A New Kind of Networking

Of course, it is what you know. But entertaining Barbra Streisand at your bridal shower doesn’t hurt either. By now, Dawn Steel’s shower is virtually the stuff of Hollywood legend. The bash for the then-Columbia honcho, hosted a decade ago by agent Rosalie Swedlin, was attended by all manner of industry muscle, from the ultra-fit Cher to future UA chief Lindsay Doran.

At one point, producer Polly Platt entertained the troops with a film starring Steel’s boyfriends, best friends, flirtees and work buddies, among them Richard Gere, Richard Dreyfus and Don Simpson, who suggestively brandished a fake Uzi. It was coyly titled “All the Men I’ve Ever Loved.”

“She always gave the impression that she could take the heat and I think she paid a price for it,” producer Melinda Jason recalls. “They were gruff and rough. The film was outrageous.”

“It was the edgiest thing at the shower,” producer Lynda Obst says. “It got a little harsh at times because Dawn was one of the boys.”

Not exactly.

If the boys have long had their golf and river-rafting trips to help grease the wheels among the powers that be, the girls are chiming in with their own bonding rituals. In a town where pleasure is business, the power shower has become de rigueur for many of Hollywood’s female players.

“Little Women” producer Denise Di Novi had one two summers ago. The baby bash at the Polo Lounge was thrown by Amy Pascal, who had shepherded Di Novi’s film through Columbia before Pascal’s recent return there as president.

Producer Lili Fini Zanuck threw a job shower for Pascal when she took over Turner Pictures in 1994. And when Steel celebrated her last birthday, other industry heavyweights were there to watch her blow out the candles--Paramount Motion Picture Group Chairwoman Sherry Lansing, Columbia TriStar Vice Chairwoman Lucy Fisher, Pascal and Obst.

“There was this remarkable sense of camaraderie, a tremendous sense of empathy and support,” Obst says. “I do think very much that there has evolved what I call a tree of girls--enormously dense branches and very strong interrelations, and a very high quality of both mentoring and alliances.

“There was a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was able to say to an executive, ‘You don’t want to make this script, it’s perfectly OK, because there’s Lindsay, Sherry, Lucy, Laura [Ziskin, president of Fox 2000 Pictures] and Amy running studios out there and they all have my taste.’ And that’s a remarkable thing to be able to say. After 20 years, it actually caught in my throat and gave me a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary kind of smile.”

Women have lately flexed their box-office brawn with the hits “The First Wives Club” and “Waiting to Exhale.” While much has been said about the “surprising” strength of female audiences, those films are also raising the curtain on the women making the films. At “First Wives” studio Paramount, as much as 44% of top-tier creative executives are women, including the queen movie-making bee, Lansing, according to Premiere magazine. At 20th Century Fox, which made “Exhale,” the percentage is a respectable 35%, and it also boasts a woman, Ziskin, running a key division.

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And as female filmmakers grow in number, they’re not only shattering glass ceilings, they’re taking other women with them, much as the old boys always have.

Indeed, just before Pascal took over the reins at Columbia, she told the New York Times that her new teammate, Fisher, was her old mentor. Their relationship began in the mid-’80s at Warner Bros., where Fisher had given a production deal to Pascal’s first boss, producer Tony Garnett. Pascal sold her first project to Fisher, “Girl Crazy,” which never saw the light of day, although they all teamed up on 1985’s “Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird.”

“She was my mentor not only because she cared about me but because she had set a great example,” Pascal says. “Here was a smart woman who did things her own way who was incredibly powerful at the studio.”

Fisher had kept track of Pascal’s career since their days at Warner’s, and when she heard things were shaky at Turner, she threw her support behind Pascal’s hire by Sony Pictures President John Calley, who was already a fan.

“I was flattered that she called me a mentor because I always thought she was a firebrand,” Fisher says. “She’s someone I’ve always been anxious to work with again. She’s a complete magnet for talent. She has great taste. She’s a workhorse, but a productive workhorse. And she’s great company.”

Fisher, who also considers herself a mentor to TriStar executive vice president of production Amy Baer, says there’s been a women’s network for years. “I don’t know how well known it was,” she says. “I owe two of my most critical career opportunities to women”--Marcia Nasatir, the first female studio vice president, who gave Fisher her first job as a reader at United Artists in the early ‘70s, and Paula Weinstein, who hired Fisher in her first VP post at Warner’s.

Of course, Fisher was brought along by prominent men, among them Steven Spielberg and Warner co-chairmen Bob Daly and Terry Semel. And many see the industry’s fabric threaded primarily along generational lines. That is, as more women enter the field and baby boomers rise to the top, gender has actually become less of an issue.

“There’s a new group of people running the industry, whether it’s Richard Lovett at CAA or Toni Howard and Rosalie Swedlin at ICM and Amy Pascal at Columbia,” says Iris Grossman, president of Women in Film.

“Most of these people grew up together, and instead of being [just] competitors, which they are, they are able to be friends, which is what the old boys’ network is. But now it incorporates women. I disagree about the fact that it’s an old girls’ network. We’re becoming part of the old boys’ network and it makes for a new kind of network.”

In Grossman’s view, Hollywood’s younger women mesh with the new network, and whatever old girls’ club exists encompasses women over 40.

“There’s a line from ‘The Heidi Chronicles’ by Wendy Wasserstein, that women who open doors are going to be the ones who suffer the most. And the women who opened up the doors for me were the ones who perhaps did not get to be in the old boys’ network, so they had to find their own network.”

On the other hand, Nikki Rocco says she managed without an old girls’ network as she scaled the heights of studio distribution, the first female to crack that male bastion when she became Universal Pictures distribution president a year ago.

“My feeling is not many women have stayed with their convictions and pursued their careers in my area and I have,” she says. “You can’t blame the old boys because they have the jobs and you can blame the girls for not being tough like me.”

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Liz Glotzer, Castle Rock’s president of production, considers the idea of an old girls’ network “sexist in a reverse way. I’d like to think I’m not sexist in that way, that if a script is good it doesn’t matter if it’s written by a man or a woman.”

Glotzer herself was mentored by men--producer Larry Gordon who launched her career by hiring her as a story analyst, and later Castle Rock President Martin Shafer.

“I didn’t have a lot of women to look up to in the beginning,” she says. “The women who were successful were so high up I didn’t know them. Sherry Lansing was a legend but I didn’t have access to her.”

Lansing is often cited as an example of someone who curries other women’s careers as is Steel, and Obst helped launch the successful careers of producer Lynn Harris and Jersey Films President Stacey Sher, whom Obst mentored with her former partner Debra Hill.

But most women in Hollywood who have mentors at all were mentored by men, regardless of their networking stripe. That’s largely a matter of the demographics of decades past. Fewer jobs were available to women, and scarcity was the mother of competition.

“In the beginning, we all began as wild competitors,” Obst says of the industry’s female warriors. “There were six women’s slots and one woman for each slot, and if you lost your job, a girl would take it.”

With fewer women coloring the business environment, male standards of behavior often prevailed over their work lives.

“It was harder for women to have natural relationships with each other,” says “Little Women” screenwriter Robin Swicord. “Women’s relationships don’t tend to be heavily bound in hierarchy, and what was odd was women acting hierarchically toward other women because of the business environment. And as more women have come into it, I feel things are more relaxed in that sense.”

Bonnie Bruckheimer, Bette Midler’s producing partner, has unpleasant memories of certain female superiors prominent when she was coming up in the business 20 years ago.

“I was not exactly embraced by some of the women who were in positions of power above me,” she says. “As a matter of fact, some of the worst experiences I had were with women. For instance, my first job was at Columbia Pictures, and there was a woman executive there who was mean to me because I looked like an up-and-coming younger woman.

“And I’ve never forgotten this because we’re All Girl Productions and our motto is, ‘We hold a grudge.’ ”

Now All Girl is nearly all girl--”we always have one boy”--because she and Midler enjoy working with women.

“A lot of the women stars have female partners, because I think that women are very comfortable working together,” Bruckheimer says. “Women are much more honest with each other. We’re less paranoid about how we appear to each other. We’re less worried about our egos and more intent on getting the work done.”

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Demi Moore and her producing partner, Suzanne Todd, celebrate their female friendships with Girls’ Night--casual Thursday soirees that include a revolving group of agents, producers, actresses and directors who schmooze about boys, chow down, play games or watch TV at one another’s homes. Sometimes there are guest appearances by a jewelry designer, a manicurist or a masseuse.

“It started three years ago because [producer] Dan Melnick told Demi and I that he had a weekly poker night for years and years, long enough that we were jealous. Originally we said we want Chick Poker Night, but we found out really quickly girls aren’t into poker,” Todd says.

“We started calling it Girls’ Night and One Guy because we figured out whoever’s house we were at, that person’s significant other would find some excuse to come down for leftover food. They’re always desperate to know whether we’re talking about them.”

Not surprisingly, all that fun and frivolity sometimes translates into deals. Moore and Todd have a project in development at TriStar written by Girls’ Night regular Gigi Levangie. “Teacher, Teacher” will be helmed by “The Last Supper” director Stacy Title, who has also attended Girls’ Nights.

“We have Gigi’s script because we know her really well from lots and lots of Girls’ Nights, and that’s how we got to know Stacy better,” Todd says. “We didn’t talk about that project then. We learned each others’ sensibilities and it evolved during work hours.”

If it can be easier to segue into work mode with someone you socialize with, it can also be easier to socialize with other women you meet through work.

“It may be easier for girls to make friends with girls and boys to make friends with boys,” Swicord says. “Having lunch with your girlfriend is something you might do anyway. If work gets done too, great.

“When Josh Donen was [a production executive] at Universal, I loved working with him, and I wrote a script under his guidance, ‘The Serious Case of Benjamin Button.’ I like him very much, but I don’t call him very much to have lunch because we’d probably only talk about work, whereas when you get to know someone as a woman, you have girlfriend things in common too.”

Director Martha Coolidge also plays with people she met through business and then sometimes does more business with them. The equestrian bought her first horse from fellow horse lover and producer Gale Anne Hurd, and the two rode together in the 1996 Rose Parade.

Coolidge is also a partner in a paso fino horse breeding ranch in Agua Dulci, Calif., with screenwriter Kathleen Rowell and her lawyer husband, John. She met Kathleen at Zoetrope Studios, where she also met fellow riders Eva Gardos, an editor, and Aleta Chappelle, a casting director. Chappelle cast her films “Rambling Rose” and “Three Wishes,” Gardos cut “Valley Girl” and “Joy of Sex” and Kathleen has worked with Coolidge on four projects.

“I try to go out of my way to work with women when there are talented women,” Coolidge says. “But I tried once in my life to get an all-woman crew together, and I never regretted anything more. The personalities didn’t meld together well.

“Gender can’t be the only judge. You have to pick a camera person because they love the material and they get along with the gaffer and the grip. You can’t just say, ‘Let’s get all women and put them in a room together.’ That doesn’t work.”

The distaff crew, pulled together in 1975 for her film “Not a Pretty Picture,” disbanded and the film was later shot with a mixed crew.

Of course, women don’t automatically become allies simply because they’re women.

“There are personal psychology issues that can overwhelm feminism, and they come from family dynamics,” Obst says. “If you have very complicated personal dynamics with your mother or sister and you haven’t worked them through, you’ll play them out in your work relationship.

“And if you want to be the only woman on the tennis team, you’re more likely to be threatened by the success of other women. Men have that profoundly but they’re comfortable with it and we’re not, because they have sports and gamesmanship to deal with these competitive issues.”

When boys will be old boys, their gatherings can still be quite a bit more high-powered than the girls’. For one thing, women aren’t likely to be knitting together multinationals the way the boys have at investment banker Herbert J. Allen Jr.’s Sun Valley, Idaho, corporate retreat. That’s where Michael Eisner, Warren Buffett and Tom Murphy batted around the idea for the largest corporate merger in entertainment history--Disney’s $19-billion takeover of Capital Cities/ABC. While women may be on a relative power roll in Hollywood, it largely stops short of boardrooms.

“Nothing would be nicer than the premise that an old girls’ network existed, but I think it’s premature,” producer Lili Fini Zanuck says. “We haven’t been in positions of power long enough. I don’t think we can really help each other beyond the emotional support.”

Many industry women have another starring attraction in their lives--their families--which slices into after-hours networking time.

“One of the reasons why we don’t have a Herbie Allen retreat--it’s not that we couldn’t--but when we’re not working, our personal life has a greater value,” Zanuck says. “A lot of these women are mothers. We’re not going to leave the kids when we’re not at home often enough and feel guilty as it is to spend more time hiking together.”

On the other hand, motherhood can be the glue that draws industry women together, cementing relationships with an extra fillip of shared experience. Rae Sanchini, president of Lightstorm Entertainment, has traded tips on nannies and preschool with Hurd; Kate Guinzburg, Michelle Pfeiffer’s producing partner; and Universal co-president of production Stacey Snider since becoming the mother of a daughter six months ago.

“It certainly does bond people on a different level,” Sanchini says. “A commonality of interests and experiences can always lead to other places, and that’s what the old boys’ network is based on--commonality of life experience and interests.”

Family concerns torpedoed an embryonic attempt to organize a Grand Canyon river-rafting trip for women, like the annual men’s expedition helmed by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. And, of course, there’s that natty matter of making movies to cut into a girl’s networking time.

“We used to have a hiking group, but unfortunately we don’t have it anymore,” Zanuck says. “That’s also the nature of our business. You find each other when you can. I was gone six months last year in Paris trying to make a movie. We don’t have schedules that are dependable that way.”

Many women efficiently forge ties during regular work hours. And with more women entering the industry, they’re more likely to grow up in the business with other women.

Pascal worked for Steel at Columbia and later Steel helped Pascal take over Turner, where Steel had a production deal. And when Lisa Henson left Columbia last summer, she teamed up with producer Janet Yang, whom she’d met a decade earlier on the set of Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.”

Nora Ephron mentored Obst in New York’s magazine world in the late ‘70s when Obst’s then-husband David was the literary agent for Ephron’s then-husband Carl Bernstein. Years later, Obst recruited Ephron to make her directing debut with the 1992 “This Is My Life.” More recently, Ephron called Obst from Austin, Texas, where she was shooting “Michael” to enlist her as the director for “Friends for Life,” a girlfriend film they were developing as producers.

“I was so moved I almost wept but I didn’t,” Obst wrote in her recent memoir, “Hello, He Lied.” “Instead I told her how flattered I was, regardless of whether or not this turns out to be the right project for me to direct. She had been my mentor, then I had been honored to be hers when I produced her directing debut. Now she was offering me the opportunity to be produced, taken care of, by my closest mentor. The karmic kickback was actually kicking in.”

Pascal met Swicord in 1981 when she was hunting for fresh talent for Garnett. “When we met we started talking about ‘Little Women’ and how important that book was,” Swicord says. “There was something about how our imagination clicked that made us friends.

“What’s nice is that some of the people I’ve known for a long time started out as what they called derisively ‘D Girls’ are in the position to greenlight movies or be strong proponents.”

Years later, Pascal introduced her to Di Novi when she was lining up a producer for the 1994 “Little Women.”

“We had all grown up in the business together, and it was a great opportunity for all of us at a point of maturity to make a great movie together,” Di Novi says. “There was something profoundly rewarding about that.”

The film version of the girls’ classic was made under the stewardship of yet another woman, Henson. And some advocates of women’s fare believe such films have a better chance of being made with more women in a position to greenlight and champion them.

“People do develop movies about things they know about,” Pascal says. “I know about being a girl.”

“A thing I’ve noticed about many of the women I know who have good jobs in Hollywood is that they often want to make movies because they want to see the movies,” Ephron says. “As opposed to some of the guys--not all of them--who spend an enormous amount of their time trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.”

Swicord has found it’s sometimes easier to work with women when it comes to developing scripts with female characters.

“I’ve had some really weird experiences working with some men early in my career. I wrote a script for a group of people who said, ‘Does a woman have to be a rocket scientist? Can’t she be a housewife? I see this scene where she takes a death mop and shoves it right in his face.’ I was shocked. They live on a different planet.”

First-time director Alex Sichel says female executives were far more likely to respond warmly to “All Over Me,” her new film about teenage girls’ friendship, which made its Sundance Film Festival debut this year.

“I had this moment of feeling there is this world where women want to see movies about themselves and support women directors and producers,” Sichel says. “But I don’t know how much women are actually making the decisions. We had it happen quite a few times where women said ‘yes’ and started talking to us as if they were going to make the movie, and then the president or owner of the company didn’t respond to it and that was a man.”

Fine Line picked up the film in part because it was championed by executive vice president of marketing Liz Manne, who’d worked before with Sichel’s producer Dolly Mann, and by v.p. of production/acquisitions Rachael Horovitz.

More famously, Lansing spearheaded last year’s hit “The First Wives Club,” which broke first-weekend records for a female-driven movie, ultimately soaring past $100 million and upending common Hollywood wisdom that women over 40 don’t buy tickets in bulk.

The year before, “Waiting to Exhale” did the same for perceptions of the African American female audience when it became a surprise hit.

Ezra Swerdlow, who worked as executive producer on “Wives” and producer on “Waiting,” says both films were propelled by economics and key female executives--Lansing and executive vice president for production Karen Rosenfelt at Paramount and executive vice president Elizabeth Gabler at Fox. Still, men were also prime forces behind those films.

“I think intelligent executives of any gender are going to respond to material that’s not specific to their sex or race, but it may just broaden the perspective of the studio,” Swerdlow says. “It’s a matter of degree. There are obviously male executives who will see the commercial and creative value of stories told from a woman’s perspective but they might miss one.”

Similarly, Fine Line Features President Ruth Vitale believes background and experience pack a stronger punch on slates than sex.

“Certainly a female perspective is a healthy and good one to have,” she says. “That doesn’t mean if women ran every studio you wouldn’t have ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Lethal Weapon.’ ”

Ultimately, the action-hungry global marketplace may have as much say in whether female-driven films get made as do female executives.

“ ‘The First Wives Club’ is doing pretty well overseas,” Swerdlow says, “but ‘Waiting to Exhale’ we felt underperformed overseas. There may be the translation of that material and the cultural specificity of it making it less translatable compared to an action movie.”

And in the end, the old girls’ network still has miles to go before it sleeps. At some studios, female faces are relatively sparse among top-tier creative executive ranks--19% at Warner Bros. and 21% at Sony, though women fare better at middle-level positions, according to Premiere. And things are bleaker for women in directing and cinematography. Only 10% of 1995’s films were directed by women.

“Looking at the statistics, I don’t think you can get too carried away with any of this,” Ephron says. “You know the way people always insisted there were all these poor white males being squeezed out by affirmative action? We’re not exactly at that stage, and I look forward to the day we are.”