Tapping the Untapped Market : Women-Oriented Films Find a Growing Audience

When he screened his low-budget period film in June at the AFI Festival, British director Mike Newell expressed concern that “Enchanted April” would be hurt by unfavorable comparisons to the more ambitious “Howards End.”

Originally made for television, the film had done well in theatrical release in England, even though no money was spent on advertising. But some of the more influential English critics had found it lacking in the pictorial values of the Merchant-Ivory movie, the director told the AFI audience.

Newell need not have worried. The lyrical film, centered on the connection formed by four English women of the 1920s, has apparently found an audience. It has been drawing sizable U.S. crowds and, for two weeks running, the highest box-office receipts per screen of any movie in national release.

In its first 24 days, “Enchanted April” is expected to have grossed $1.7 million--small potatoes by Hollywood standards, but impressive nonetheless when measured against the film’s $2 million cost.

Adapted from a 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, the film, starring Miranda Richardson and Joan Plowright, tells the story of how two acquaintances joined by two other women they find through a newspaper ad revitalize their stagnant lives through an idyllic vacation at a magnificent seaside castle in Portofino, Italy.

Like the far more commercial “A League of Their Own,” one of the summer’s biggest hits, and “Fried Green Tomatoes,” last winter’s sleeper, “Enchanted April” is concerned with the way women relate to one another, with men assuming a secondary place in the films’ preoccupations.

Despite these recent successes, such films are rare. Newell, whose previous work has included such dark films as “Dance With a Stranger” and “The Good Father,” believes that the dearth of women-oriented themes has helped to boost “Enchanted April,” a film he describes as “a little patisserie.”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with sexual politics but it almost certainly has to do with an incredible overlooking of 50% of the audience,” Newell said by telephone from his home in London. Male directors now enjoy a new freedom to make movies seen from a woman’s point of view, he added. “We’re much less hemmed in by stereotypes of our own masculinity.”

The so-called woman’s picture was a highly lucrative staple of the Hollywood films of the 1940s. But those films tended to focus “on a woman who was torn between the man she loved and the man she ought to marry,” said critic Molly Haskell, author of “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.” “It was a whole different kind of concern.”

Martha Coolidge, director of the recent Turner Network Television movie “Crazy in Love,” points out that “television has taken over a great deal of the so-called female market. But that doesn’t mean women won’t go to the movies, and that men don’t want to see (these films) either.”

The newer type of “women’s picture” is not entirely a novelty in Hollywood, which has generated such successful female-relationship films as “The Turning Point,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Julia,” as well as a handful of female-buddy action pictures such as “Thelma & Louise” and “Outrageous Fortune.”

Nevertheless, pictures of that type do not come along very often. These days, women are “an untapped market, and Hollywood has been slow to catch on to it,” Haskell said.

Is Hollywood catching on at all?

Two upcoming family dramas--”Rich in Love,” which opens in October, and “Used People,” to be released at Christmas--contain strong roles for women, and are expected to be pitched to the audience that flocked to “Fried Green Tomatoes.”

Based on the best-selling novel by Josephine Humphreys, “Rich in Love” reunites the creative team responsible for the Oscar-winning “Driving Miss Daisy”: producers Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, director Bruce Beresford and screenwriter Alfred Uhry.

“(Such films) represent a kinder, gentler story line, and appeal to a more adult audience that is not looking for action-oriented films,” Richard Zanuck said. “That audience has always been there, but we as suppliers haven’t supplied that audience with enough of what they want to see.”

Directed by Beeban Kidron, “Used People” brings together Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy of “Fried Green Tomatoes” as well as Shirley MacLaine--a veteran of female-relationship movies (“The Turning Point,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Postcards From the Edge” and “Steel Magnolias”)--Marcia Gay Harden and Sylvia Sidney.

“It’s becoming more and more apparent to everybody that films that focus on women are doing very well,” said Richard Ingber, president of marketing and distribution for Largo Entertainment, which is producing “Used People.” “Based on the grosses coming out, they must be getting more than women. They may start with women, but they seem to be able to broaden out.”

Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the co-producer of “Enchanted April” along with Britain’s BBC, said women made up most of the audience the first week, but now an equal number of men are seeing the film. Both sexes are responding to the film’s charm and upbeat message, he said.

“If it started out as a women’s film, it’s now an everybody film,” he said.

Nevertheless, it is agreed that women make the choice to see many art house and independent films. And women, unlike the young men who make up Hollywood’s target audience, are not likely to rush out to see a movie the weekend it opens.

Haskell argues that studios have to be more patient with films such as “This Is My Life,” the Nora Ephron-directed movie about a female comedian’s relationship with her daughters, which turned in a lackluster performance at the box office, despite good reviews.

A film like that cannot possibly find its audience in a single weekend, the critic said. “Women are busier than men--anyway, busier than young men,” Haskell added. “With women, it takes much longer.”