Liberating Hollywood: "UCLA Film Series Highlights Extraordinary Women in Film"

[Lisa McRee:] Well, it's not just the political world where women are taking a stand. This film and television award season is sparking new dialog about representation and inclusion. Just last night, number of women received recognition at the SAG Awards in Los Angeles. "GLOW" which is a show about female wrestlers starring Alison Brie took Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a TV Series. Sandra Oh won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in the drama series, about a female assassin, called "Killing Eve". And a film series at UCLA is hoping to bring attention to more of the film world's most underappreciated artists. Our Kristopher Gee, attended the UCLA film series "Liberating Hollywood" and saw how some voices have fought their way to the top. Many cinephiles look to the 1970s as a Golden Age in American cinema. I'm Kristopher Gee, at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood, where I met up with Maya Smukler, whose new book "Liberating Hollywood" has spawned a film series that's re-examining the work of a handful of extraordinary women in film. [film music] [Gee:] Maya Smukler's book, "Liberating Hollywood" is the culmination of 20 years of academic work on women in film, and came to fruition as she was working on her doctoral thesis. [Smukler:] So it was the, sort of, perfect homecoming, to be able to plan this series with UCLA Film & Television Archive. [Gee:] Maya examines how social and industrial conditions opened up opportunities for women in film in the '70s, and how they coped with institutional sexism that still remains an issue. I've always been a cinephile. I've always been a feminist, my whole entire life. And so as I grew up, I was able to put those interests in conversation with each other, professionally. [Gee:] Despite producing a wide range of unique films from melodrama to exploitation biker films, Maya wanted to examine why names like Joan Tewkesbury, Elaine May and Barbara Peeters are largely left out of film history. [Smukler:] That they had been marginalized, and for the most part, excluded in film history, but most specifically, to really look at these women, not in terms of their gender, but as individual filmmakers and to really be able to celebrate them as individual artists. It's not only were they left out of historical texts, but in many instances, they were left out of archives. [Gee:] Speaking of left out, I asked Joan Tewkesbury whose film "Old Boyfriends" kicks off the series if the absence of women director nominees at this year's Academy Awards bothered her? You know, no. It's about movies. I mean, I'm alone in this. People get very angry that I don't get angry. I'm not angry. Because there are a lot of films that have been directed by women. And to me, that is the - that's the most important thing. [audience applause] [Smukler:] Today, all kinds of powerful men and women are speaking out on behalf of fighting sexism and racism and ageism and homophobia. And that's really significant. [audience applause] [Gee:] Maya hopes that her book and the film series will help bring a new appreciation to the work of these unique film artists. [music] [Giselle Fernandez:] And joining us now in studio with more on the "Liberating Hollywood" series and UCLA's Film & Television Archive, is programmer Paul Malcolm. Welcome to "The Beat on 1". [Malcolm:] Thank you for having me. [Fernandez:] Let's start off, tell us more about the archives at UCLA, and the work that you do. [Malcolm:] Well, the UCLA Film & Television Archive is the second largest archive, film archive in the United States, second only to the Library of Congress because they got started before us. But we are the largest university film archive in the world, which basically means we preserve - we collect film, television, all kinds of moving image media. We preserve and store it for safety. We restore it so it can be screened again, and we exhibit it in public theaters like we're doing for "Liberating Hollywood". So I'm in the exhibition side of things, at the Archive. [Melvin Robert:] And what inspired the series? [Malcolm:] Well this series was actually inspired by the work of two women. I'm here representing their work, 'cause they couldn't be here. So, [laughter]. [Fernandez:] You're a renaissance man! [Malcolm:] just to get over that. But Maya Smukler wrote the book "Liberating Hollywood" which is a, a remarkable sort of - I wouldn't say counter-history, but it's an additive history to what we've always known about the - or we've heard about the new Hollywood in the 1970s, when Scorsese and Spielberg and George Lucas all got their start. When the - when these Hollywood studios were trying to find a new direction, new voices to reach a new audience, there was also this whole group of women who got started at the same period of time. They started out around the same time, working in the same genres. [McRee:] Look at that. [Malcolm:] Yes, there we go. [Robert:] I love that. [Malcolm:] There's Elaine May working on "A New Leaf". [Malcolm:] And so, those women, kind of, at some point, got - this is Anne Bancroft working on "Fatso" - kind of got written out of the histories after a while. [McRee:] Wow. [Malcolm:] And their films start getting - stop getting screened and they stop getting sort of attention. [Fernandez:] They were mostly independent, right? [Malcolm:] Independent - well, a lot of Hollywood studios were - some of these were Hollywood studio films. Some of them were independent films. But they made this contribution to American cinema in the '70s and '80s that has been kind of written out of the history books, just sort of overlooked. [McRee:] Because the others have become such a canon. The canon of the '70s movies has always sort of lionized all these great male directors and it's not taking away from those great films, they're still great films, but we, we sort of let go of all these, all of these others. [Malcolm:] Yes. [Fernandez:] Is that a young Jeff Goldblum? [Malcolm:] Yes it is. [Robert:] Looks like it! Yeah! [laughter] [Malcolm:] In Joan Micklin Silver's, I think, "Moment to Moment". [McRee:] Tell us about some of the films that you're playing - that you're showing. [Malcolm:] Well, I think that, like you said, you know, Maya - the argument that Maya makes in the book is not that the films of Scorsese and Spielberg aren't amazing, they are, it's just there is and should be room for these other amazing films made by these women filmmakers. And I think, the other thing that's really amazing about this program that she and K.J. Relth, my colleague at the Archive, put together is, it's not just one type of film. I mean, you have romantic comedies, like "A New Leaf" and "The Heartbreak Kid" by Elaine May who is a master, who deserves a lot more credit, but you also have these incredible, what we would call, exploitation or horror films by Barbara Peeters and Stephanie Rothman, "The Velvet Vampire" being one of my favorites. Where they were taking the, sort of, politics and the, sort of, social cultural unrest of the time and channeling it through these genre films in really amazing ways. [Fernandez:] Why didn't it get more attention at the time? [Malcolm:] You know, I don't know. There's, there's any number of different reasons. Maybe the films didn't, they didn't do well at the box office, or they didn't connect with their audiences at the time. Or they did connect with their audience but it's always making that second and third feature that then becomes difficult for women filmmakers. [McRee:] Well, that's the thing. The argument is, you know, Mike Nichols had this amazing career and he did "The Graduate" "Heartbreak Kid", his partner, his comedic partner Elaine May, very similar, capturing some of the big themes, the melancholy of that generation, and yet, his career, went on and on and on, and she had a few films, but she never had that sort of, that sort of career. [Malcolm:] Right. [Malcolm:] And you get, it's just the difference between, say, a male director gets a big hit and it's capturing lightning in a bottle. A woman has a big hit and it's a fluke, or it's a one-off thing. [McRee:] Well, it's also director jail too. Like, [Malcolm:] Yes, right. [McRee:] There's also director jail, which if a man makes a stinker, he has a couple more passes at other films before he's shut out. Women, one bad one, you're in director jail. [Malcolm:] You get one chance and that's it if you're a woman. [Fernandez:] Well, it's a whole new generation took off - I'm just reading the statistics and it says only 8% of the 250 films made last year were made by female directors. So maybe looking at this exhibit, it gives you a chance to take a look at what might, should be? [Malcolm:] Well, I mean it, yes exactly. It's, it's - that's a crazy, that's a crazy statistic. 8% is ridiculous. And if - but if you look at the films that, a lot of films that are on my Top 10 list, were made, from last year, were made by women, "The Rider, it was this phenomenal film, I can't believe it's not getting nominated for anything. But so the idea is that if we can, if we can point to this history, if we can show that women have been making films for decades, and were amazing films, [McRee:] And done well. [laughs] [Malcolm:] Then, there's a sort of, there's a context for the work that's coming out now, and so it doesn't seem like, "Oh, my gosh this is a new thing." This is - there's a history for this, going back decades. And I think it's time we started paying attention to that. [Fernandez:] Amen. [Robert:] Thank you so much for being here. [Malcolm:] Thank you very much for having us here, appreciate it. [McRee:] Great. Okay. [Robert:] We'll be right back, stay with us. [music]