Most of these so-called "women's" films had been turned down, or at least resisted, at the proposed project level by studio executives. Every studio in town turned down "Driving Miss Daisy" before it was financed independently, and it took producer Amy Pascal 12 years of trying to get "Little Women" made.
When films like those were successful, they were assumed by the studios to be, in William Goldman's wonderful phrase, "nonrecurring phenomena." The phenomena have been regularly recurring: "Ghost" (1990), "Pretty Woman" (1990), "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991), "The Bodyguard" (1993), "While You Were Sleeping" (1995) and "First Wives Club" (1996).
Another reason studios looked down on "chick flicks" was the assumption that male action pictures, with minimal dialogue, would play better in the overseas market. Not necessarily true. "Indecent Proposal" made $106 million at the U.S. box office, but $150 million internationally. "Sense and Sensibility" made $42 million in the U.S. and $90 million internationally. (And though both were British films, "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "The Full Monty" were pushed to high grosses by female audiences.) "Titanic," which has doubled its American gross internationally, is simply the culmination of the trend.
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About the only reviewer who sensed the connection "Deep Impact" had to all of this was, appropriately enough, a woman. Lisa Schwarzbaum, writing in Entertainment Weekly, said, "It's . . . the womanly action-thriller, a new breed of summertime entertainment, in which scenes of speed, suspense, frantic keyboard punching and computer-generated destruction serve as testosterone infusions between the nurturing of relationships!" The action elements of the film were used in the conventional promotion for the film (the only trailer I saw for the film that emphasized the relationships appeared only a week before the film opened), which was what Hollywood assumed would create the $30-million opening.
This attitude continued after the film opened, as in this quote from an anonymous Paramount executive (presumably a man) that appeared the following week (May 22) in Entertainment Weekly: "You really want to know what opened the movie? The wave [that wipes out New York City]. We put it in the trailer and all the TV spots. That's the only reason it opened. We all know it." (See what I mean about irritated?) The person is assuming that the wave shot was like the exploding White House shot in the "Independence Day" trailers, but the former does not have the resonance of the latter (except perhaps for confirmed New York haters).
