Women in Film Celebrates Achievement

Loretta Young brought the audience at Women in Film’s annual Crystal Awards ceremonies to its feet because of who she was. Henry Winkler got the same effect by what he said.

Winkler warned that there must be a balance between hunger for success and reaching out, between doing for oneself and doing for others. “The strains which push us in this industry every day to the edge need an equal force from the other direction to help balance us,” Winkler said, as he and his wife, Stacey, received the Norma Zarky Humanitarian Award for their work with abused, neglected and disadvantaged children.

“We are sometimes very shortsighted and we seek short-term profits,” noted Winkler, honorary chairman of United Friends of the Children, the support group for MacLaren Children’s Center. “And sometimes we pervert our own energies . . . which diminishes our lives and the entertainment that we perpetrate on the public into something less than wonderful. And we wonder why the audience is more elusive than ever.”

Winkler, still “The Fonz” to many of the children he sees, noted that “it is as easy to be responsible as it is not,” and that “the feelings you get from the doing is enough.”

As an example, he spoke of his visit last month to the Music Center’s Very Special Arts Festival for “mentally and physically challenged” children.

“I was walking around and posing, and hugging and kissing,” he said, when all of sudden a little girl who was about 5 called out in a high-pitched voice, “Fonz!” He said that the girl’s mother looked startled, as if she was about to collapse, and he asked why. He said she told him the child was autistic, and that was the first word her daughter had ever spoken.

“I am convinced that the true waste in our lives is to not use that power that we have to motivate one another,” Winkler said, “to take the risk of stepping out from being comfortable.”

Although Winkler noted that it’s “a national shame that women have to work so hard, just to work,” the awards luncheon, which drew more than 1,200 to the Century Plaza on Friday, including powerful studio heads, agents and such stars as Julie Andrews and Goldie Hawn, was more a celebration of achievement than a session for pessimism. Mayor Tom Bradley, who took office in 1973, said he was delighted that he and Women in Film were both “celebrating our 15th anniversary.”

“Look at me, starting in the second half of my life,” said Crystal Award winner Lee Grant.” “We are here to celebrate obsession, divine discontent and the journey,” the actress-turned-director said.

Loretta Young noted that when she started out in the mid-’20s, women in film were “actresses and script girls, and wardrobe mistresses, and to the best of my knowledge there was one female editor, Margaret Booth,” who is now 91. Booth, who was in the audience, was the editor on “Laugh Clown, Laugh,” a silent movie in which Young had her first leading role.

Young, honored for her 98 motion pictures and several hundred television episodes of “The Loretta Young Show,” advised “my sisters in film” to bring their “tender attitude” and “sensitivity to their work. Without these qualities, she said, “the film industry could turn out to be one long car chase.”

Also honored were Suzanne de Passe, president of Motown Productions, and Polish-born director/writer Agnieszka Holland, who co-wrote the screenplay for “Anna.” Holland, winner of Women in Film’s international award, directed “A Woman Alone,” which had been banned for six years in her native country, and “Angry Harvest,” winner of a host of festival prizes, about a Polish farmer who saved a Jewish woman during the Holocaust.

Grant, who directed “Tell Me a Riddle” and the documentaries “Women Who Kill” and “Down and Out in America,” said there was a far different attitude toward women as directors when she left Hollywood for New York seven years ago than there is today. She attributed much of the changed attitude to the “second wave” of women directors, including Randa Haines (“Children of a Lesser God” and the TV movie “Something About Amelia”), who was sitting on the dais behind her.

“When I left L.A.,” Grant said, “I was getting a strong message that, fond of me as they were as an actress, the studios were closed to me, and this is my reckless and amusing quest, and would I please come to my senses so they could relax and be fond of me again?

“In the last three or four years,” Grant continued, “success at the box office of maybe five women directors plus the quality and high viewing numbers of some TV movies and episodes directed by women turned the town around so far that as I flew back and forth from New York, I could literally see the doors crack open.”

“I think we’ve entered the still hard but possible years,” she said.

De Passe at first was tart, twitting Berry Gordy, Motown’s chairman of the board, who hired her 20 years ago. “What can you say about a man who has given something new to the word mentor ,” and she paused with an actor’s timing, “ Tor -men-tor.”

But as she spoke about her success, about being the only woman or the only black in a room, or about being the only woman and the only black “in a sea of faces,” her voice began to choke, and she dabbed at her eyes without apology. “You provided the validation for my dream,” she said. “The amazing part is that I didn’t dream that it would happen, but that I did (dream).

“Humor has been my survival. The humor helped wear down the chip. I have come to know it’s not what happens to you but how you take it that makes all the difference.”

“It’s a long way from 135th Street in Harlem to this dais,” said the woman who was one of the key behind-the-scenes figures in the success of such Motown stars as Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. “Yes, it is.”

It was Stacey Winkler who drew the biggest laugh--a laugh that caught in the throats of many movie and television executives.

Winkler, who has been active at MacLaren since 1980 and serves as president of the United Friends of the Children, said she knew it would be difficult to speak at the end of the program. She said she read her speech over to a friend, but still she worried about her time slot.

“ ‘There’s a (writers’) strike going on,’ ” she said she was told. “ ‘No one has anywhere else to go right now.’ ”