Lawrence.com

Six percent of the 250 top-grossing movies in the United States last year were directed by women.

This means 94 percent were directed by men. And yet women make up roughly 40 percent of the film students at KU, according to the Department of Theater and Film. So what happens to all of them?

It's one of those problems that never seems to go away. This story, which is about women in film, and why so few of them occupy the most important roles behind the camera, could have been written 10, 20, 30 years ago and be virtually the same.

LUNAFEST, an annual film festival featuring films for, about and by women is coming to Liberty Hall on Sunday, March 9, and it's an appropriate time to celebrate the strides women are making in filmmaking. But before getting to that part of the story, think for a moment about how backward the situation is in Hollywood.

The constant assumption in the United States when it comes to equality is that things are slowly improving. Martin Luther King Jr. called this "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." But in this case, even gradual change is failing. The number of women in key roles is not slowly increasing, but is, in fact, slowly declining.

Martha M. Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, puts together an annual report called the Celluloid Ceiling on the number of women behind the top 250 films. In 2007:

- 15 percent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors were women.

- The percentage of women in each of these roles was lower than it was 10 years earlier.

- One in five films employed no female directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, or editors.

Catherine Preston, one of the two film faculty members at KU who are women, says the problem isn't an overt bias against women so much as a bias against people without a track record. Producers don't want to hire people without experience, and until women get experience, they can't be hired.

"It is kind of a perpetual situation in which the women don't typically hold the power that is needed to finish films," she says.

And women who do hold power, the one in five producers last year who were women (10 years ago it was closer to one in four) don't necessarily influence the hiring of more women, as the percentage of women producers is higher than in any of the other key roles behind the camera.

"Women producers also only want to back people who they think are going to be successful," Preston says. "Again, that's track record, and, again, that is people who are able to get the money to make their films look good."

Lawrence native Patty Jenkins broke into the Hollywood scene four years ago with the box-office hit "Monster," a movie she wrote and directed about a female serial killer. Now that she's known-now that she's cracked the Celluloid Ceiling-she doesn't have any problem finding work in Hollywood.

"Now they just see me as a commodity that can make them money by having my name attached. And it's great," she says from Los Angeles, where she lives. "Nobody's shooting that down because they have a problem with women."

Jenkins was aided in getting her big break by the fact that she wrote a badass script that producers thought would make them money and actors wanted to act in. But what about female directors who don't have that luxury?

She says the fact that there are so few female directors-and the notion that women have a harder time getting hired-may further perpetuate the problem by causing a lack of confidence. Her secret it simply to tune out the problem.

"Even if it's real, just tune it out, because by thinking that this exists and it could hold you back, you're more likely to create that situation," she says. "You have to have blind confidence in order to get hired."

Jenkins says she's known many women who eventually ditched their dream of sitting in the director's chair for a number of reasons created by an all-absorbing lifestyle-she often works a hellishly long 16 hours a day.

"Basically, by doing that job, you're deferring that somebody else is going to raise your children and do everything else in your life," she says. "I think that there are more men who are willing to make that sacrifice, and can find a way to make that sacrifice in a way that works, than there are women. Being a man, being a director does not negate your inherent masculinity, but being a female director, it kind of does."

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Screen sisters

A Day on the Job

Misti Boland, like most people only a few years removed from film school, hasn't made it to the big-budget, high-grossing film industry. She has yet to become a statistic in Lauzen's Celluloid Ceiling.

That's not to say she hasn't done well for herself. She was the production designer and art director for local film demigod Kevin Willmott's upcoming "Bunker Hill" and the art designer for Willmott's "The Only Good Indian," and has worked in production design on several other feature films, commercials, and music videos, as well as directing her own shorts. She wants to make her own feature film in the next few years.

Today, Boland is in the back seat of an SUV, heading south on U.S. Route 169 to Paola with a couple other young filmmakers who graduated from KU a few years ago, Bobby McGee and Steve Deaver, to scout locations for a family Christmas movie called "Last Ounce of Courage."

Boland is the production designer for the film, and she's going to be checking that the set will accommodate everything the script calls for. Their first stop is the Paola Community Center, a big, blocky brick building where a man named Chad Myers is waiting.

Myers, the director of the community center, meets the group in the auditorium and leads them to the stage. This is where, in the script, a group of junior high students put on a space alien version of Christmas as their school winter play (which they rebel against by staging a production of the true Christmas story).

Myers goes to the side of the stage and rolls down a couple backdrops-one looks like the inside of a Roman palace and the other looks like a country road. Neither looks much like Bethlehem.

"I think it's going to be good," Boland says, her head tilted back before the giant canvas. "The backdrop is going to be-a project."

Boland, McGee, and Deaver are driving around for three days to make sure the locations will work-to make sure there's enough parking, to check lighting and scheduling conflicts and all that, to figure out what to do if the flowers are in bloom. Then a month of filming will begin.

In the SUV, as Boland is listing off the projects she's worked on, McGee interjects, "Misti's on the forefront of a lot of affluent filmmakers living in Lawrence that are continuing to get work over and over again."

Hollywood Schmollywood

The Lawrence scene may be a far cry from Hollywood, but, in many ways, that can be a positive for female filmmakers. Stacey Fox, a filmmaker and the visiting guest artist in the Department of Art at KU, explains that many women have bypassed the mainstream movie establishment only to thrive in indie films.

"You're allowed to really be creative, and you're not playing by a set group of rules that were put in place by the older, male establishment," she says. "If someone were to go about and say, 'How many independent women filmmakers are there?' the numbers would blast away any survey taken of women filmmakers in the old establishment."

Amy McClung, a KU junior in film, is trying to find her own space to work outside of the mainstream industry. Before coming to KU, she worked in Washington state doing freelance video production, filming things like city council meetings for public access TV. After a couple years of that, she decided to go to film school and take a shot at higher pursuits.

"It's very difficult when you're starting out at the very bottom, because people know you're at the bottom," she says. "The advantage of being in charge, doing my own thing, is that I don't have to answer to anybody. I make the decisions, and what I say goes."

Using a Canon XL1, she made her first feature-length film in 2006, "Change of Life," about a minister and his lesbian daughter trying to reconnect.

"My crew consisted of myself, my mom, and a couple other guys working lights and that kind of thing," McClung says. "For the most part, we didn't really have a crew. I was the crew. It's low-budget filmmaking. We just didn't have the money to hire people on, but I'm such a control freak that it really didn't matter. I wanted to do everything myself."

Not only are more women making small-time independent movies, Fox says, but old rules are disintegrating as well. The traditional roles-women overseeing things like makeup and costume design and men operating the machinery-are changing in independent films, even if not in Hollywood.

"You're seeing a lot more girls with cameras, women behind the lens, and women in charge of production," Fox says.

Muriel Green is one of those girls with a camera. The KU junior worked as an assistant camera (the person clapping the slate) on "Bunker Hill" and has also been a camera loader and operator, as well as making her own short films.

Green says that while her production classes at KU include a pretty healthy mix of guys and gals, she's noticed a lot more guys doing the camera work on the few professional projects she's been a part of.

At the same time, she's already made a pact with a few friends from KU-who happen to also be women-to keep each other in mind as they branch off into careers in film, so that if they ever need somone for a project, the know who to call.

"People move away, or they get day jobs, or they do whatever they're doing, but there have been three of us that are relentlessly holding on to this idea that we're going to make movies together," Green says. "So we're trying to start up something."

It's groups like these-people who respect each other's stuff and enjoy working together-that lead to getting hired, says Jennifer Hellwig, a filmmaker and the equipment manager at KU's Oldfather Studios.

And when women are part of a movie crew, chances are that they know other women who are good at what they do. Hellwig mentions "Go Fish," a movie from 1994 that was made by a group of women in Chicago. Shot in their spare time, the low-budget film eventually was picked up by a distributor and released.

"I think anywhere you find a community of people who all have the same vision and dream and drive, you'll make things happen," Hellwig says. "I think Lawrence definitely has that capability." »