Cinema: Calling Their Own Shots

Ah, Hollywood! Barbara Boyle, former senior vice president at Orion Pictures, dubs the place "Boys Town." Director Martha Coolidge calls it "the land of the starlet." Hollywood, though, has always been an industry in which powerful men made films starring beautiful women. The guys ran things--as producers, directors, bosses--and the highest-paid females were so much screen sirloin. The very job descriptions were sexist: cameraman but script girl. And ruling the set, in his safari jacket and jodhpurs, was the director--an amalgam of Da Vinci and De Sade, Patton and Hemingway. A man's man. No girls needed apply.

They are now, though. Women have started demolishing Hollywood's most honored typecasting: the macho movie director. They have done it the old-fashioned way, by making movies that make money. Amy Heckerling's National Lampoon's European Vacation earned some $50 million at the box office and finished among 1985's top-ten-grossing pictures. Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan raked in $27.5 million on a $5 million budget and graced many a ten-best list. Now that, as Seidelman notes, "women directors are no longer looked at as novelty items," their more established sisters can get back into the act. Barbra Streisand, 43, the all-around auteur of 1983's Yentl, will soon direct an adaptation of the AIDS play The Normal Heart. And Elaine May, 53, an early-'70s trailblazer with her comedies A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, is currently directing Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar--at $30 million, the most expensive film ever entrusted to a woman.

Women are scoring in the low-budget action and independent markets as well, directing movies that can serve as calling cards to the major studios. Penelope Spheeris, 40, has two grungy, turbulent melodramas in release this month, Hollywood Vice Squad and The Boys Next Door. At the other end of the fringe, Donna Deitch, 40, won the Jury Prize at this year's U.S. Film Festival with Desert Hearts, a tale of Sapphic love in Reno that plays like The Women hyped on estrogen. The festival's Grand Prize went to Joyce Chopra's Smooth Talk, which opened in New York City recently to critical raves.

Smooth Talk, based on a Joyce Carol Gates short story, illuminates the traditional contours of a woman director's film--the leisurely portraiture of an ordinary family--then shockingly reveals a mysterious fable of fear and longing. Connie (Laura Dern) is a coltish California girl trying to cope with her brand-new woman's body and its desperate urgencies. She sasses her angry mom, cruises the mall with her girlfriends and dreams of a boy who will hold her close and sing to her. Enter Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), an older man whose silky threats mesmerize the girl into taking his dare. Arnold is Connie's demon lover, a nightmare image of every male she has ever vamped, and the price he exacts is her realization that 15 is too young to grow up and old.