Colin Trevorrow’s Hollywood fairy tale started at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The bespectacled, bearded director, then 35, came to Park City, Utah, with an endearingly quirky time-travel romantic comedy executive, produced by the endearingly quirky Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, and starring Mark. The $750,000 indie film, Safety Not Guaranteed, went on to make $4 million in theatres.
The young director soon found a mentor in Brad Bird, who became famous at Pixar directing The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Trevorrow started hanging out with Bird on the set of his big-budget George Clooney movie, Tomorrowland. Bird called his pal Frank Marshall, a producer of Jurassic World, to give him a heads up.
‘‘There is this guy,’’ Bird said, ‘‘that reminds me of me.’’
Marshall was so impressed with Trevorrow that he took him to meet Steven Spielberg. That’s where Trevorrow hit the jackpot: He was tapped to direct and co-write the $150 million Jurassic World. The movie went on to make $1.6 billion, and Trevorrow was signed to direct the ninth Star Wars’
That kind of leap — from indie to blockbuster — is almost exclusively reserved for young guys in baseball caps who remind older guys in baseball caps of themselves. Kathryn Bigelow, a unique figure in Hollywood, got a big budget for K-19: The Widowmaker. The director Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman will arrive in 2017. No other woman in Hollywood has directed a $100 million live-action film.
In August, Trevorrow drew ire by suggesting that the dearth of female directors making films involving ‘‘superheroes or spaceships or dinosaurs’’ was because not many women had the desire to direct studio blockbusters. He had already drawn a backlash for portraying Bryce Dallas Howard’s character as a cold career woman running away from dinosaurs in high heels. ‘‘Would I have been chosen to direct Jurassic World if I was a female film maker who had made one small film?’’ Trevorrow mused in an email to Slashfilm.com. ‘‘I have no idea.’’
Every woman who has ever had a film at Sundance has an idea, because they have watched male peers at the festival vault with ease across the chasm to Hollywood studios, agents, financing and big paychecks. ‘‘If they make a $150 million movie with women directing or starring, and it bombs, they take it a little harder,’’ says the director Adam McKay, who is Will Ferrell’s writing and producing partner. ‘‘You can trace that to the old-school guys in the boardrooms.’’
Leslye Headland is a 34-year-old writer and director who was in the same 2012 Sundance class as Trevorrow, with the movie version of her scorching Off Broadway play, Bachelorette. She bristles with ambition to do everything he is doing. Sitting in a red leather banquette at the Monkey Bar in New York, Headland told me she wants to be a Martin Scorsese, and ‘‘not just the female Martin Scorsese.’’ She wants to direct a James Bond movie, ‘‘even if I have to marry someone to get British citizenship.’’ She wants to make films in which women behave badly and are not held to a higher moral standard or seen as ‘‘less than.’’ She wants to look cool in magazine pictures so that ‘‘little girls will put female film makers on their Pinterest boards.’’
Headland made this fall’s Sleeping With Other People, a raunchy rom-com starring Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, in 25 days for $5 million from a script she drafted in two weeks, chronicling her obsession with a “lame”’ ex-boyfriend. “Quentin Tarantino can make Pulp Fiction for $8 million and you can slap him on any magazine,” Headland said. “He’s the poster boy. He was for me. I want to be that guy even though he looks like a foot. God bless him, and he can do whatever he wants to my feet. But with a female director, you’re just not celebrated the same way.”
Female directors are in what Girls creator Lena Dunham calls “a dark loop”. If they don’t have experience, they can’t get hired, and if they can’t get hired, they can’t get experience. “Without the benefit of Google,” Headland said, “ask anybody to name more than five female film makers that have made more than three films. It’s shockingly hard.”
There had long been a strange sort of omertà on talking about the gender disparity. Even though women watched things getting worse, said Helen Hunt, the actress and director, it was hard to speak up: “Women who say it’s not OK are wet blankets or sore losers.” When I began reporting this article several months ago and asked some male moguls in the entertainment industry for their perspectives, they shrugged the issue off as “bogus” or “a tempest in a teapot”.
©2015 The New York Times
