In a time in which major female film characters remain a minority, director Martha Coolidge is determined to bring her share of standouts to the screen.
And she`s determined to do the same for the men in her movies.
”I`m really interested in people, male or female, and the different levels upon which men and women relate to each other,” says Coolidge, director of 1991`s ”Rambling Rose” and this week`s TNT cable network`s film adaptation by Gerald Ayres of Luanne Rice`s novel, ”Crazy in Love.”
”I look at them all as human beings-what motivates them, how they grow, what the heroic challenges are in their lives, what the crises are that they face and the revelations they have. That`s drama to me.”
Coolidge, 45, is a former documentary filmmaker who moved to feature films nearly a decade ago. In the ensuing years, she has built her reputation on maintaining the delicate balance between men and women in her stories, always probing the humanity at the core.
”I think it`s very important that women directors not treat male characters in a superficial fashion the way female characters have been treated in movies,” she says.
”Crazy in Love,” to be aired at 7, 9 and 11 p.m. Monday and other times this week and next, stars Holly Hunter and Gena Rowlands. It looks into the intertwined lives of four women-a grandmother, mother and two daughters-and their involvements with men, past and present.
”It`s extremely character-driven,” Coolidge says of the film, ”with all the implied complex interrelationships dealing with issues of motherhood and the women`s familial attitude towards men. It reflects a very personal look at female attitudes toward things, especially female judgments on male behavior. Because it reveals things about women, it is extremely interesting to men as well as women.”
Coolidge`s next project, about to begin shooting, is her first major studio production, the screen adaptation of Neil Simon`s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama, ”Lost in Yonkers.” Seen from the perspective of two young boys left temporarily in their grandmother`s charge, the story hinges on the clash between the bitter, strong-willed elderly woman and her fragile, emotionally abused daughter, who is part of the household.
Coolidge first drew attention with a series of short documentaries after graduating from New York University Film School in 1971. They included one about her brother and his struggle with drugs and another about her then 87-year-old grandmother.
Her 1975 full-length documentary, ”Not A Pretty Picture,” analyzed the experience of rape based on her own assault a dozen years earlier. That led to feature films.
”Valley Girl,” a 1983 comedy focusing on teenage angst, marked her arrival as a director. Seated in her Sunset Boulevard office, Coolidge says of that film`s content, ”First love-very big deal. First choices and decisions to go against members of your family, to go against your friends-very serious stuff, things I could relate to. I put everything I had into it-it was personal, sincere, deep work. And it changed my life.”
Another major step forward was last fall`s ”Rambling Rose.” The film brought Academy Award nominations for actresses Laura Dern and Diane Ladd, and Coolidge`s direction was praised for the genuineness of the women`s characters in the story, told from a man`s point of view.
In the film`s original script, she says, ”the women don`t change so much. Rose (Dern`s character) could have been done in a very shallow way as just a bimbo, a tramp, without much character development and Mother (Ladd`s character) could have been ditzy without any intensity and it still would have worked. But I thought the movie would be less meaningful that way, so I added a little character growth to both of them, and the men still had their revelations.”
Although she admired the acting in ”Thelma and Louise,” Coolidge disagreed with its ”macho vision,” she said, and she felt the male characters were thinly portrayed. She objects to that kind of character portrayal, she says, ”whether they`re men or women.”
The themes of ”Valley Girl”-choices and decisions-and ”Rambling Rose”-woman as sexual object-find resonance in her own experiences. All her films do, she says: ”The reason you take on something is that it mirrors your own life.”
Coolidge is the daughter of two architects. Her father was a professor of architecture at Yale University and her mother practiced the profession. Hitched to a career path from birth (two of her brothers are architects), she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her academic advisers suggested she study architecture, she says, ”but with the family I came from, if I couldn`t draft, there`d be something wrong with me.”
But in design school she veered toward the performing arts-acting, singing and dancing in campus and local amateur productions. Then she made an animated film for a class project and fell in love with filmmaking. She dropped out of school, which caused conflicts at home.
”On the one hand I was raised to do what I wanted to do-to follow my bliss,” she notes. ”But on the other hand I was raised to be an architect, an artist, a painter. My mother was worried about film-she thought it was too much of a business. My father was dead by them, but other family members dissuaded me.
”I`d never been pressured to get married and have children in the traditional sense because my mother never held that up as the ideal of a woman`s achievements. But when my bliss became expensive-it costs a lot of money to make films-and painful, with the possibility of facing a lot of rejection and tremendous competition, they advised me against it.”
But Coolidge prevailed. She moved to New York and assisted on commercials and documentaries before applying to New York University, where she collided with another barrier.
”My interviewer said, `You can`t be a director-there aren`t any women directors.` I didn`t understand why that meant I couldn`t do it. I was not raised in a hard world of discrimination.”
She was accepted. At a film seminar one evening with a group of women directors, she watched a movie about a rape. They were all offended by its superficiality and lack of balance, and in discussing it, they discovered that many of them had been raped or victims of attempted rape.
Coolidge decided to make a movie on the subject. Her own encounter had been date rape, committed by a high school classmate during a party when Coolidge was 16.
At the time, she says, ”I never thought of it as rape. It wasn`t considered rape at the time, and I never reported it.” In fact, her mother found out about it only when Coolidge`s documentary, ”Not A Pretty Picture,” was released.
The movie got her an American Film Institute internship in Los Angeles. Over the next few years, she paid her dues. A project she developed at Francis Ford Coppola`s Zoetrope Studios was dashed after nearly three years` work when the firm collapsed. She shot a movie in Canada, ”City Girl,” about a woman living out her fantasies, but it was released only on video in Europe.
”Valley Girl,” a low-budget production that came along as part of a wave of comedies appealing to teenagers, grossed $17 million.
That showed that she could turn a profit with a project, and, she says,
”It showed me I could take my personal feelings and personal issues and work them out in a commercial, entertaining, comedic, romantic format-that I`d be satisfied and the audience would be satisfied,” she explains. ”It really flipped it for me.”
With the exception of ”Real Genius,” a techno-teen comedy with moral underpinnings about scientific education and weapons research, which proved to be a deadly combination at the box office, Coolidge spent the rest of the `80s developing projects, including ”Rambling Rose.” She also married Michael Backes, a computer graphics consultant, in 1984, and gave birth to their son, Preston, now 3 1/2. Backes` projects include Steven Spielberg`s new movie,
”Jurassic Park.”
As far away from her own experiences as her latest projects seem, connections abound for Coolidge.
”Who hasn`t experienced extreme jealousy?” she asks, touching on one of the themes of ”Crazy in Love,” then adds, ”And by the way, am I a driven career woman who muddled about in my 20s and tried to work out how to have a relationship and a career at the same time?”
”Lost in Yonkers” summons up an echo as well.
”When I was 9, my father was dying of cancer, and we kids were dropped off at my grandmother`s house for a short time so my parents could take a last trip together,” she says. ”My grandmother was a terrifying woman. She was very strict and gave me all kinds of punishments-like washing my mouth out with soap.
”Later, as an adult, I grew to love my grandmother very much. But back then, it was a traumatic experience in my life. I know how these two kids (in the Simon script) feel.”
Of her method of portraying men, she says, ”I`ve always tried to show them the way I see them-complex, but slightly different from the way men see men.
”Women consider it very important for men to have a sense of humor,”
she says, ”but you don`t always see it in male-directed movies. It isn`t a No. 1 priority. Also, there are different qualities in men that make them attractive. A man who is in touch with his sensuality, who is aware of feelings and physical self, is very appealing. Barbra (Streisand), for example, brought out Nick Nolte`s emotional side (in ”The Prince of Tides”)- which I always knew was in him.”
If men stand for one thing as actors or characters, they stand for something else in the industry, from a woman`s perspective, Coolidge says. Statistically, she notes, the number of women directors hasn`t increased over the last few years.
”Equality is a joke,” she says. But she`s encouraged by the fact that
”we`re directing better films with higher profiles and more publicity.
Women directors are ”not there yet,” she says. ”It`s still much harder for a woman to get a job. There are a few producers who would just as soon hire a woman as a man, but they aren`t in the majority. Some studios are hiring women directors and some really aren`t.
”It`s one of those things you can`t legislate. It`s an artistic field, and people kind of have to go with (a particular director`s) vision. And if they don`t believe in the vision, then they`re not going to hire you. ”
There`s a silver lining, though.
”We can get excited about the fact that women direct and blacks direct-that we can open up new markets and have other points of view,” she says.
”That`s where everyone`s going to benefit. Every director is different. Two men don`t see things the same way. When you add other elements-ethnicity, gender-then you start getting even greater variance in the points of view.
”And the audience may see something that reflects what they think they`ve never seen before.”
