WOMEN DIRECTORS-- VIVE LA DIFFERENCE?

Do women make different kinds of movies than men?

The question comes up again and again. Most recently it surfaced at Sunday’s “Women in Film Festival” seminar “What I Really Want to Do Is Direct!” Panel member Randa Haines (“Children of a Lesser God”) observed, “Until women directors can offer the public a much larger body of work, there is no answer to that question.”

Haines sidestepped an issue that has become increasingly controversial as more women strive to join the director ranks. Will there be any difference in what the public sees as more women get to direct?

Barbra Streisand said last May at New York’s “Women in Film Week” celebration: “Women have a unique vision of the world. It is our instinct to nurture, to create life, not to destroy it. We must see that vision realized. We need to believe in our own sensibilities and our own power--but we need to do more.”

Not everyone agrees with Streisand’s belief in a female sensibility. “Psychologists have been studying gender differences since the early 1970s,” observes Carol Jacklin, USC professor of psychology. Jacklin, with co-author Eleanor Maccoby, published “The Psychology of Sex Differences” in 1974.

“Women probably do see things differently,” Jacklin says, “probably because of different experiences and the different status given to women, not necessarily because they’re innately looking at different things.”

Many women film makers today prefer to stress their equality with men rather than their uniqueness. They fear that acknowledging the existence of differences from men could cost them work. They haven’t forgotten that movies labeled “woman’s picture” spelled “failure” at the box office.

Independent producer Cindy Dunne (“The Boy in the Plastic Bubble”) puts it this way: ‘The more genderless we get, the more cooperation and understanding we will get. Genderless does not mean making us into eunuchs. I’d like to err on the side of cooperation.”

Producer-director Fern Field (“Kane and Abel”) believes that “genderless is not a step backwards. We’re trying to eliminate discrimination of any kind. We can’t take the position that if anything is done by women, it’s necessarily better. The goal of any minority has got to be that people are perceived for what they are.”

“Female sensibility is not a subject women want to discuss because it gets translated into ‘Women can only do love stories,’ ” KCET executive Phyllis Geller explains. “This has probably been one of the biggest obstacles for women.”

Obstacle or not, director Lynne Littman (“Testament”) says, “I don’t believe in denying the natural stuff you come to material with. What I object to is no point of view.

“Nobody would ask Richard Pryor to pretend he’s not black. Why should the question come up about being called a woman? It just means I’m female. It doesn’t mean anything antagonistic.

“The issue may be in guiding the material. If it’s a macho film, the women can be interesting. Those are differences that can be put in and identified.”

“There are different artistic levels at which directors function,” Littman continues. “The more skillful an artist is, the more personal and stamped the work is. Most directors don’t reach that point, but it’s not necessarily everybody’s goal. A lot want to be anonymous and entertaining and not make statements.”

“American Playhouse” executive producer Lindsay Law may be giving women a left-handed compliment when he praises them for “digging deeper into themselves--both in what they bring to the project and the subject matter. Women seem to make things they care about, as opposed to ‘I can sell this.’

“If you’re thinking about your first or second movie, you haven’t become clever yet. By the time you do your fifth film, you think you know what will sell.”

Producers and studio executives respond to passion, but they also like to think about profit.

When women directors say apologetically, “I’m drawn to difficult material” (as several said during interviews for this series), how likely is it the executive will take out the company checkbook? If a male director puts forth a similar argument, will he be more apt to get a green light?

“A man is not considered wrong for anything,” director Francine Parker (“Cagney & Lacey”) observes. “George Cukor made some of our best women’s films,” producer/director Linda Yellen (“Playing for Time”) points out. Warner Bros. executive Lucy Fisher cites Roland Joffe and Jim Bridges for their “humanist” films. Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) adds dryly, “Men have been directing childbirth scenes for years.”

If the “male sensibility” can cover such a wide range, what’s to stop the “female sensibility” from being just as wide-ranging? “I can learn anything about anything,” Francine Parker says. However, those who hire directors have to be convinced of that.

In the area of science fiction, Martha Coolidge is the only woman who can say she directed a big-studio hardware film. “Real Genius” started out as a teen comedy about weapons research. “I had the script rewritten to put in more and more heavy-duty science,” she recalls. “Almost every scene involved some kind of mechanical prank. It became a large special-effects picture.”

Since then, Coolidge has directed for TV’s “Twilight Zone.” And she directed the pilot of “Sledge Hammer,” ABC’s comedy-action police series. If Coolidge were a man, no one would make a big fuss over such TV credits. But for a woman, they become noteworthy because few women have been able to get jobs directing action-adventure.

“I think a lot of producers feel they would happily hire a woman for something that had more of a female point of view,” says Barbara Corday, president of Columbia Pictures TV. “I have been guilty myself of saying in certain situations, ‘We really ought to get a woman writer on this project or a director because it’s such a woman’s piece. It would be nice to have a female point of view.’ So I suppose a lot of those producers feel the same way about a male point of view.”

One male producer Corday worked with, Franklin Levy of Catalina Productions, hired Sharron Miller to direct “Pleasures.” His reason: “I felt women would bring a special perception. I wanted a woman’s point of view.”

Steven Spielberg says, “I think it’s a terrible handicap when male producers only assign feminine subjects to women directors.” After viewing choreographer Lesli Glatter’s “Tales of Meeting and Parting” done as part of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, Spielberg chose Glatter to direct three episodes of “Amazing Stories.” “Lesli’s work doesn’t specify gender,” he emphasizes. “She uses movement and visual dynamism to tell a story.”

Vista production head Herb Jaffe handles the male/female sensibility question by calling it “absurd. I’d certainly challenge anyone to look at the dailies of our film ‘Dudes’ and say, ‘I deduce a touch of feminism here.’ This is an action-packed film.” The director is Penelope Spheeris.

Spheeris aside, women directors have not made many strides in the field of action-adventure. Kim Friedman, whose considerable directing credits include “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Love Boat,” “Square Pegs” and “Head of the Class,” wants to direct episodes of “Miami Vice.” “I think they’d be hard-pressed to hire me because they’d want to see some action footage,” she says. She doesn’t have any.

Gabrielle Beaumont, a Briton and one of the few women to have directed episodes of “Hill Street Blues,” complains she “is constantly given women’s subjects to direct. I’d love to direct a Western. You don’t have to be a man to understand a Western. If men and women are good at their jobs, the results should be the same. We shouldn’t be classed as two different kinds of film makers.

“Of course, we all have slightly different perceptions. Hopefully, every director makes a different movie. Women might be more sensitive in some areas and less in others. In Joseph Losey’s films ‘The Servant’ and ‘Accident,’ he observed things in the class society of England that an Englishman wouldn’t see.

“This goes for the difference between men and women. I’d have liked to direct ‘The Deer Hunter.’ I might have observed a lot of things differently that men just take for granted.”

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” director Penny Marshall recalls an argument about violence she had with the producer, a man. It involved a scene where a man pushes Whoopi Goldberg into the Hudson River and then gets shot.

“The producer wanted to show the man’s chest exploding,” Marshall says. “I have no interest in seeing that kind of gory stuff. I wanted to cut immediately down to Whoopi in the water. So I walked away and said to the producer, ‘If you want it, you do it.’ ” Marshall adds that he did shoot the chest explosion but that the scene wasn’t used in the final cut.

More action pictures with women as heroines could boost opportunities for women directors. “Hollywood is a place that manufactures mythology--primarily from a male point of view,” Directors Guild of America Women’s Steering Committee co-chair Eileen Carhart says. “I see it in feature films. More often than not they’re little-boy adventures, macho -men adventures.

“Women are supporting characters, peripheral characters or victims. If that’s the product being manufactured, it’s not hard to see why the people making the product aren’t using women (to direct).”

Kathy Bonk of the National Organization for Women’s Women in Media Project says that NOW has embarked on a study addressing this issue. “If there are more women in decision-making capacities within the networks or production companies, does that start reflecting different kinds of storylines and images?” she asks. “I personally believe it does.” Results of the pilot study should be available in January.

Whatever the storyline, do women go about directing differently? “Research shows that women do communicate differently from men,” DGA spokeswoman Carhart points out. “Women ask more supportive questions, use more modifiers. That is perceived as being more tentative, unsure or deferential.

“Another way of looking at it is that women’s vocabulary is more inclusive of others. Men issue orders. Many men will speak about the process of directing in military terms--like commanding an army.”

But changes are seeping in. Barbara Corday reports on a meeting she recently attended at ABC: “There were three women and two men in the room. The women were talking about the project we were there to talk about--and the men were talking about their new babies.”