Sunday, April 23 | 2 Movies
In 2017 it was a female director, Patty Jenkins, who gave Warner Bros. – and the film industry more broadly – the year’s highest grossing summer movie. Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017) smashed the worldwide box office and brought in a whopping $615 million in sales during its opening weekend and over $800 million during its run. As the first female-directed and female-led superhero studio project, the film premiered at a tense moment, when Hollywood studios were increasingly criticized for the lack of inclusive hiring practices. At the same time, Warner Bros., which owns DC Entertainment, desperately needed a financial win in the superhero sector, after David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016) and Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) underproduced in sales and had a lukewarm reception among critics. Jenkins was best known for writing and directing Monster (2003), a biographical crime drama about real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron), a sex worker who, traumatized after being brutally assaulted by a client, went on a murdering spree from 1989-1990. The film earned Jenkins the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Warner Bros. entrusted her to bring her sharp eye on gender to the male-dominated cinematic world of comics. Jenkins’ Wonder Woman beautifully feminizes typically masculine superhero film tropes like the training montage and the war battle. She shows how, in addition to physical strength and vigilante justice, compassion, community and love are also superpowers.
With its success, Wonder Woman is widely viewed as both rescuing the DC film franchise and putting Warner Bros. back on the map as a company that fosters the extraordinary talents of female filmmakers. In 2018, Warner Bros. and its corporate siblings HBO and Turner Broadcasting introduced a policy aimed at increasing the number of women and people of color involved in its movies and television shows. Since then, Warner Bros. has taken on projects by female directors Ry Russo-Young (The Sun Is Also a Star, 2019, co-produced with MGM), Ava DuVernay (DMZ, 2022, on HBO), and Cathy Yan (Birds of Prey, 2020).
Roughly 40 years before Wonder Woman and the concerted implementation of gender and racial inclusion policies, Warner Bros. broke away from the industry’s pervasive sexism to support independent female filmmaker Claudia Weill. Her semi-autobiographical film, Girlfriends (1978), was part of the women-led independent underbelly of the New Hollywood era, overshadowed by movies made by male auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, George Lucas and Brian De Palma.
Unlike these men’s glossy big budget films, Weill’s Girlfriends metacinematically tells the story of Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron), a young photographer who wants to showcase her work in a gallery but is stuck with small change shooting jobs, covering bar mitzvahs and weddings. Her best friend and roommate, Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner), is also an artist, an aspiring writer. After Susan sells three of her pictures to a magazine, she thinks she has left small gigs behind, but her life begins to crumble when Anne moves out to get married and she suddenly can’t manage to sell any more of her work.
The everyday challenges faced by female artists are of central concern in the film. Weill outlines how women manage near impossible mobility in their careers as well as the demands of domestic life. Friendships between women – both personal and professional – are mediated by these difficulties. In addition, the film adds the particularities of Orthodox Judaism to explore gender roles within the religion and culture. Ultimately, Weill makes the case for how a woman can gain personal autonomy and self-worth if she roots herself in her artistic individuality.
These themes resonated with female filmmakers and audiences in the 1970s. Barely 1 in 200 movies rated by the Motion Picture Association between 1970 and 1978 was made by a woman. Open misogyny permeated the industry. Women were effectively exiled from the big studios and production companies, regulated to low-budget documentary and experimental film over feature narratives. As one male executive told independent female filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, “Feature films are expensive to make and expensive to market, and women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”
Weill’s film started as a 30-minute short funded by a grant from the American Film Institute. Upon completion, Weill realized that she wanted to explore what would happen next in the story. (That short film eventually became the first seven minutes of the feature film.) Original funding for the feature came from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, totaling $80,000. Principal photography was six and half weeks, but those days were stretched over the span of a year because the production kept running out of money and Weill had to seek out private investors. Girlfriends won awards at the Locarno International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the David di Donatello Awards before Warner Bros. bought it for world distribution. It went on to be nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. When asked about what he thought of the new Hollywood “paths and trends” initiated by the celebrated male auteurs of the time, Stanley Kubrick ignored those men and said, “I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood – American films – that I’ve seen in a long time is Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe.”
A decade after Girlfriends, Warner Bros. distributed Susan Seidelman’s Cookie (1989). Like many of Seidelman’s other films, Cookie spins an established film genre, updating it with a female protagonist and her distinct point of view. With Making Mr. Right (1987), Seidelman used science fiction conventions against themselves, critiquing sexist tropes within the genre; with Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Seidelman upended the conventional male/female role-swap by having two women exchange their very opposite personas. And with Cookie, written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, Seidelman took on the mafia story, a popular genre in the 1980s. Against the hypermasculine themes of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) and Wise Guys (1986), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Cookie tells the story of mafia father Dino Capisco (Peter Falk) who learns to appreciate his headstrong daughter Cookie (Emily Lloyd), a gum-chewing, chain-smoking 18-year-old who outsmarts both the D.A. and the mob. Cookie remains a cult classic.
Both Girlfriends and Cookie are important forerunners to Wonder Woman – as well as the other contemporary films and television shows made by women and supported by Warner Bros. This month, TCM highlights these two gendered turning points in the studio’s history, providing invaluable context for today’s female audiences and hopeful filmmakers.
