Vassar College Digital Window @ Vassar Senior Capstone Projects 2015 Behind Every Great Man There Are More Men: Disparities for Women Filmmakers in the Film Industry Bobbie Lucas Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone Recommended Citation Lucas, Bobbie, "Behind Every Great Man There Are More Men: Disparities for Women Filmmakers in the Film Industry" (2015). Senior Capstone Projects. Paper 387. This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Window @ Vassar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Digital Window @ Vassar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Vassar College “Behind Every Great Man There Are More Men:” Disparities for Women Filmmakers in the Film Industry A research thesis submitted to The Department of Film Bobbie Lucas Fall 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Someday hopefully it won’t be necessary to allocate a special evening [Women in Film] to celebrate where we are and how far we’ve come…someday women writers, producers, and crew members will be so commonplace, and roles and salaries for actresses will outstrip those for men, and pigs will fly.” --Sigourney Weaver For the women filmmakers who made films and established filmmaking careers in the face of adversity and misogyny, and for those who will continue to do so. I would like to express my appreciation to the people who helped me accomplish this endeavor: Dara Greenwood, Associate Professor of Psychology Paul Johnson, Professor of Economics Evsen Turkay Pillai, Associate Professor of Economics I am extremely grateful for the valuable input you provided on my ideas and your willing assistance in my research. To my wonderful friends—thank you for accepting my excuses of, “I can’t…I have to write my thesis,” and somehow managing to tolerate and validate me during this entire process. To my unconditionally supportive parents—thank you for always believing in me, while also grounding me with the knowledge that as long as I try my best, I’ve done all that I can do. Finally, to Sarah Kozloff, Professor of Film on the William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair, and my fantastic advisor—without your encouragement, advice, and vision, the completion of this project would never have been possible. Words cannot fully express how your guidance and passion for film history and theory have inspired me. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Pioneering Women: Market Forces in Early Hollywood, 1895-1925…………………………..17 The Good Old Boys’ Club: Consequences of the “Central Producer System,” 1926-1948…….38 Trust Busting: The Prolonged Absence of Women, 1948-1967………………………………...63 The American New Wave: Effects of a Youth-Oriented Hollywood, 1968-1975………………83 The Blockbuster Era: Too Big to Fail, 1975-1993……………………………………………..100 Many Means of Distribution: The Gender Gap Continues, 1994-Present……………………...118 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...145 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………154 INTRODUCTION This thesis traces the progression of women filmmakers in Hollywood over the course of film history and explains how their roles were shaped by economics. In doing so, I have found that as film became a more solidified and profitable business enterprise, women’s positions of authority in the industry declined, and a system of male domination emerged. In order to properly account for the impact of the economic changes on women film professionals, this narrative seeks to show how the wider, and often transforming, cultural, historical, economic, and social climates of the United States influenced the economics of the film industry. Specifically, this thesis intends to investigate how the changing economics of the film industry led to disparities for women employees. Each chapter focuses on different periods in film history and analyzes how the industry and national alterations impacted women as filmmakers. Additionally, every chapter ends with case study examples of women filmmakers who nevertheless have defied the odds and found successful careers, while also explaining how their personal stories fit into the larger social and economic climate of Hollywood during their respective time periods. My analysis of women filmmakers mainly emphasizes producers, directors, and screenwriters in order to explore jobs that represent positions of power within the film industry. However, the results found within these areas of industry employment roughly correspond with women working in other areas such as cinematography and editing. Although female actresses and costume designers have found more job opportunities in Hollywood, their successes in these positions also reinforce the ways in which male authority has pigeonholed women into more “traditionally feminine” jobs. Therefore, all industry positions prove relevant to my study and demonstrate women’s hardships in creating and managing careers in Hollywood. 1 Women’s prominence during the silent era and subsequent unequal representations throughout the remaining film history suggest systemic reasons for the observed inequalities. This systemic absence and underrepresentation of women poses many questions in need of answers. Firstly, does the configuration of women filmmakers’ industry presence depict the general trends of women (of all industries) in the United States labor force? Secondly, if differences do exist, to what extent has Hollywood’s particular industry economics been responsible for the plights of female filmmakers in the industry? Lastly, were the economic gains of industry reconfigurations worth turning female filmmakers into an industry minority? To start with the first question above, if women filmmakers’ participation rates matched those of the total women’s U.S. labor force participation rates, they would need to demonstrate a consistent and positively increasing pattern. In the United States, only 20 percent of all women worked for pay in 1900.1 As shown below, women’s participation rate increased from around 30 percent in 1947 to a peak rate of 60 percent in 2000, and while dropping slightly by 2012, remains fairly consistent today at a rate of 57 percent. Figure 1. Graph of U.S. women labor force participation showing increasing rates, 1947-2012. 1 Dora L. Costa, “From Mill Town to Board Room: The Rise of Women’s Paid Labor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 14, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 101. 2 Participation rates for women started to increase as a result of the shortage of male labor during World War II and continued to grow during the late 1940s when women remained in the workforce even after men returned home from war. Likewise, women’s participation rates rose even quicker during the 1970s and 1980s as a result of Second Wave Feminism. With more liberal, modern views about equality and justice pervading American society (as well as the need—caused by inflation and rising costs—for 2 incomes in order to sustain standards of living), women have maintained higher participation levels in the workforce. Although a slight decline occurred in the early-mid 2000s, it influenced all areas of the labor force, including men’s participation levels, and had more to do with “lingering business-cycle effects from the long economic boom of the late 1990s, which may have driven labor force participation rates to unsustainably high levels at that time”2 than specific factors related to gender. Regardless, the general trend for women in the labor force over the past 100 years positively increased while male labor force participation progressively decreased. Accounting for other influential factors, these trends held consistent across age groups for both men and women. By dividing age ranges into groups: ages 16-24, 25-54, and 55+, the most significant age groups in the male decrease and female increase of changing labor force participation rates were observed. 2 Chinhui Juhn and Simon Potter, “Changes in Labor Force Participation in the United States,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 3, (Summer 2006): 30. 3 Figure 2. Trends in labor force participation taking into account age group influence.3 According to the various age group participation rates, the age group 55+ contributed to the largest decrease in male labor force participation rates, although all three age groups did decline. Meanwhile in the female labor force, women 55+ slightly increased their participation, but the major growths occurred in the 16-24 age group, and more influentially in the 25-54 age group. The 16-24 year-old female participation rates rose from around 45 percent in 1948 and peaked around 60 percent. Even more impressively, the 25-54 year-old women participation rates went from around 35 percent in 1948 to roughly 75 percent in the early 2000s. In order to properly assess why the 25-54 age group most influenced women’s labor force participation rates, we must study one more categorical division of women in the workforce. By dividing women into married and unmarried subdivisions, the data depicts how the influx of 3 Chinhui, 30. 4 married women into the labor force led to such influential increases in women’s overall labor force participation rates. Figure 3. Labor force participation rates of women, 1900-2009.4 As Figure 3 shows, single women and widowed/divorced/separated (women who have always worked to support themselves) maintained much smaller increases in participation levels. However, married women’s participation levels increased from under 6 percent in 1900