The Big Knife (1955), an expose of the studio system, made Lupino rather unpopular with high rolling Hollywood insiders. Lupino became the second woman admitted into the Directors Guild of America, and at the time, she was the only working female of its 1300 members.

On Lupino's director's chair were the words "The Mother of us all," a nod to Gertrude Stein, who wrote a libretto for an opera about Susan B. Anthony. The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Lupino's best film, is technically the only true noir by a woman during the classic noir period of 1944 to 1950. Lupino's film Outrage (1950), starring Mala Powers , dealt with the subject of rape and a woman destroyed by gossip. "There was a great deal of camaraderie between the crew and Ida; they would do anything for her," said Powers.

Lupino was just one of many women who switched with ease between her roles as actor and producer. Bette Davis continued the tradition when she produced A Stolen Life (1946) in the midst of her turns as a dominant alpha bitch and double-crossing dame in women's melodramas of the .

Continue to Part Two...

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Women in Film

Continued from Part One .

The 1950s: A Brain of Solid Popcorn

The 1950s were supposedly the era of the Hollywood melodrama and "women's films." Just about anything starring Bette Davis would fit into this category. (1950) also featured Anne Baxter as a conniving young actress, Celeste Holm and . Davis, as the fading (read: menopausal) star of the stage Margo Channing, delivered her bitchy, smart-aleck advice: "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Dorothy Dandridge

More than any other decade, I like to see the 1950s in terms of the female roles in front of the camera. There were some choice parts for A-list screen goddesses like Marilyn Monroe and , and yet there was just one major role for a black woman: 1954 was the first time an African-American woman received an Oscar nomination for best actress - , who played the hot-headed siren Carmen Jones . Decades later, to redress the historic significance of a black woman in Hollywood in those days, Martha Coolidge directed Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1990) for HBO. Starring as Dandridge, the film depicts 1950's Hollywood racism and sexism run amok. Many of the best roles for women in the 50s came from playwright . Gordon was known as a novelist, a playwright, an award-winning screenwriter and one hell of an actor - she won two acting Golden Globes in the 1960s for Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968), and was nominated again in 1972 for what is easily her most well-known role in Harold and Maude .

In Gordon's comic play Over Twenty One , successful writer Polly Wharton lives with her husband who is having difficulty in getting through his Army studies. Polly helps him pass his tests and, in spite of all his bad luck and trouble, she sticks with him. In one scene, Joe says to Polly, "The truth's no good to me, Polly! History's unbelievable! And it's up to us to make it seem real." Polly replies, "Honest to God, Joe, you must have a brain of solid popcorn."

Women could relate to the way a gal thinks differently from a man, and nobody knew that better than Ruth Gordon. She formed a writing team with her husband , 16 years her junior, and the two of them enjoyed a solid working relationship with director George Cukor , starting with 1947's A Double Life .

Still, nothing was quite as impressive as the movies Gordon wrote in the 50s: Adam's Rib (1949), (1952), (1952), and (1953). In Adam's Rib , perhaps their best work, off-screen lovers and act out a battle of the sexes, but more importantly, the snappy dialogue between the couple depict them shoulder to shoulder, equally accomplished, equally competent.

A Woman's World (1954), directed by Jean Negulesco , was yet another comedy showcasing a pack of clever women's interplay with men. Lauren Bacall , Arlene Dahl , and June Allyson star as three wives whose husbands compete for an executive job. All the candidates are so equally matched that the employer decides to use their wives as a tie- breaker: the woman who outclasses the others wins their man a job.

Many have claimed that pictures in the 1950s reaffirmed male dominance and female subservience, that women's roles were confined to sex role stereotypes of pretty, amusing or child-like. One glance at the film roles in the era, though, and this doesn't completely hold up. We have Bette Davis as a smart aleck sociopath in a whole slew of melodramas, Katharine Hepburn playing an intellectual equal, and Bacall - the list goes on.

The 60s and the Avant Garde: Films That Cost "What Hollywood Spends on Lipstick" The era of free love was a lot more liberating to the art world than to Hollywood. Women's progress took a big old backtrack in the Hollywood of the 1960s (although it was the decade where Cleopatra 's (1963) became the first actress to receive a million dollars), so let's focus on an avant-garde maverick. 's conceptual arts scene flaunted a wealth of young talent. Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol started playing with the medium of film during the 1960s. With nothing but an anonymous array of buttocks in No. 4 (or Bottoms [1966], Ono depersonalized sexuality and upended the convention of narrative context in 1966.

Behind this creative flurry was a remarkable Russian New Yorker named . The undisputed mother of the avant-garde film movement, Deren used to say that her films cost what Hollywood spends on lipstick. Art buffs say Deren had more impact on the avant-garde than anyone; an influence seen in works by later filmmakers like Willard Maas, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. In addition to making films, she wrote about them, organized touring screenings of work and founded the Creative Film Foundation to promote practice.

Maya Deren died suddenly in 1961, long before the dawning of Aquarius, but she left major creative waves in her wake. Deren's most famous film, (1943), is celebrated as one of the great works of experimental cinema and was awarded the "Grand Prix International for 16mm Film, Experimental Class" at the . That year's award marked both the first time it was bestowed to a woman and to an American. She was also the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim for creative work in motion pictures (1947).

In films like and Study in Choreography for Camera , Deren's experiments in film editing included jump cuts and double exposure; she experimented with the concept of linear time in much of her work. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) also illustrates Deren's technical experiments with negative film.

Between 1951 and 1952, Deren shot over 20,000 feet of film in Haiti. Although she was attempting to make a film about Vodoun rituals, her footage remained unedited; Deren felt it was not possible to alter the forms of the rituals. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti , a 54-minute edited after her death (and which was also accompanied by a book), is considered one of the more accurate depictions of this religion. Her last film, (1959), also focused on this misunderstood world. Deren's other film projects - planned but never finished - include a film with dance, children's games and Balinese trance; Witch's Cradle (1944, with Marcel Duchamp and Pajorita Matta); and Medusa (1949). Maya Deren: Experimental Films (1943-58) , a DVD released last year, contains examples of this unfinished work. In 1985, the established the for artistic contributions to experimental film work. No doubt about it, Deren was a mother of invention. In the understatement of the year, Utne Reader in 2003 named her one of "40 Past Masters Who Still Matter."

1970s: Housewives in Bondage

During the era of the "battle of the sexes," the 1970s, Americans saw the debate over equality reflected in its films. That decade spawned the blockbuster, starting with the runaway hit Jaws (1977). Director has said the work by editor Verna Fields (Paper Moon [1973], American Graffitti [1973]) was the major reason for the movie's huge success. And yet few women were "allowed" to produce or direct blockbusters. They were thought of as untrustworthy with the management of colossal budgets. As usual, women had to create their own scenes. The Women's Directing Workshop at the American Film Institute was founded in this restrictive social climate and benefited from the involvement of such luminous actresses as , and Lynne Wittman.

A vital independent scene broadened in the 1970s. wrote and directed Hester Street in 1975, a black-and-white period piece about immigrants which failed to secure distribution but, in a humble triumph, earned more than five million dollars at the box office and an Oscar Nomination (for actress Carol Kane ). Silver is now most known for the delightful romance Crossing Delancey . One male indie filmmaker who contributed to "women's pictures" (read: "emotionally sophisticated") was , known for his infamous insistence on unpeeling the emotional core of things. Cassavetes's wife played Mabel, A Woman Under the Influence (1974), in perhaps the single most excruciating film about emotional anguish. Rowlands brilliantly plays a young wife with no creative or emotional life outside of her relationships with her husband and son, a "housewife in bondage," who completely freaks out. To this day, Rowlands's performance is still one of the most talked about ever.

Shut out of blockbusters, female directors and producers flourished when it came to documentaries. Mai Zetterling was one of the directors on Visions of Eight (1973), a documentary about the 1972 Olympics, edited by . Barbara Kopple made the Oscar-winning Harlan County U.S.A in 1979 - none of her later work was as daring or raw as this story of coal miners and their union.

Women's achievements in the documentary influenced the formidable careers of quite a few, including the Oscar-winning documentary producer Sheila Nevins . Nevins says her first exposure to documentaries included Kopple's film as well as docs by the Maysles brothers . In the late 1990s, as executive VP of Programming for HBO, Nevins guided several stories by and about women, including The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) and Southern Comfort (2001), by veteran filmmaker Kate Davis .

In the 1970s, women also made features about real-life dilemmas in friendship. The Waiting Room (1973) was shot by Nancy Schreiber and directed by Claudia Weill; Girlfriends (1979), directed by talented Aussie filmmaker Gillian Armstrong (whose more recent work is all we have to enjoy on DVD), addressed the relationship between two friends who choose different paths - career and homemaker. Tamara Asseyev and Alexandra Rose co-produced Norma Rae (1979), about a working class hero played by . (Asseyev had earlier worked on drive-in pictures like Big Wednesday [1978]).

The conventional Hollywood job for women at the time was, at best, screenwriting and editing. The prevailing myth was that in editing there was equity. But a few women had no patience for conventional pink-collar gigs and set their sights much higher. Julia Phillips , who is unfortunately more famous for her tell-all book You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again , mastered the producer's game of making the Hollywood blockbuster and became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture when she produced The Sting in 1979. Phillips also produced Taxi Driver (1976) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Other women producers who enjoyed at least a modicum of success included , an early hyphenate (comedian-writer- producer-director) whose The Heartbreak Kid enjoyed some success in 1972, but May then lost whatever power she may have had with the colossal bomb Ishtar .

1980s: The Incredible Shrinking Woman

In the 1980s, women did hold positions of power in Hollywood, but there was a backlash going on, constricting both the job market and any sense of camaraderie. The numbers of women in the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild at the time are scant, and the women who did make it up the ladder of success often failed to hold out their hands for other women to grab onto.

Documentarians continued their work into the 80s and a few broke new ground. Penelope Spheeris , a newcomer with roots in comedy, started her career producing short subjects for Albert Brooks . With her first feature, she looked to the outsiders she related to, the punk rockers in The Decline of Civilization (1981). Spheeris next did the punk drama and 80s time capsule Suburbia (1983) and then returned to comedy with the first Wayne's World movie in 1992, which, needless to say, did fairly well at the box office. Another woman with roots in comedy, did find work in the 80s, beginning with her role as a hen-pecked secretary in the hit comedy 9 to 5 (1980). She followed this with The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), written by Tomlin's frequent collaborator Jane Wagner, a social satire about a woman's station in too many aspects of American culture. Critically, the movie was a flop, but with respect to women and the backlash, it can actually be seen as an allegory. Tomlin took on more comical roles in the 1990s, like the paranoid, drug-dealing hippie-mom in Flirting with Disaster (1996).

Teen comedy was Hollywood's big cash cow in the 1980s. In a surprising career move, Martha Coolidge , a former theater director, made her niche here. Teen comedy is not something one would have predicted for Coolidge based on the seriousness of her first feature film, Not a Pretty Picture (1975), the story of a date rape. But Coolidge adapted to the demand for funny movies and made a name for herself with the underrated Valley Girl (1983). She then directed three more teen flicks: National Lampoon's Joy of Sex (1984 and best forgotten now), (1985, a good little quirky comedy), and Plain Clothes (1988). In 1991, Coolidge won Best Director at the Independent Spirit Awards for the period piece Rambling Rose , and a year later made the TNT movie Crazy in Love with a fiercely independent trio of actresses: , Gena Rowlands and Frances McDormand . A longtime associate of the Director's Guild, Coolidge became the group's first woman president in 2002.

Marleen Gorris , a Dutch lesbian writer and filmmaker, is like an inversion of Martha Coolidge. This director's filmography shows a militant commitment to feminist themes. Gorris is best known for her film Antonia's Line (1995), a quirky comical story about a few generations of a family of independent women; the film won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Unlike Coolidge, however, comedy was never her niche. Gorris's first feature was the feminist thriller A Question of Silence (1983), the story of three women who murder a man. The film's ambiguity leaves open the possibility that they assassinate him for political reasons. Two years later, she confronted similar themes about the damaging effects of patriarchy and sexual threats to women. In 1997, Gorris's fine adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway (1997), starring , also received critical acclaim.

Women in Film

Continued from Part Two .

1990s: Having Our Say

With the rise of the chick flick, the 1990s was a better decade for women. Offering more roles for women to write, play, and direct, the chick flick took aim at formulaic treatments and the usual subjects and stereotypes. Hollywood struck while the iron was hot and, for the first time, screenwriter Robin Swicord got offers to write movie roles for women after years of writing things like Stock Cars for Christ . Swicord's adaptation of Little Women (1994) directed by Gillian Armstrong , went "ka-ching" at the box office. Five years later, Sara Risher started the ChickFlicks division of New Line. As president of Columbia Records, Amy Pascal said, "Now the pandering machinery begins."

A fair share of 1990s films pandered to women's themes, but the decade was saved from tawdriness by the number of movies about adaptable outsiders. We all know about the parable of freedom and dignity in Thelma and Louise (1991), sure, but more striking was the psycho-twist on the theme of survival in Freeway (1996), with a lean, mean at the wheel. Dogfight (1991), with as a quiet, homely girl who romances a GI, shook up the standard formula under the direction of . Savoca directed Taylor again in the eccentric (1993), but it's still her first film, the pre-wedding jitters comedy True Love (1989), that most people remember. Taylor went on to play Valerie Solanas, the deranged hanger-on in Mary Harron 's I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), showing us what happens when female rage has been wrapped too tightly for too long.

Women were also actually beginning to receive official recognition from the Academy. Writer-turned-director got her props back in 1991 for Thelma and Louise while, in 1992, took home an award for Howards End (1992). triumphed in 1993 with The Piano (although Campion's short films may still be her best work), and 's 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility earned her an Oscar.

The decade also offered other progressive signs. HBO showed a three part series on rights If These Walls Could Talk (1996), directed by Savoca, and launched the still hugely popular Sex and the City series. A network film called Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years (1999), directed by Lynne Littman and co-produced by Judith James, was honored with the Peabody Award.

Although it was mostly white women who reaped the benefits of Hollywood's shifting attitudes, "minority" women also found resources to make their own pictures. Joan gained renown with the (1990) television series, then went on to produce and direct. In 1999, Chen made the lyrical Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl about a teenage girl's struggle for survival during the Chinese . Independent director became the first African-American female director ever to have a film in commercial circulation in the US with Daughters of the Dust (1991), a languid drama about the African American Gullah culture of the North Carolina coast. The film won an award at Sundance but, ever since, Dash has worked mostly in the made-for-TV world; for example, she directed the recent Rosa Parks Story (2002) for CBS. (For related Greencine titles, see the Girls Gone Wild and Women of Color Directors lists.)

Attempts at fresh insight into lesbianism fell a little flat in Hollywood. Lisa Cholodenko directed High Art (1998), which was passed off as a lesbian romance and critically dismissed as shallow. Perhaps a more successful attempt at lesbian romance was Maria Maggenti's The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995) and the very low-budget but successful indie Go Fish (1994). Newcomer Kimberly Peirce then grabbed the spotlight with Boys Don't Cry in 1999, a film based on a true story of such brutality and heartlessness that experiencing it is both sickening and unforgettable.

TODAY: Homegrown Pictures and Indie

To see where sisters are doing it for themselves in the 'oughts, look to the independent scene. Young actors like , and Robin Tunney have consistently chosen to stay away from the Hollywood hoi polloi.

These women seem to be as involved in the dramatic arts as they are in motion pictures. Adrienne Shelly, who has acted in 's The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990), has also directed Sudden (1997) and I'll Take You There (2001); she's written and directed several plays and served as the artistic director of the New York City theater company Missing Children as well. Indie favorite Robin Tunney ( Cherish [2002], The Secret Lives of Dentists [2002]) studied acting at the Academy for the Performing Arts, spending her summers performing in productions of Bus Stop and Agnes of God .

Parker "Queen of the Indies" Posey made her debut in 1993 as one of the popular girls in Dazed and Confused . Through the 1990s, Posey performed in more than 15 independent features, including The Daytrippers (1995), The House of Yes (1997) and Clockwatchers (1997). Posey has also become part of Christopher Guest 's merry band of actors, perhaps most memorably as Sissy Knox in (2003).

Parker Posey in Personal Velocity

Posey played one of three 21st century women in Personal Velocity (2002) - which was directed by Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur) and based on her book. A showcase of unhappy women with unhappy lives, it makes you wonder if this is Miller's commentary on women's lot in today's world. It did win the Sundance Grand Jury prize, but her debut feature, Angela (1995), was in some ways an even more striking work.

Anjelica Huston made her directorial debut in 2000 with Bastard out of Carolina , adapted from the novel by Dorothy Allison. It is one of the more credible depictions of sexual abuse on film. The talented actress also directed (and starred in) the underrated Agnes Browne (1999).

Director has a fondness for rock and roll movies. Things Behind the Sun (2001) shows a young woman using her songwriting to deal with a rape, while the heartfelt (1996) centers on a woman navigating her way through the music industry. Patricia Cardoso 's film Real Women Have Curves , with its two strong-willed, Hispanic female characters, won the Audience Award at the 2002 .

The Dignity of the Iceberg

Here it is, 2003 and 14% of US Senators on the Hill are female; and in 2002, out of the top 100 films from Hollywood, 4% were directed by women (stats: Guerilla Girls). As for other film jobs for women in 2003, you still won't find proportional numbers in positions of power and creative visibility. Only one of the top 100 grossing movies of 2002 was made by a female cinematographer. Number written by women: eight; cut by female editors: 12. Hemingway said of writers, "The dignity of the iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water." After the enthusiastically equal playing field of the 1920s disappeared, female actors, executives, cinematographers, directors, producers and writers have worked invisibly, underwater, as it were. Are women film-goers, then, seeing what they crave to see in Hollywood movies?

As the population ages overall, women will wish to see their experiences handled differently. There is much potential material in the silver-haired set. The subject of women and aging is almost completely unexplored territory on the silver screen. A few writers have already produced material about relationships for older women. , 53, (writer for Private Benjamin [1980], Father of the Bride [1991] and Parent Trap [1998]) has just finished her first solo screenplay after a career as partner in a writing team. (Like Ruth Gordon, Meyers co-wrote with her husband - Charles Shyer .)

Meyers' new film, Something's Gotta Give , with and , is about an older man who dates younger women. Meyers based the screenplay (which she also directed) on her real-life sense of invisibility around a male peer who dates younger women. In true Hollywood form, she added a whimsical angle to the premise by making the man fall for a woman his age.

Women both in Hollywood and in independent cinema are motivated by their own personal metrics of success. They are informed by a great body of work, in which there are lessons learned and the occasional truly great achievement. These are women creating stories, budgets and pictures, who go for a different brass ring or no brass ring at all. They've had to invent their own way to measure their worth.

Thoughts? Comments? Reactions? Suggestions? Discuss!

GreenCine Recommends...

A Few of Jennie's Favorite Women's Films: • Belle du Jour (1967): Catherine Deneuve as a French housewife with a multi-dimensional sex life. • Cries and Whispers (1972): From the sister-story genre (which Bergmanophile delved into as well, with Hannah and her Sisters [1986]), this Ingmar Bergman film is, by far, the freakiest. • Harold and Maude (1971): What Ruth Gordon did for aging activism thirty years ago. The soundtrack, with songs and lyrics by Cat Stevens was dubbed "mush minded" by , but who cares. • The Heartbreak Kid (1972): Elaine May 's second film was also her most successful comedy. Reminiscent of her old partner Mike Nichols 's The Graduate . • Impromptu (1991): Biopic period piece (read: fancy costumes) about lovers and Frederic Chopin. Playing Sand, Judy Davis gives gender a bang on the ear, just as her character did in real life in the 1830s. • The Hours (2002): Lovely movie adaptation from Michael Cunningham's novel about Virginia Woolf; another way of seeing Mrs. Dalloway .

Favorites Not out on DVD:

• The Decline of Western Civilization : Mixed feelings about Penelope Spheeris, but it's still pretty punk to make a movie with the only known footage of Darby Crash making eggs. • Girls Town (1996): This is Sundance territory, say the critics. Lili Taylor improvising her big heart out. Directed and written by Jim McKay . For now, check out his similarly sympathetic Our Song (2001) instead. • Paris is Burning (1997): The feature documentary about an outsider scene most of us would never get even a glimpse of.