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Liberating Hollywood
Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2019
About this book
Winner of the 2018 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theater Library Association
Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry. Throughout the 1970s feminist reform efforts resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of women directors, yet at the same time the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood continued to create obstacles to closing the gender gap. Maya Montañez Smukler reveals that during this era there were an estimated sixteen women making independent and studio films: Penny Allen, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Joan Darling, Lee Grant, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Peeters, Joan Rivers, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly Sebastian, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Tewkesbury, Jane Wagner, Nancy Walker, and Claudia Weill. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author, Liberating Hollywood is the first study of women directors within the intersection of second wave feminism, civil rights legislation, and Hollywood to investigate the remarkable careers of these filmmakers during one of the most mythologized periods in American film history.
Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry. Throughout the 1970s feminist reform efforts resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of women directors, yet at the same time the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood continued to create obstacles to closing the gender gap. Maya Montañez Smukler reveals that during this era there were an estimated sixteen women making independent and studio films: Penny Allen, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Joan Darling, Lee Grant, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Peeters, Joan Rivers, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly Sebastian, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Tewkesbury, Jane Wagner, Nancy Walker, and Claudia Weill. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author, Liberating Hollywood is the first study of women directors within the intersection of second wave feminism, civil rights legislation, and Hollywood to investigate the remarkable careers of these filmmakers during one of the most mythologized periods in American film history.
Author / Editor information
MAYA MONTAÑEZ. SMUKLER is head of the UCLA Film & Television Archive Research and Study Center. Her work appears in collections including: Women and New Hollywood: Gender, Creative Labor and 1970s American Cinema, ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, ReFocus: The Films of Susan Seidelman, and Happily Ever After: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age.
Reviews
"Smukler sees the increase of independently produced features in the ’80s as a turning point for women no longer at the mercy of a slow-moving studio system. She’s right, though working independently puts the onus of proving artistic and commercial viability directly on individual artists’ shoulders, dependent on a world of potentially prejudiced funders with no centralized power to reform, however incrementally. That said, it’s impossible to read Liberating Hollywood and not recognize the progress that has been made, even though too much remains sadly familiar. It’s still rough out there, but histories like these keep me moving forward."
— Film Comment"[An] excellent and deeply researched book."
— Variety
— Hyperallergic
— UCLA Library Film & Television Archive
"Highly recommended."
— Choice"Liberating Hollywood is an invigorating, detailed account of the women who were denied seats at the directors’ roundtable and sat down anyway. Their bittersweet but valiant efforts paved the way for feminist reform. Smukler’s book is valuable not just because it covers an important piece of Hollywood history, but because it’s a reminder that progress is not to be taken for granted."
— Movie Maker Magazine"This engaging and timely book is a long-overdue corrective to the histories of 1970s Hollywood that have celebrated the iconoclasm of 'new Hollywood' without also asking why that iconoclasm did not extend to changing Hollywood's production culture, and why, at the height of second-wave feminism, Hollywood continued to define media-making as men's work."
— Journal of American History“A counterintuitive feminist history of the new Hollywood that convincingly challenges widely held assumptions about the boys’ club movie brat auteur renaissance. In Liberating Hollywood, Maya Montanez Smukler is remarkably attentive to the industrial as well as sociopolitical histories that made such a new women’s cinema and such a suddenly liberated Hollywood possible.”
— Jon Lewis, author of Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles"Maya Montañez Smukler’s Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema is an exciting and topical examination of a transformative group of female filmmakers whose stories and struggles have too often been forgotten. At once an eye-opening analysis and a significant contribution to feminist film scholarship, Liberating Hollywood persuasively challenges the received wisdom about a period of American cinema (the so-called time of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls) in which women are routinely banished to the margins. As Smukler demonstrates, women were always there – making movies, good trouble and American history."
— Manohla Dargis, film critic for The New York Times
— Vanity Fair
"A fascinating series of profiles of trailblazing filmmakers."
— Sight and Sound"An ambitious [and] compelling book....Smukler has done an excellent job of researching and writing about the individual careers of her directors. The stories are both empowering and heartbreaking, and she has out the available oral histories to good use."
— CineasteTopics
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Frontmatter
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CONTENTS
vii -
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Introduction
1 -
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Prologue: Before There Was 1970s Hollywood, There Was New York City in the 1960s
19 -
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1. Feminist Reform Comes to Hollywood: New Hollywood, Old Sexism
33 -
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2. 1970s Cultures of Production: Studio, Art House, and Exploitation
77 -
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3. New Women: Women Directors and the 1970s New Woman Film
159 -
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4. Radicalizing the Directors Guild of America
232 -
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Epilogue: Desperately Seeking the Eighties
278 -
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Appendix
293 -
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Acknowledgments
297 -
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Notes
301 -
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Index
347 -
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
353
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 21, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9780813587509
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780813587509
Keywords for this book
American Studies; Women's Studies; Film; Media Studies; Communications; women; filmmakers; social justice; sexism; racism; United States; Hollywood; Penny Allen; Karen Arthur; Anne Bancroft; Joan Darling; Lee Grant; Barbara Loden; Elaine May; Barbara Peeters; Joan Rivers; Stephanie Rothman; Beverly Sebastian; Joan Micklin Silver; Joan Tewkesbury; Jane Wagner; Nancy Walker; Claudia Weill; directors; feminism; feminist; second wave feminism; civil rights; American
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
