It's especially hard to cry discrimination about female directors when women flourish in so many other areas of the business -- Hollywood is loaded with powerful female producers, studio executives, managers and publicists. By and large, the track record of hiring women directors is no different at any studio, whether the studio is run by a man or a woman.
Nonetheless, the track record is terrible. Catherine Hardwicke, director of such youth-oriented films as "13," "Lords of Dogtown" and the upcoming "Twilight," says she studies the Directors Guild of America calendar of upcoming screenings each month, adding up the director's names. "It's usually 30 guys and one woman," she says.
If you were looking at Hollywood's history through a gender lens, you might say the industry went almost directly from male domination to post-feminism without ever enjoying a true feminist age. The rise of feminism almost exactly overlaps with the last glory days of filmmaking (roughly 1967 to 1978), yet the era as portrayed in Peter Biskind's compelling history "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is one of pure male ego and excess.
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The paucity of female directors seems rooted in a variety of hard-to-define issues, including lifestyle choices, aesthetic interests and personality differences. But one key contrast stands out. While there is a sizable number of women working in indie films (Sofia Coppola, Mira Nair, Nicole Holofcener, to name just a few), when you ask studio chiefs to name women who would be on their list to direct a mainstream summer movie, they offer up Nancy Meyers, Nora Ephron and -- well, then they start to run out of gas.
"You can name the women directors in our business by their first names -- that's how few there are," says DreamWorks Co-Chairman Stacey Snider. "It's flattering that they have such instant notoriety, yet it speaks to the larger issue that there just isn't a very wide pool of talent to choose from."
Sony Pictures Co-Chairman Amy Pascal, who made Meyers' last two films, has Ephron's next picture and has hired more female directors than any studio head, says summer movies just aren't an area of interest for most women. "It simply may be a matter of self-selection, since most studio films are aimed at young boys," she says. "Look at my summer slate. I don't think there's a woman who would've wanted to have directed 'Hancock' or 'Pineapple Express.' "
