Celluloid Ceiling Inches Towards Ten Percent Mark

An article in Sunday’s New York Times January 13, 2013 announced that 9 percent of the top 250 movies at the domestic box office last year were directed by women, “a substantially higher number” than the 2011 figure of 5 percent. Funny, the 2012 report is not out yet.

The NYT attributes this to San Diego State University (SDSU) professor Martha Lauzen whose annual “Celluloid Ceiling” report is usually announced the week of the Sundance Film Festival. Frankly, I don’t know where the author of this piece got her information from because the 2012 study has not come out yet. I can’t find it anywhere online or on the SDSU Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film website that does the tracking and study of women working in the movie industry. Contacting Martha Lauzen, she responded saying she is working on the 2012 report which will be released in a week or two, exactly during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. I know. I can’t wait for it to come out.

What I have come across is an executive summary for another study: Independent Women: Behind-The-Scenes Representation on Festival Films (2012) providing employment figures for domestically and independently produced feature-length documentaries and narrative films screening from August 2011 to August 2012 at various U.S. film festivals. According to this report, women are more likely to work as directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers on documentaries than on narrative features screening at high-profile film festivals in the United States.

Here’s where in 2011- 2012, women accounted for 31% of behind-the-scenes individuals working on documentaries compared with 23% on narrative features with the difference especially blatant in the directing role where 39% women directors worked on documentaries as opposed to 18% working on narrative films and only 5% directed top-grossing films in 2011.

At the Sundance Film Festival, 8 of the 16 films in Dramatic Competition are directed by women, while touted as an optimistic statistic for the new year, is still under one tenth of directors hired. When women are hired they tend to take on more or all responsibility tied into the filmmaking process including fundraising, scriptwriting, distribution, marketing and promotion.

As executive director of the center and the author of the study, Dr. Lauzen is not greatly optimistic and views the greater diversity as merely a matter of dollars coming from the lower cost of producing documentaries and a deeply entrenched industry for narrative films– “That director role is traditionally the most male role. With narrative films, whether they are independently produced or  produced by a studio, there is still that celluloid ceiling women have to overcome.”

Women in Film & Television International (WIFTI) supports women filmmakers from around the world and will be hosting a panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday, January 22 at the New York Film Office, Main Street, Park City. More information on the WIFTI Facebook page.