If you're a film lover, it probably won't shock you to learn that Universal Studios, that behemoth of Hollywood filmmaking, credited only one female director among its films in 2017.
But what would you say to the fact that a century earlier, in 1917, Universal credited more female directors – eight, in fact?
The downward trend is part of a decades-long amnesia of women's achievements in film, Empire magazine editor-at-large Helen O'Hara tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
Because in the early 1900s, women directors were, frankly, crushing it.
Alice Guy-Blaché made the first narrative film, The Cabbage Fairy – and over 1,000 others. And Mary Pickford was so successful, she could cherrypick her scripts and crew.
Marion E. Wong established her own film company and Frances Marion demanded the pay her stardom warranted.
Tressie Souders became the first known African American woman to direct a film, A Woman's Error, and by 1916, silent film director Lois Weber was the highest paid director in Hollywood.
Female directors were in high demand, commanding big budgets and at the forefront of their profession.
But they are rarely remembered as such, says O'Hara, who is also the author of Women Versus Hollywood: the Fall and Rise of Women in Film.
"What's interesting is how almost completely [Weber] was left out of the history books, when those came to be written. All the attention was given to the Cecil B. DeMille's and the D. W. Griffith's.
"This woman who had been right there alongside them … was just sort of left on one side."
Problematic rise of the 'difficult' genius
O'Hara says female directors started to disappear in the late 1910s when Hollywood started to become "very big business".
Films were getting longer and more expensive, which meant an increased need for financial backers.
These investors were "all men" and they were "very reluctant to invest in women", O'Hara says.
"They understood dealing with other men and they didn't understand dealing with women."
There was another setback for women: the rise of the "auteur", the 1950s term coined to describe a director whose distinctive approach gives their film a unique stamp.
O'Hara says with the auteur came a reverence for the artistic genius: "someone who is difficult, who is old, who may be rude and who's almost certainly male".
It helped breed a culture in Hollywood in which "men are allowed to be badly behaved", she says.
"We started to kind of deify these male genius directors [and] it was an extra burden and an extra hurdle for women to overcome."
Hollywood gets a shake-up
Some of the hurdles for female directors are now being dismantled, says Elissa Down, an Australian film and TV director based in the US.
On the set of her 2007 feature film Black Balloon, she recalls a young female extra asking how Down gets the boys to do what she says.
"[It] broke my heart", Down says.
"Because that's the whole thing about being a director – you're doing the things that as girls we were trained not to do: be loud, be dominant, make decisions, tell people what to do."
But Down, who also teaches directing, says there's a palpable shift in attitudes among a new generation of directors, and a striking difference in the ways girls and women speak about themselves.
Where once many young women suffered from "impostor syndrome", Down says today they seem to have a sense of wanting "to come in and take up space and take my place".
The Me Too movement has propelled the shift; indeed, it made a significant difference to Down's own career.
She "felt a shake in Hollywood" when Me Too took off in 2017.
"Suddenly doors were being opened," she says.
"[Before] you just weren't getting meetings, you weren't considered, you weren't on the director lists.
"Suddenly, it was like, 'Shit, we better have women on our director lists, as well as people of colour'."
In the years since, women's work in film has begun to be "taken a little bit more seriously than what was before", Down says.
Yet financial backers still hold significant sway – and often it's not in the direction of female-led projects.
"There's still this false idea that women's [filmmaking] doesn't do well at the box office," Down says.
"It's hard to break through because the male execs go, 'No, I don't want to make this [female-led or written story], I'll make my superhero movie'."
But she's optimistic about the future of her industry; slowly, surely, things are changing for participation and representation in film, and not just in regard to gender.
Viewers expect and are enjoying seeing "people of different colours and shapes and sizes" on their screens, she says.
"The horse has bolted ... There's definitely an embracement of new voices [and] more diverse stories being told."
Hollywood realises it has 'a case to answer'
O'Hara agrees that the ground is shifting in filmmaking.
Oscar wins for directors Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion, in 2021 and 2022 respectively, signals a "very important" movement, she says.
"What we're seeing over the last few years is Hollywood realising that there is a case to answer here in terms of their, frankly, discrimination against female directors.
"They're beginning to realise how bad it looks and … that there is talent out there that they are missing out on."
There's even an accreditation now, a Reframe stamp, for films that achieve gender parity in their film casts or crews.
Down says it doesn't carry extra funding or promotion; rather, "it's a point of pride".
She says there's a saying in Hollywood about Ginger Rogers "doing exactly the same as Fred Astaire, but backwards and in heels – but everyone still talks about Fred Astaire".
It's a pattern that may finally be petering out.
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