Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema by Maya Montañez Smuckler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema by Maya Montañez Smuckler Alicia Kozma Maya Montañez Smuckler, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. In 2015, Hollywood studios made headlines as the as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) accepted a request made by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California to investigate systemic discrimination in the hiring of women film directors. While mainstream media reported the inquiry as a potential watershed moment for gendered labor equality in the industry, little was made of the fact that the EEOC had been down this road with Hollywood before. Thankfully, Maya Montañez Smuckler's Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970as American Cinema painstakingly narrates the lesser-known history of the intersection between employment oversight, Hollywood guilds, studios, and the fight for women's equal participation in filmmaking. Combining oral history, interviews, and in-depth archival research focused on internal guild publications, press coverage, legal records, and trades, Montañez Smuckler reconstructs the advocacy efforts of three professional unions—the Directors Guild of American (DGA), the Screen Actors Guild of America (SAG) and the Writers Guild of American (WGA)—from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, as the rise of "Women's Committees" within each union fought in various ways against the hiring discrimination of women film workers. These efforts intersected with the federal efforts to diversify the Hollywood labor pool, beginning with a late 1960s EEOC hearing on job discrimination and ending with a devastating mid-1980s ruling that stymied legal recourse for discriminated workers. Intertwined with this history, Liberating Women recounts the rise of women filmmakers in Hollywood during this time of heady time of social, cultural, and political change. The book's prologue traces the impact of the New American Cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s in New York City as a critical creative space for the women directors like Shirley Clarke and Juleen Compton, precursors to the women who would spur on more than a decade of creativity and advocacy in Hollywood. Chapter 1 notes the first attempts of feminist reform as the second wave feminist movement bisected the growing number of women directors vocal about their lack of opportunities in Hollywood. The EEOC makes its first foray into Hollywood in 1969, requiring the industry set measurable benchmarks for hiring minority workers; women film workers were not included in this plan because the EEOC did not consider them a large enough pool of workers to merit protections. In what would become a recurring standard, the EEOC left it up to the studios to enforce hiring benchmarks and protections in good faith. jThey did not live up to their requirements, and with the exclusion of women workers from agreement, it was left to guild women to demand their own seats at the table. Chapters 2 and 3 integrate institutional efforts at gendered labor equality while focusing on the individual women working within and without the Hollywood system as writers, producers, and directors. For many of these women, Liberating Hollywood is the first substantial academic treatment of their work. While Montañez Smuckler does not claim that these women worked in communication with one another, they do represent a cadre of film laborers fighting to produce work in a system that was openly hostile to their inclusion. Many of these women may have [End Page 67] not been professional colleagues, but they exist in camaraderie with one another. While both chapters provided professional biographies and overarching critical filmic and industrial analysis, Chapter 2 chronicles women directors through their "cultures of production" (77) and Chapter 3 through the rise of the "new women's film" (159). Chapter 2, then, traces the studio, art house, and/or exploitation work of Elaine May, Barbara Loden, Karen Arthur, Joan Micklin Silver, Penny Allen, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly and Fred Sebastian, and Barbara Peeters. Chapter 3 includes Joan Darling, Jane Wagner, Joan Tewkesbury, Joan Rivers, and Claudia Weill. While these two chapters primarily concentrate on individual filmmakers, Liberating Hollywood does not lose the thread of its larger spotlight on...