‘One woman’s failure affects every woman’s chances’: stereotyping impossible women directors in 1970s Hollywood

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, after decades of exclusion from most creative and technical roles in the American film industry, women worked to break down barriers to their employment through fighting for equity and representation in industry guilds, broadening their access to education and training, and through establishing women-focused film festivals and independent production companies. Five women—Elaine May, Joan Darling, Jane Wagner, Lina Wertmüller, and Joan Micklin Silver—directed films for major Hollywood studios during the decade. Yet each woman experienced gender discrimination that circumscribed her commercial feature film output and Hollywood career. This article argues that even as women made inroads into filmmaking in the 1970s, their progress as directors in Hollywood was impeded by institutionalised and renewed beliefs that women could not manage the financial, logistical, technical, and creative complexities of filmmaking. 1970s Hollywood discourse and practice stereotyped women directors as incompetent and impossible with enduring consequences for women filmmakers.