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In most of the industries one could name, women and minorities have typically been underrepresented in positions of power. The same is true of the entertainment industry. Discrimination in the entertainment business is most often based on race, gender, age and sexual orientation. This discrimination is found both in front of the camera, through the depiction of various groups in movies and television, and behind the camera in the arenas of writing, direction and production.
Women in the Entertainment Industry
In the film industry, women directors were virtually unheard of after the birth of the Hollywood studio system in 1924.
In the 16 years between 1927 and 1943, only one woman directed films for a major studio. Her name was Dorothy Arzner, and her power and influence in the industry has been unequalled by any woman director since. She directed Paramount Pictures' first talking film, and gave many famous actresses their first starring roles, ineluding Clara Bow, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball. Arzner was the first woman member of the Directors Guild of America ("DGA") (Seger, 1996).
In 1949, six years after Arzner directed her last film, the actess Ida Lupino turned to directing. Lupino directed seven feature films, and more than eighty-eight shows for television. After Lupino, not a single major feature film was directed by a woman until Elaine May directed A New Leaf in 1971 (Seger, 1996).
Recent statistics illustrate the disproportion in power,.based on figures from the DGA released in June, 1997 (Pols, 1997):
* Only 20% of the guild's 11,000 members are women
* Women account for only 9% of the total days worked by members annually
* 24% of the directors in television and cable are females
Therefore, it is interesting to note that the first fiction film ever made was written, directed and produced by a woman. In her book When Women Call the Shots, Linda Seger relates the story of the first "feature film" producer. Alice Guy was a young woman in Paris when her boss patented one of the first motion picture cameras in 1895. This new invention had previously been used for documentary types of films depicting such scenes as a moving locomotive, or people doing everyday tasks.
Guy's first film was s...