Bird's Eye View

Elizabeth Karlsen: how are British female writers really doing?

Celia Imrie leads the cast of Saint Joan

One of the many highlights of this year’s Festival programme was She Writes: a celebratory performed reading of one of Grace Banks and Kate Bingham’s screenplay Saint Joan, co-presented with The Script Factory and BAFTA, and written and developed during last year’s She Writes lab. The performance was introduced by a keynote speech from Birds Eye View Chair and celebrated producer (including, most recently, of Made in Dagenham) Elizabeth Karlsen, examining the current prognosis of British female screenwriters, and asking whether the challenges they face today might not be even greater than those in the earliest days of the industry. Click below to read Elizabeth Karlsen’s full speech. I’m delighted to see a full house for this event – thank you all for coming.

She Writes has been a brilliant scheme for Bird’s Eye View and The Script Factory to be involved in and before we formally welcome the first She Writes in-take to the UK film industry, I thought it would be interesting to spend a few minutes putting this programme into some sort of social context – so we all know what we are trying to achieve and the obstacles we have to overcome.

In 2006, the UK Film Council commissioned a series of research projects which looked at who is actually making British films. The results famously showed that women were credited as screenwriters on fewer than 15% of our movies.

In some ways, you may not find this surprising – it is only slightly better than the figure for female directors which hovers around 6%, and women are under-represented in every field, with the exception of the caring profession. But nonetheless, it is a shocking statistic and needs to be changed. Women must be held in the same regard and statistical bracket as men.

Some writers might quip, like Jay Presson Allen – the late scribe of Marnie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret – that the screenwriter stands “somewhere just below the publicist, and just above the hairdresser.” But actually we know that without the story, there is no film. It all starts with the script. So does this joke really reflect her experience as a writer in general, or more as a woman?

Bird’s Eye View, and of course She Writes, celebrates female writers. She Writes works, in part, to re-define the stereotype of the chain-smoking, hard-drinking male screenwriter, bent over his battered typewriter, slamming away at the keys. People now forget that women have long contributed to the writing of iconic movies in Hollywood. Gene Gauntier wrote the screenplay for Ben Hur in 1911 and the chief scenarist for Cecil B. DeMille was Jeanie Macpherson (a woman!).

Yet, in 2007 the Writers Guild of America published a list of the 101 greatest movies of all time and none in the top 20 were penned by a woman. Indeed, only five screenplays on the list were credited or part-credited to women, including Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise, Melissa Mathison’s E.T, and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally. In 2003, only 8 of the 100 top grossing films were written by women, and in 2004 that figure had dropped to 7.

So, incredibly, it seems that the challenge for women writers is perhaps greater now than it was in the earliest days of the industry.

In fact, it’s almost as if things have got tougher with every decade. Marsha McCreadie argues in the book ‘The Women Who Write the Movies’ that in the Golden Age of Hollywood there were many more female screenwriters than today. She points out that back in the heyday of silents, women ‘scenario’ writers outnumbered men by a ratio of 10 to 1.

By the 1920s, Photoplay, an influential movie magazine, came out in support of women writers, but arguably for all the wrong – and most patronizing – reasons, with a comment like this:

“all of them [are] normal, regular women. Not temperamental ‘artistes’, not short-haired advanced feminists, not faddists” (1923).

This of course suggests that if a woman ever wrote about any topic beyond simple household stuff, they’d be getting dangerously ahead of themselves.

But by the 1930s, Frances Marion, writer of The Poor Little Rich Girl and the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1930 for Big House and then another for Best Story in 1932 for The Champ, was saying that, wary of discrimination:

“When we carried the scripts on which we were doing re-writes, we made sure that they were in unmarked, plain covers. Because we knew male writers were complaining about the ‘tyranny of the woman writer’ supposedly prevalent at all the studios then, and particularly at MGM.”

You may have noticed that the examples of great female writers pre-1950 I’ve mentioned are mostly American. That’s because it proved much more difficult to find British women credited on films made in the first half of the 20^th century. Perhaps there’s something in the British sensibility and in British culture that makes it harder for our women still.

Claudine West and Alma Reville are exceptions to this rule. West was a woman, English and won an Academy Award in 1942 for writing Mrs Minerva. She was also Oscar-nominated for Good Bye Mr Chips and Random Harvest. And of course anyone with an interest in Hitchcock knows how instrumental Alma was in shaping his films and his career – if not always credited. But two women is not much compared to the slew of Americans I’ve already talked about.

So then, how are British female writers really doing in film today?

According to the UKFC, women make up 53% of those who write generally for a living in Britain, but only 26% of those writing for film. Women writers are prolific when you look at theatre, novels, poetry, even writing pop songs. So why the discrepancy when it comes to screenwriting?

Across our industry many of our best creative commissioners, financiers and broadcasters are women. In fact, all three of Britain’s main film commissioning bodies are headed by women, in Tessa Ross of Film4, Tanya Segatchian of the UKFC and Christine Langan of BBC Films. Plus, there are large numbers of female creative producers (like Amanda Posey, Finola Dywer, Alison Owen – me!) And the rest seem to be busy script doctoring or script editing (a disproportionate number of women seem to have these roles).

So what happened to the presence of female screenwriters in Hollywood? How and why did it slip away? And why have women seemingly never been even marginally, let alone equally, represented here?

Elizabeth Karlsen

UKFC research pointed to one possible reason for the imbalance:

-         The age old perception that women want to write more small scale, low concept drama and the idea that’s such films are not what audiences (led by young men who make the choice of what film to see when they get to the box office) want to see. Put simply, commissioners, possibly unconsciously, believe that women do not write the sorts of stories that sell.

But this perception does not accord with the UKFC’s data, which show:

-     firstly, that women aged 35 plus make up the biggest single part of UK cinema audiences (18%);

-       secondly, that comedy, not action, is the most financially successful film genre, consistently making up one quarter of releases and takings at the UK box office;

-     and thirdly that women, like men, can and do write a broad range of genres, including comedy.

The truth is, we don’t really have answers about the imbalance in writing. But it’s there, which is exactly why an event like this matters so much. And it looks like these efforts – and the many other initiatives to empower creative women in Britain, Hollywood and elsewhere – may be starting to pay off.

A quick brainstorm on my way to this event brought to mind a long list of significant films produced in the last year or so from the work of women screenwriters. Consider just a few examples:

Oscar-winning In A Better World by Susanne Bier

Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

Oscar-nominated The Kids Are All Right by Lisa Cholodenko

Jane Goldman’s Kick Ass

Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago

and Shutter Island by Laeta Kalogridis

And then there’s Mad Men – which I have on loop on my Ipad. Behind the smooth-talking, whisky-guzzling, misogynist advertising executives on “Mad Men” is a group of female writers. Seven of the nine members of the writing team are women.

So, that’s not a bad list! And, with help from schemes like She Writes, it’s getting better still.

She Writes set out to find a small group of emerging women screenwriters – people who were showing promise, with interesting ideas, but who hadn’t yet ‘made it’. It looked at all the possible barriers – and tried to address them – giving craft skills, pairing each up with a mentor, introducing the group to key industry figures, and creating a nurturing, supportive environment.

In drawing attention to the great work of contemporary women screenwriters, I believe She Writes and endeavours like it can push the business into a new era, one in which women like Frances Marion won’t need to carry their scripts around the MGM lot in an unmarked folder.

And now it’s time to bring them out. They’ve all worked hard; they’re all here to say hello to you and briefly introduce themselves – please welcome the She Writes class of 2011.