These Amazing Shadows Page #7

- I like dances with wolves.

- ...Two...

...Three!

That myth of the American West

is the myth of America.

But Blazing Saddles takes that myth

and twists it and turns it on its head.

It also takes the moviemaking myth

and twists it and turns it on its head.

Raisinets!

And finally, the Board said,

"Well, he may have a point."

And the rest is history.

To see Blazing Saddles on there was...

was a little bit of vindication for me,

that I didn't waste my time in college

watching that movie so many times.

I wasn't wasting my time.

I was enriching myself with film history.

- Why don't you let him go by?

- Well, he wants the whole road.

Now, look, all I'm trying to say is

there are lots of things that a man can do

and in society's eyes it's all hunky dory.

A woman does the same thing the same,

mind you-- and she's an outcast.

- Finished?

- No.

One of the most important things

that I can do

with my role on the Board

is to keep

the contribution of women to film history

in the center of our discussions.

We had to write reports

on what we wanted to be

and the boy next to me wrote a composition

on how he was gonna be a movie director.

And I got so angry at him,

because movies seemed too good for us,

like they came

from magical people in Hollywood and...

here he was, the guy that cheated off

of me during the tests and...

how could he be a movie director?

And then I thought,

"Well, I must be this angry...

because that's what really,

what I want to do."

Awesome!

Totally awesome!

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

is one of my favorite films.

Not the favorite, you know,

but when Sean Penn

ordered the pizza into the classroom...

- Who ordered the double cheese and sausage?

- Right here, dude.

...I thought, "This is the best moment

in American film history," actually.

Very few people know

about the extent

of the involvement of women...

in early film culture

in the United States.

Half of all films in the silent era

were written by women.

All of the top screenwriters

were women.

The highest paid screenwriters

were all women.

And many of the top directors

were women.

It was a growing industry.

It was the popular mass medium.

People were going to the film

every single day.

So, there were incredible opportunities

for women in Hollywood.

Lois Weber is an extraordinary figure

in American film history

and she's somebody who

very few people know about.

Everybody's heard of D.W. Griffith,

everybody's heard of Cecil B. Demille

and in the 1910s,

Weber was often mentioned

alongside Griffith and Demille...

as the three great minds of filmmaking.

She was Universal's top director.

And she was a top director

who made socially engaged films

about the key problems of the day.

The film that's in the film registry,

"Where Are My Children?",

is a film about birth control and abortion

and it was Universal's top moneymaker

of 1916.

It traveled all around the world.

Not only did she make these films

about really difficult...

issues that we're still grappling with

as a culture,

she made popular, box office successes.

When you start looking at the studio era,

the '30s and '40s and beyond,

then you really do see gender bias.

Then it really becomes

nearly impossible for women to direct.

When I was in graduate school

at U.S.C. Cinema,

a group of us organized

a small screening series called...

Films by Great Women Directors

and somebody wrote

across the sign "There are none."

Often when you're working with the studios,

they'll give you a list

of pre-approved directors

and you'll find that there

are very few, if,

in many cases,

no women directors on the list.

Dorothy Arzner is the only woman...

to work as a director in the studio era

in the '30s and '40s.

That's an extraordinary accomplishment.

She would also joke

that she was one of the guys.

She used to dress like a man,

she used to hang about with the guys,

she used to behave like the guys,

and she always said,

"that's how I got on in the industry,

'cause I was just one of the guys.

They didn't think about me as being a woman,

I was just a guy directing films."

Dance, Girl, Dance

is a film that takes on,

in an allegorical way,

Hollywood's representation of women.

It's about a dancer who

aspires to be a serious ballet dancer.

She's sort of stuck as the comic act

amidst all this

sexual exploitation of women and...

the climax of the film

occurs when she stops

in the middle of her performance...

and looks straight at the audience,

which means she looks straight at the camera

and she says...

I know you want me to tear my clothes off

so you can look your 50 cents' worth.

50 cents for the privilege of staring

at a girl the way your wives won't let you.

I'm sure they see through you

just like we do.

It's an extraordinary moment, in which

we, as the audience, are confronted

and asked to think about

what we routinely see...

in movies which is

the sexual objectification of women.

Weber and Arzner

were very different women...

who made very different kinds of films

in very different contexts,

but if I think about it,

what maybe unites them is that...

they had a unique and singular vision

of what they could do

that just allowed them to persevere.

It's really important to have

female filmmakers because

women have a different perspective

on the world, on our culture, on life.

Women filmmakers,

we have an awful lot to bring

to the screen.

There are not a whole lot of us

and we have this nurturing quality

and we have often a different point of view,

a way of seeing the world,

a different way of placing characters

or placing the camera,

so let's play around with that,

let's experiment and that's...

and I did that with

Daughters of the Dust.

And for a lot of people, it worked

And for a lot of people, they said...

"Whoa, what is this?"

"What are you doing?"

And it was like, "I'm exploring

and I'm telling a story... my way."

I was involved

in getting Back to the Future

put on the Film Registry.

What did I tell you'?!

88 Miles per hour!

I went to the fans.

Back to the future

is one of my favorite movies.

I had used a wonderful website,

BTTF.com,

that was

hosted by a man named Stephen Clark

and I wrote to him and said...

"Look, fan response

is an incredible factor

in getting something

on the Registry

and make your fans write in."

And the response was amazing.

Steve Leggett, who works

with the Film Registry,

said that he had

so many e-mails every day,

hundreds of e-mails coming in,

and it was...

the first time that there had been

such an overwhelming response...

to getting one film on from people

outside of the Library of Congress.

It's found its way

into the popular culture so much,

and the fact that you can now buy

a flux capacitor online...

and people will buy them... is saying

something about the impact of the movie.

My moment of triumph as far as

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