The following Women Film Pioneers seminar took place in Los Angeles on Wednesday, August 2, 2000. The panel participants were Cari Beauchamp, Jane Gaines, Fay Kanin, Polly Platt, and Bridget Terry. CATHERINE: I'm honored to introduce our distinguished moderator. She's an award winning producer and writer for stage, screen, and television and is part of the wonderful documentary we just saw. She was a four term president of the Motion Picture Academy and past president of the screen branch of the Writer's Guild of America. At present she chairs the National Film Preservation Board serves as the vice chair of the foreign language film executive committee and she also co-chairs the AFI Center for film and video. It's my great pleasure to introduce Fay Kanin. Kanin: Even though I had a small part in it, I really wasn't prepared for the impact of the whole piece. We're very pleased and delighted that Turner Classic Movies has chosen to launch this month long landmark festival that they're going to have honoring the tremendous contributions of more than a hundred women who wrote or directed films as well as the actors, the producers, the writers, and the technicians in what was certainly the most creative era for women in American history. Kanin: We thought it would be a good idea to talk a little about the crucial role that women have had and that they continue to play in films. So we've invited four accomplished women to participate in this panel and who are taking an active role in preserving this history that we saw in this film. You've already met Bridget Terry, the director-producer-co-writer of the documentary you just saw. Kanin: Next we have Cari Beauchamp who was the co-writer and co-producer of the documentary. Kanin: Next is producer-director, executive and distinguished designer Polly Platt. Kanin: I should tell you that Polly got her start in this industry as the first woman production designer in the Art Director's Guild. Kanin: Finally, Jane Gaines, author, film feminist, historian and producer and director of the program in film and video at Duke University. She is the founder of the Women's Film Pioneer Project and you'll see her lending her historical insight into many of the films you're going to be seeing in this coming month. Kanin: I had the privilege of interviewing Lillian Gish at a seminar event and Lillian told a story about D.W. Griffith. She always spoke of him as Mister Griffith. It seems in one of his earliest films Griffith broke tradition by bringing the camera close and shooting his actor's faces. When he invited the film's financial backers in to see the rushes they watched the actor's faces in growing dismay. "What are those?" they wanted to know. (LAUGHTER) "They're close-ups," Griffith said. "No way," the backers protest. "Get rid of them. We paid for the whole actor." (LAUGHTER) I love that. Kanin: Of course Griffith didn't get rid of them and in the cinema world historians have always credited Griffith as the inventor of the close-up. It wasn't until a few months ago when I saw a film about early women in film that I learned that Alice Guy, a French woman filmmaker working with the Gaumont company in Paris had been using close-ups as well as other innovations in her films as early as 1911. Which leads to my first question. Why didn't I know that? Why has it been such a well kept secret? Why haven't they got a significant place in film history? Which of you would like to answer that first? I'd like to hear from you. RESPONDENT: One of the reasons is - it's a complicated story. I think that's part of it and part of that story is - they didn't promote themselves. Kanin: . . . and the fault was partly theirs? RESPONDENT: . . . also D.W. Griffith's films were far more famous than Alice Guy's films. So I think that's one of the reason why he got the credit. Kanin: Well, in that particular instance, but I bet a lot of the people here didn't know much about Frances Marion. RESPONDENT: Well...if you go out in the street and ask who wrote "ET," who wrote "Jaws," people won't know the writer. I mean, one of the joys of this isn't just putting the spotlight on these incredible women but putting the spotlight on the writers. RESPONDENT: I also think that the whole evolution of this century has brought women to the forefront. I don't think history has recorded the deeds of women for the most part. Maybe because they were written by men and for another part because it's self promotion. Men are better at it. Women artists, women composers, in every aspect of the arts they've been neglected. They've been neglected in the history books and you know, maybe that's starting to change. And it's not revisionism. It's just sort of exonerating people that were left behind but that had an impact in their time. Kanin: Well Jane, where did you do your research when you went to look for the stories about women? Where did you go? Gaines: Well Fay, it's very interesting the question about why didn't we know because in 1973 I was a feminist in graduate school. I knew about Alice Guy but we didn't have her films to look at. So there really are kind of two things going on here. Number one, you may know the names and you may know rumors but until the films start to come out of the archives and also until we have women who research and write about them - Cari Beauchamp for instance and Bridget Terry - they might as well be buried. So I think about old films as buried alive. Here they are in the archives. We know they're there. Why we don't know they are there is because archives don't advertise. They aren't commercial institutions exactly. Kanin: Do you think that's going to change now? Do you think that we're going to get into the film textbooks. RESPONDENT: Sure. Just seventy percent of the silent films of at least seventy percent of the silent films have been lost for good. But those that remain are there to be presented. RESPONDENT: Right. And also things like Turner Classics Movies presenting these films to millions of viewers. I mean forty-five million people hopefully are at least quarter of that or three quarters of that will watch this movie and learn. RESPONDENT: And then. . . it will change people's opinion. RESPONDENT: But the point about the history books is that we now know it's not just three hundred films at Gaumont and four hundred at Solax. It's probably more like a thousand films that Guy supervised. We know that she build the first studio in 1912 the same year that "Cleopatra" was produced. Helen Gardener created a studio. She put a hundred thousand dollars of her own money, without having to raise it, to put this studio together in Fort Lane, New Jersey. She is the first director of the first fiction film probably. Kanin: Why do you think women chose writing over some of the other opportunities or lack of opportunities? Why writing? RESPONDENT: Well Frances called writing the refuge of the shy. She just loved that moment when you're alone with your character. RESPONDENT: . . . isn't it easier? RESPONDENT: I think it's less threatening . . . RESPONDENT: I don't mean it's easier to write. I mean ... it's easier to get the job. RESPONDENT: And it's easier to to do it. You do it alone in a room. RESPONDENT: You know what they say, just open a vein and bleed. Nothing to it. RESPONDENT: Absolutely. (LAUGHTER) RESPONDENT: But I think writing is one of the professions where women truly have historical role models. I mean Jane Austin. I mean you can go back and find writers in every century that are women and perhaps it's because it's easier and you can stay home with your family . . . RESPONDENT: . . . not easier. RESPONDENT: Uh no. (LAUGHTER) You said it's easier to do it... because you can. RESPONDENT: It's easier to get the job but it's also easier for women to do because she can stay home with her family. She doesn't have to go out into the workplace. Whatever. RESPONDENT: Little investment of time. RESPONDENT: There's arguing points to everything I just said but it's the role models. There were women that you can point to and say gee, if she can write that I can write that. And that's what I think is so good about this. If she can produce, I can produce. I really do think that gender specific role models are really good. There are a lot of men's works that we like to emulate too. But I mean it's really important for women to have women role models and I think writing supplied that. RESPONDENT: But it was very hard for women. I think of those early women directors and I think of the directors today who give orders to men on the set. RESPONDENT: It isn't so hard to give them, it's hard to take them. RESPONDENT: And they just did not like taking orders. Whereas a woman in a room alone did her work. And when she wanted to come on the set it wasn't really well regarded. I remember I started in this business as a reader at RKO. And across from the building where we read were the editors' rooms. And I could hear the machines going and I was very curious. And I walked up the stairs and went down into those little cubicles. And there were the editors sitting alone. And I felt a great kinship with the editors because we both worked alone. This reminds of me....I've gotten these other wonderful stories from the late Ô70's, early 80's, where women will tell me if I saw another woman in the room she was competition Ôcause there was only room for one other woman. It was just me or it was who was gonna get my job. And now you go into meetings and there are more women in the meetings and it doesn't immediately mean competition. And I know we participated in groups where it's incredibly nurturing for women to be together and share their war stories just as Frances and her friends did. And you just go out feeling a little bit better, a little more like a link in a chain. But as Bridget said, others have done it. I can do it do. Kanin: I think the two words that make me the most angry is when I hear chick flicks. I really, really hate that because you look at the range of movies Frances Marion did. "The Big House." "The Champ." "The Scarlet Letter." There was nothing she couldn't write. And that's my theory. If you're talented, you can write everything, woman or man alike. Polly, how do you find working today in films? How different is it from what you saw that Frances had to deal with in her day? PLATT: I think it's vastly different...I wish that I had lived then and made silent films, even though they're harder in a way to write than sound. Now everybodys in a big motor home after each scene. Everybody disappears. There's no sense of camaraderie. The best part is the writing part and I'm not disagreeing with you about doing it alone but you don't do it alone. You go in and you meet with the producer and you go and you meet with the star. You go and meet with the actors if you're lucky. And you know, you do have to be able to play in the big man's world. But I really think it's important for us not to think that women could write because it's easier. It really isn't....it's just easier to get the job. But it's changed a lot even since I first made my first film which is in the Ô60's. Nobody had these big mobile homes and now we live in a corporate world as everybody out there knows and France owns Universal....I don't even know how to talk to anybody. (LAUGHTER). RESPONDENT: It also was a very different world. The films that we're talking about - I mean, it was an idea one week, in front of the camera the next, and in the theaters within a month. They could afford mistakes. I mean, the reasons Frances has up to three hundred films to her credit is that she had a couple years there where she did forty a year. I mean, it was a different world. And because there were over a hundred film producing companies in Los Angles in 1920. There was a need for that incredible number of creative women who were welcomed. And yet by 1933 there were seven studios. So that change was very quick. And it became very big business as it is today. I mean you could make a film then in a couple months. And now, as we all know it's two to three years . . . Kanin: Well what can we learn from looking at those women up there and what they experienced? What can we take away from that that's useful today? RESPONDENT: Hope. Hope don't you think? Great hope. Certainly when I studied film I had no idea there were any women. None. And I think we all agree that that's going to change for sure. For sure. It's gonna change. And I don't think that they're going to disappear. I think they're gonna show up in people's garages in Copenhagen and you know, I think these silent films are going to continue to be discovered more and more. RESPONDENT: You know, some of Dorothy Azner's films are extinct. One of the reasons why Mary Pickford's films weren't shown for years is that she herself decided not to re-release any of her pictures. She felt that they would be laughed at. And so she shut the door. But now we'll be able to see Mary Pickford's work again.... RESPONDENT: And they'll be out on video in September too. RESPONDENT: . . . yeah we'll get a chance to see them. So there's great hope. Kanin: What advice would you give, Bridget, to a young woman who's trying to get a start in this business? TERRY: Well, it takes a great deal of tenacity and...I thought Polly said something which at least for me was a guiding factor. If you have the urge to be an artist or create in this business, then it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, you just have to do it. You just have to be sure of it first of all and then you just have to do it. You just have to be tenacious. And I really think that the world is breaking up into fragments where the creative outlet is becoming more possible. Whether it's the internet, whether it's television, whether it's movies, whatever. Everyone needs creative people to fill all these voids that everybody's creating you know. And I just think it's an exciting time. But you really have to be very tenacious and it is a lot of luck. I mean you just have to put it out there and hopefully it'll intersect with some other person out there that will make it go to some other person out there. And I mean it really is a network. Somehow movies are still being made and television shows are still being made. And now the internet needs creative people. So it happens but it's serendipitous. TERRY: . . . absolutely. Absolutely. Kanin: What about you Cari? BEAUCHAMP: Be cursed with a passion. I'm thinking about why we didn't know about these women and I take myself back to ten years ago and....I assure you no publishers were coming to my door saying oh please write a book about Frances Marion. (LAUGHTER) You know, my own agent said forget it. I mean, this was not something that people knew about so I was determined to get this story out. At one point after, a couple years, I went back to my family and said this is gonna take longer. But Adele Rogers' daughter said to me, please make a work of honor. Make it honorable. And that just stayed with me. And I said I'm not gonna go back to work for awhile. I was just so touched by these women that I wanted to serve them well. RESPONDENT: You're saying sacrifice. TERRY: Well passion combined with that kind of support. PLATT: I agree with what my predecessors have said, you have to be tenacious. You have to be lucky. But I really, really do believe that if you never give up you will make it. I certainly have a three time rule. I tried three times to get something made in each office that I go to. I don't give up when they say no. I try again. And then they say no and then I try again and sometimes they say yes. Just never give up. Kanin: Never give up. Jane. GAINES: Well I was gonna say it falls to us to write the history of these women who are now writing scripts and directing and producing but the point is to promote yourself. I think modesty is not the best policy in this case. You will have to toot your horn. Certainly there will be those who will wanna write your history. But it's very important that we think about paired achievement at this time in history. We have some unfinished business in feminism. Many issues that we still need to raise. And we can raise them in Hollywood as we raise issues about the lives of the women who had been forgotten. And we can remember their names and their stories. Cleo Madison. Clare Kimball Young. Gene Gauntier. RESPONDENT: . . . Louis Webber. GAINES: Louis Webber. Hundreds of women. We thought for awhile that there were a handful. We don't just limit this project to the US. Over a hundred, not just screenwriters, but producers, directors who sometimes were actresses and were consistently involved in pushing forward this industry where before 1920 there were more women involved then there have ever been historically. So that was an infant pioneering time and we're now at another time. It feels sort of the same I think. The point is to be tenacious of course. To get your stories out because we need to be surprised by stories we haven't heard. Women have stories that they have not told and we want them. Kanin: I once got a compliment that I've always cherished it. Someone said you're awfully tough to work with because you're a fighter. And I thought that was the best compliment I've ever gotten. And that's the best thing I could tell anybody. APPLAUSE END OF TAPE