Women's Work in the Silent Era (was Re: [fla-left] [gender issues/culture] Hey, Hollywood)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> > forwarded by Michael Hoover
> >
> > > Hey, Hollywood: What's Wrong With This Picture?
> > > Run Date: 09/18/00
> > >
> > > By Jeannine Yeomans
> > > WEnews correspondent
> <snip>
> > > New research by Martha Lauzen, Ph.D., a professor at San Diego State
> > > University, reveals that among the 207 top grossing films last year,
> > > women constituted only 17 percent of all creators behind the scenes,
> > > including producers, directors, writers, and editors.
> > >
> > > Only 4 percent of directors were women, a drop from 8 percent the
> > > previous year. There were other significant declines in the numbers of
> > > executive producers from 21 percent to 15 percent, and female editors
> > > from 13 percent to 8 percent. The picture for television is similarly
> > > bleak.

*****   The New York Times
September 15, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section E; Part 1; Page 25; Column 1; Movies, Performing
Arts/Weekend Desk
HEADLINE: HOME VIDEO;
Women's Work In the Silent Era
BYLINE:  By Peter M. Nichols

New VHS and DVD editions of "This Is Spinal Tap," Rob Reiner's 1984
parody of a rock documentary, were released on Tuesday, but some of
the better entertainment issued this week can be found in two new
series from the silent era: "First Ladies: Early Women Filmmakers
1915-25" from Kino and "Equal Time: The Women of Cinema" from
Milestone

Good silent films hold surprises, not least the people who made them.
In the earliest days strong women frequently produced and directed
what they also wrote and starred in. "Women were allowed to work
because there weren't great profits to be made yet in that industry,"
said Dennis Doros, president of Milestone, a distributor of classic
films.

Once the money got better in the 1930's, men asserted themselves and
professional life became more complicated for women like Dorothy
Davenport Reid, the producer and co-director of "The Red Kimona"
(1925), about a young girl who is tricked into becoming a prostitute
in New Orleans and murders her pimp.

The Kino series includes five films, all of them preserved by the
motion picture department at the Library of Congress. The four others
are "The Ocean Waif" by Alice Guy-Blache, one of the first directors
of either sex, who had made more than 700 shorts and features by
1916; "49-17," a western satire by Ruth Ann Baldwin; "Eleanor's
Catch" (1916), a two-reeler by Cleo Madison about still another young
woman done in by a lowdown man; and "Hypocrites" (1915), written,
directed and produced by Lois Weber.

A colleague of Guy-Blache, Weber was known for her moral crusades. In
"Hypocrites" the subject was "the naked truth" as envisioned by a
hand-wringing religious ascetic and sculptor who, inspired by a woman
scampering in the buff, renders a nude statue of same. On its
unveiling, the good citizens, all cheats and perverts, to judge by
Weber's interpretation, are shocked.

Notes on the cassette box call the film "amazingly complex." Bizarre,
too. "Definitely off the wall," said Jessica Rosner of Kino. "That's
real nudity. If you look closely, you can see everything." In Boston,
clothes had to be painted on the woman before the film was
distributed.

The Milestone series moves on to the talkies with "The Gay Desperado"
(1936), starring Ida Lupino, and Mervyn LeRoy's "Tonight or Never"
(1931), with Gloria Swanson as an opera diva who has lost the passion
for her work. But there are also Frances Marion's silent "Love Light"
(1921), with Mary Pickford as a betrayed wife, a role intended to
change her her little-girl image, and two silent films by Nell
Shipman, "Back to God's Country" (1919) and "Something New" (1920).

Shipman, a conservationist, set her two films in northern Canada and
the Mojave desert, respectively. "She did action films," Mr. Doros
said. In "Something New" the heroine (Shipman), her boyfriend and her
collie, Laddie, escape mounted bandits across rocky terrain in a
Maxwell sedan, a forerunner of the sport utility vehicle.

For information on the Milestone series, call (800) 603-1104. For the
Kino tapes, call (800) 562-3330.   *****

Yoshie