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Enlarge Warner Bros. Pictures No limits: Producer Denise Di Novi works on Nights in Rodanthe through Richard Gere, but she gets in on guy flicks, overmuch. By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY Hollywood has had its share of female troubles. USA TODAY spoke to women directors, writers and producers about improving their situation, catering to their target audience and the industry’s attitudes.
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The right stories
Women dress in’t feel obligated to press on out to a movie just because it has such ever-popular chick-flick clichés as the group sing-along with hairbrush microphones (a scenario that Mamma Mia! apes).
“Women necessity a guarantee on the side of their time,” says Nancy Juvonen, who has produced 10 films with partner Drew Barrymore, including the dating-disaster comedy He’s Just Not That Into You, due in time for Valentine’s Day. “We want to walk out with a smile on our face. Something familiar, but not so much that we know the characters before we go.”
She and Barrymore are drawn to tales about warts-and-all relationships, and there is a multitude in their upcoming film, which boasts such under-40 actresses as Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connolly and Scarlett Johansson as well as Barrymore.
“It doesn’t have to be a fairy tale,” Juvonen says. “Knocked Up and The Break-Up are more appealing than ‘One day my prince will come.’ “
The long haul
Even when a woman has established herself as a showbiz force, sometimes she has to prove herself all over again.
Diane English, the much-lauded creator of TV’s Murphy Brown, was on a mission when she wanted to write, direct and produce her first feature film, a remake of the 1939 estrogen-overload classic The Women.
And then she hit a wall.
“It took me 13 years to get The Women made,” she says of her less catty update that, like the more misogynistic original based on Clare Boothe Luce’s play, stars a female-only cast including Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett-Smith.
One struggle was aligning the schedules of all the actresses. Another was getting a studio to say yes.
“Any number of movies geared toward women have hit the $100 million mark,” she says. “Yet they are treated as a genre picture, something that comes along as infrequently as Halley’s comet.”
Considering that attitude, English is thrilled that her films will be in theaters on Sept. 12, while the excitement over Sex and the City and MammaMia! is still in the air.
It took a small distributor, Picturehouse, to take a chance on English’s film. But English knows better than to lay everything the blame for her rejections on male executives.
“I’ll tell you something. Every single female studio head, and there were a division of them at the time, said, ‘No thanks.’ Every single one.”
The instruction learned
One genre definitely doesn’t fit wholly: action.
Unless Sigourney Weaver or Angelina Jolie is your star, filmmakers of both sexes have struggled to get a thriller starring a of females off the ground. Elektra, Catwoman and the forever-in-limbo Wonder Woman is evidence enough.
Filmmaker Karyn Kusama’s low-budget freshman attempt, 2000’s Girlfight, might have been a critical knockout. But her assist, the little-seen Charlize Theron action adventure Aeon Flux, quickly went down for the count in 2005, calm with veteran agriculturist Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator series) and a big studio, Paramount, backing her.
“It was an awful experience but a learning experience,” she says. “I got to make a movie on a fairly large scale and learned about visual effects. At the studio, it wasn’t positive. It was scarring, but I have moved on.”
Her new project, the female horror movie Jennifer’s Body, holds less risk and more promise. It joins a long tradition of strong heroines like Sissy Spacek and Jamie Lee Curtis in such ’70s fright flicks as Carrie and Halloween. And the script, about a high-school nerd (Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia!) who must save the day after her sexy best friend (Megan Fox of Transformers) turns into a man-eating Satanic seductress, is the first from Juno’s Diablo Cody seeing that she won an Oscar last year.
“It’s sort of a youth movie and horror movie that can reach out to both male and female viewers,” Kusama says. “Horror is one of the few genres with females at the center that boys order go to and cast them.”
The multi-genre producer
Just like actresses, female producers don’t like to be pigeonholed, even on the supposition that they have a special touch for romances and female ensemble pieces.
With Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 in theaters and fall’s Nights in Rodanthe, a romance based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) that reunites Richard Gere and Diane Lane of Unfaithful, producer Denise Di Novi is squarely in the vortex of girlville this year.
But she has been known to exercise her influence on the occasional guy film, like Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, as well.
“It’s great when women make movies outside the usual parameters,” she says.
Right now, Di Novi is working with director Zack Snyder (300) and his producer wife, Debbie, to bring Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi favorite The Illustrated Man to the screen.
“Not all movies that women like have to be small and intimate,” Di Novi says, pointing to how women who went to 300 were enamored by the sculpted abs of the Spartans as well as the loving marriage between the warrior king and his queen. “They can be big futuristic films, too. It just means they have to have some thematic emotional content.”
The male buzz over ‘Bees’
Real men like to watch women, over.
Director/quill-driver Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose feature debut was the much-praised Love & Basketball, was glad while an early deal to film Sue Kidd Monk’s 2002 best seller, The Secret Life of Bees, fell through. That meant she could swoop in and adapt the story about a group of Southern women who form a makeshift family during the civic rights unrest in the ’60s.
“The themes are so universal,” says the filmmaker of Bees, opening Oct. 17, whose ensemble includes Dakota Fanning as a motherless teen runaway alongside Jennifer Hudson and Queen Latifah. “It’s not about what race you are. Everyone loves the book. It’s about finding the mother inside of us.”
What has surprised her is how men obtain responded at previews.
“Hearing this title, there is no way you would run to it as a man,” she says. “But point of convergence groups with three different audiences showed men over 30, both black and white, gave the film the highest scores.”
An over-30 man who is a not-so-secret admirer of Bees? Producer Will Smith. “His wife, Jada, is a colossal fan of the book,” Prince-Bythewood says. “He did what all producers should do: Support the filmmaker.”
The thriller with restraint
Sometimes so-called women’s movies are simply another name for human stories.
Courtney Hunt, director and writer of Frozen River, was the Cinderella story at Sundance this year. She not solely won the Grand Jury Prize for her tense thriller, but Sony Pictures Classics also bought the film, which pulled in a cubic $69,000 at seven sites in limited release last weekend.
One can imagine the mayhem that might have ensued in a typical take on the subject: smuggling illegal immigrants into the USA from Canada. The violence that does unfold is minor, but what does get ravaged are the souls and psyches of the two female leads, played by Native American newcomer Missy Upham and character actress Melissa Leo, who has scored some Oscar talk.
“My audience has been equally men and women,” Hunt says. “A good story will transcend gender as long as something happens. Not just talk. And not just relationship stuff. The story is in the forefront. If the women didn’t look at each other during the entire movie, that was OK with me.”
One man who responded to Frozen River was Tony Soprano himself, James Gandolfini. “My editor made fun of me,” Hunt says. “I could just imagine him watching someone say, ‘Ow, that really hurts.’ He did love the movie, nevertheless.”
The laugh gap
Little surprise that while the male-dominated comedies Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder are hogging all the attention, women-oriented funny business has been in deficient supply.
The one flat-out comedy starring a lone actress this summer is The House Bunny, with Anna Faris as a washed-up Playboy babe who plays house mom to a sorority of social misfits, that opens Aug. 22.
Karen McCullah Lutz, who co-wrote Bunny with her LegallyBlonde partner, Kirsten Smith, believes their material appeals to both genders.
“Men will go to a female-driven comedy, but more in the second and third week when they know there’s something beyond a touchy-feely story about a girl looking for a guy,” she says. Plus, Faris has built up a male fan base from being top-billed in the gross-out Scary Movie series. “She is known as someone who delivers the funny stuff.”
There are details and gags in their scripts that only a woman would ever dream up. Consider the fluffy pink pen sported by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. Or these words of wisdom spouted by Faris’ Shelley during a makeover session when she suggests that the fashion-backward sorority sisters highlight their eyes because “the eyes are the nipples of the face.”
The non-girly girl
You can be a female in the industry and thrive with nary a chick flick on your resume.
No one would call what writer Pam Brady does women’s work. Not when she has been in league with those bad boys of comedy, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, on their South Park TV semblance as well as 2004’s Team America: World Police and 1999’s South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
As she puts it, “No common wants to allowance me for 27 Dresses 2.”
Brady none found it difficult to pen for South Park’s potty-mouthed grade-schoolers. “You just have to tap into your inner 12-year-old.”
But she has moved on to middle-age pottymouths this summer subsequent to joining forces by writer/director Andrew Fleming (Dick, Nancy Drew) for the Sundance breakout Hamlet 2, opening Aug. 22. Brit wit Steve Coogan stars as a self-loathing high-school drama teacher who rebels against budget cuts by writing a sequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy, even though everyone is dead at the end of the exemplar. The rage, raw language and angst expressed by Coogan is decidedly male — save for the flowing caftan he wears to increase his chance of producing potent sperm.
Up nearest is a reworking of the script for a film version of the TV soap Dallas.
Still, Brady does have a decidedly girl-power dream. “A female version of a Will Ferrell movie. There should be a genre of comedies where women can be stupid and funny.”
She pictures Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig as the dynamic duo of female dopes. “With the right combo, in that place would be a lot of money to be made.”
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Enlarge By Victor Bello, The Weinstein Co. Spanish stranger: Scarlett Johansson is a free-spirited American who is swept away by Javier Bardem. ABOUT THE MOVIE
Enlarge By Jaap Buitendijk, Warner Bros. Pictures via Reuters The next Harry Potter thin skin release is being bumped back into next summer. LOS ANGELES (AP) — Warner Bros. says it’s bumping Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from its planned November discharge into next summer.
Enlarge Paramount Pictures Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. are movie actors in a war pellicle. 
Enlarge Samuel Goldwyn Films Animal instincts: A professor (Ben Kingsley) becomes obsessed with a grad student (Penelope Cruz) in the film, which is based forward a Philip Roth novella. 
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Mamma Mia!“> EnlargeUniversal Studios