100 Women, One Hotel, and the Weekend Retreat That Presaged Time’s Up By 18 Years
Frustrated over the marginalization of women in film, indie director Allison Anders convened a summit—part suffragette rally, part catharsis, part 60-hour sleepover—at the Miramar Hotel, in Santa Barbara, in April 2000. The ripple effects of that gathering and its “50/50” manifesto continue to spread today, even as a new movement rocks the industry.
The idea to convene a summit of women filmmakers was an informal, modest one, yet it was born of a deep-seated frustration. And it all began because Allison Anders was pissed.
It was late 1999, and Anders, the indie film director (Gas Food Lodging, Grace of My Heart) and a MacArthur “Genius” fellow, saw women being isolated and marginalized. Why did they have such trouble getting their movies produced? Why were men, after a flop, allowed to fail upward, but if a woman’s film was successful, it was viewed as an aberration? And why didn’t women in Hollywood know about the female pioneers who had shaped the business? Anders was devastated when she learned that Dorothy Davenport Reid, an acclaimed director in the 1920s, had died in obscurity 50 years later, “practically in my backyard in Woodland Hills,” Anders now recalls.
Dorothy Davenport had not been alone. At cinema’s dawn, dozens of female directors flourished in Hollywood, where they supported one another both personally and professionally. Before 1925, almost half of all films were written by women. And yet they had risen at a time when film wasn’t taken seriously as a business. Once talkies arrived, in the late 20s, budgets soon tripled, Wall Street invested heavily, and moviemaking became an industry. Men muscled into high-paying positions, and women were sidelined to the point where, by the 1950s, speakers at Directors Guild meetings began their comments with “Gentlemen and Miss Lupino,” as Ida Lupino was their only female member.
Anders appreciated the potential power of the camaraderie to be found among fellow creative souls, and so she e-mailed a dozen friends asking if they felt the same way. If so, what would they think of getting together, each paying her own way, to spend a weekend hashing out their concerns, strategizing, and talking about, as she put it, “what needs to happen next.”