Movie Musings: Disney and More

Women Directors: Great Work for a Long Time

Women have been directing films for nearly as long as men have, but unfortunately they haven’t always received all the credit they deserve for their talent and achievements. Alice Guy-Blache became the first female director ever in the history of film when she directed the French short Les demoilisseurs in 1896. Dorothy Arzner later became the first female director in Hollywood when she directed the drama Fashions for Women in 1927. Before Vincente Minnelli’s movie-musical version of Lerner and Lowe’s Gigi in 1958, there was a French version of that film, produced nine years earlier, directed by a woman named Jacqueline Audry. Let’s look at some of the finest female directors and the work that proves their skills as exceptional as their male counterparts. 

1. Penny Marshall made her directorial debut with an episode of the show Working Stiffs (1979) and various episodes of her own sit-com Laverne & Shirley (1976-1983), which was produced by her brother, Garry, her directing mentor. Then she moved to movies, directing Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986) and Tom Hanks in Big (1988) which earned Hanks his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor and made Marshall the first female director to make a movie that grossed over $100 million dollars. Marshall and Hanks reunited on the film A League of Their Own (1992) which also made over $100 million. Her last theatrical film as director was Riding in Cars with Boys (2001) with Drew Barrymoore, though she continued to direct for television with episodes of According to Jim (2001-2009) and the television movie Women Without Men (2010). She also directed a documentary called Rodman (2019) about NBA Hall of Famer Denis Rodman before her unfortunate death on December 17th, 2018.      
2. Nancy Meyers co-wrote the screenplay for Private Benjamin (1980) with Harvey Miller and her then-husband Charles Shyer. The trio received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Screenplay as a result. She and Shyer officially married in ’80 and continued writing and producing in films such as Baby Boom (1987), and Touchstone’s remakes of Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride part 2 (1995), all of which starred Diane Keaton, with Shyer directing. Meyers, was also interested in directing, but remained focus on raising her family, until she received the offer by Walt Disney Pictures to direct the remake of The Parent Trap, released in 1998. Meyers and Shyer unfortunately divorced in 1999, but she continued to direct exceptional romantic comedies, including Something’s Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and The Intern (2015). Most recently, she produced Home Again (2017) with Reese Witherspoon, and was directed by her daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer.     
3. Nora Ephron, before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, began her career as a newspaper reporter at The New York Post. While there Ephron did a re-write for the script of All the President’s Men (1976) with her then-husband, Carl Bernstein, (who Dustin Hoffman plays in the movie). Although her script was not used, her efforts caught the attention of Paramount, who offered the chance to write the television movie Perfect Gentlemen (1978). This ultimately led to Nora Ephron's opportunity to write the screenplay for Silkwood (1983) starring Meryl Streep and it earned an Oscar Nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The same year as “Silkwood,” she wrote a novel called Heartburn which was based on the trauma she experienced while pregnant with her second child, only to discover that her husband was having an affair with their mutual friend. Heartburn was eventually made into a movie in 1986, which again starred Meryl Streep along with Jack Nicholson. Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally in 1989 earning another Best Screenplay Oscar Nod and she worked her way up to directing in This Is My Life (1992). Next, she directed Sleepless In Seattle (1993) which reunited her with “When Harry Met Sally,” star Meg Ryan and was her first pairing with Tom Hanks. Ephron, Hanks and Ryan teamed up five years later, in 1998, for You’ve Got Mail. Her last film to write and direct was Julie & Julia in 2009, which was her third reunion with Meryl Streep. Before her sad death on June 26th, 2012, she wrote a Broadway play called Lucky Guy which reunited her for the third time with Tom Hanks and premiered after her death at the Broadhurst Theater on April 1st, 2013.      
4. Kathryn Bigelow became the very first female director ever to win a Best Director Oscar as well as the Best Picture Oscar when she produced and directed The Hurt Locker in 2009. The other four director nominees were men that year, one of whom ironically, was her former husband, James Cameron who was nominated that year for the blockbuster smash hit, Avatar. Bigelow originally was a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, though she entered the film program at Columbia University, where she earned her Masters and while there directed her first film which was a short called The Set-Up in 1978. She made her official directorial debut three years later in 1981, co-directing The Loveless with Monty Montgomery which catapulted Willem Dafoe to stardom. She married James Cameron in 1989, though they divorced only two years later in 1991. Despite their divorce, they collaborated together on the Crime Drama Strange Days (1995) starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Cameron wrote and produced the film while Bigelow directed. Bigelow also directed The Weight of Water in 2000 and K-19: The Widowmaker in 2002. Three years after her two Oscar wins for “Hurt Locker,” she directed Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, which earned another Oscar nod for Best Picture.

Pixar Animation Studios have produced a total 20 feature length films and nearly 40 shorts that have been collaborative efforts with Walt Disney Studios. And they usually are directed by men. But in 2012, Brenda Chapman co-wrote and co-directed Brave with Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, making Chapman the first female director ever to win an Oscar for directing an animated film. And this past year, Domee Shi wrote and directed the Short film Bao (2018) which played in theaters in front of Incredibles 2 (2018). In addition to being a story writer on several beloved Disney classics (i.e. Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996),) Brenda Chapman also co-directed The Prince of Egypt (1998) for Dreamworks with Simon Wells and Steve Hickner. Domee Shi was a story artist on The Good Dinosaur (2015), Inside Out (2015), and “Incredibles 2,” before she worked her way up to directing “Bao,” and she is currently scheduled to direct an untitled Pixar film to be released in 2022. 

Thankfully, there are many fantastic female directors working today, and not enough time to make this an exhaustive discussion of all of them. Greta Gurwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), Dee Rees (Mudbound) and Ava Duvernay (Selma) all come to mind…no doubt movie fans everywhere are benefitting from their continued contributions.