Toward a More Panoramic Vision

Despite an increasing number of higher-profile female directors and producers, the position directly behind the camera has remained by and large a man’s domain. But that world is beginning to turn toward female cinematographers.

Sometimes this is because some female directors are more open to hiring them, but more often it’s because women have begun to accumulate the expertise required to do the historically male job, which a lack of experience may have kept beyond their reach--until now.

Recent events offer evidence that the tide has turned.

Hardly anyone noticed, but movie history was made earlier this year when the usually exclusively male awards ceremony of the American Society of Cinematographers broke with tradition and recognized a woman, Lisa Marie Wiegand, with the inaugural Karl Struss Heritage Award for outstanding cinematography.

That Wiegand has not yet been hired by a movie studio or TV network is very much to the point, not that anyone would expect her to be.

At age 30, a recent graduate of the UCLA film school, Wiegand is precisely the kind of novice director of photography the Struss Award is supposed to honor. A few minutes later in the ASC awards program, actress Liv Ullmann introduced one of the lifetime honorees, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who has worked with everyone from Federico Fellini to Sydney Pollack.

“Someone asked me before I came here, because I am a woman, if I knew anything about cinematography,” said Ullmann, who, besides acting, has directed five films and one TV miniseries. Where Wiegand’s award points to a possibly successful but uncertain future, Ullmann’s remark acknowledges the past absence of recognition--and more important, employment--for female cinematographers.

Which is not to say there isn’t definite movement in that direction when one looks beyond the ASC awards and the Oscars show, which has never nominated a female director of photography (or “D.P.,” as they’re known in the industry).

This year, Lisa Rinzler took the cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival, for her work on the feature “Three Seasons.” Maryse Alberti and Tami Reiker were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards for, respectively, “Velvet Goldmine” and “High Art,” with Alberti taking home the award.

But as any cinematographer will tell you, it’s the work--not the honors--that matters. Regarding the source of that employment, two female cinematographers this year have definitely broken out from the indie-film world to make movies at the big studios, the launching pad for not only Oscars and ASC awards but significantly bigger paychecks as well.

Reiker shot Peter Chan’s “Love Letter,” to be released by DreamWorks in May, and Ellen Kuras, a Sundance winner for 1995’s indie “Angela,” is the cinematographer on two studio films this year: MGM’s just-released “The Mod Squad,” directed by Scott Silver, and Disney/Touchstone’s “Summer of Sam,” from director Spike Lee.

‘It’s an enormous step,” Reiker says of moving from indies to the major studios. “It’s this incredible validation of your work.”

One has to go back to 1995 and cinematographer Rinzler’s work on Allen and Albert Hughes’ “Dead Presidents,” which came out of Disney-based Caravan Pictures for a release through Hollywood Pictures, to find a situation even remotely akin to a female D.P. being directly hired by a major studio.

“It’s the classic girls play with the dolls and the guys play with the trucks,” says Kuras, whose feature-film career behind the camera began with 1992’s “Swoon.” “The D.P. is leader of the crew,” she goes on to explain. “You’re the leader of the gang. They don’t follow the director necessarily.”

She admits that seeing a woman behind the camera has taken some getting used to. “It’s been a male-dominated world largely because the guys were the ones who first started doing it.”

“Mod Squad” producer David Ladd claims to be unaware that he’s broken ground by hiring Kuras.

“Are you kidding? I didn’t know that,” he says. But as for any overt discrimination, he’s also not so sure. “I’ve had a lot of meetings where people are crewing up and I’ve never heard, ‘Oh, she can’t do it because she’s a she,’ ” he says. “For so many years, it was a man’s field and the talent pool on that side was simply greater.”

Midge Sanford, who with partner Sarah Pillsbury is producing DreamWorks’ “Love Letter,” agrees.

“I know when we’ve looked for D.P.’s in the past, if we got 50 resumes, 48 of them would be from men,” says Sanford, who also produced “How to Make an American Quilt” and “Love Field.” “There are just far fewer women to look at to see if they were right.”

Actor Jason Patric, who produced last year’s indie film “Your Friends & Neighbors,” actually went looking for a female cinematographer to shoot his Neil LaBute-directed movie.

Eventually, he settled on Nancy Schreiber, who heretofore had worked in television and documentaries.

“Everyone else involved in the making of the film was male,” he has said. “We needed that female perspective somewhere,” he told The Times, regarding the film’s battle-of-the-sexes subject matter.

Although “Love Letter” is essentially female-character driven, Sanford says that didn’t influence her hiring Reiker: “We didn’t think that way. We looked at male and female writers to adapt the book. For ‘How to Make an American Quilt,’ we were definitely looking for a female director.” Jocelyn Moorhouse eventually directed, with veteran D.P. Janusz Kaminski, an Oscar winner for “Schindler’s List,” as cinematographer.

Regarding “Love Letter,” Sanford reveals that her director of choice, Chan, was making his first film in the United States, which had much to do with his being open to D.P.’s of either sex. “Peter didn’t have a crew of any kind here,” Sanford says of the Shanghai-born Chan. Essentially, that very atypical situation gave Reiker the advantage of no advantage.

“We had to start from scratch and introduce him to D.P.’s, production designers, editors, everything.” Even more significant to Reiker’s landing the “Love Letter” gig is the beginning-to-burgeon women’s network within the independent film world.

“Maria Maggenti had written the ‘Love Letter’ script,” says Sanford, “and she had worked with Tami before, and that really was the connection.” Maggenti directed “The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love” in 1995, with Reiker as her cinematographer. “There’s no question that women [directors] are more open to using women cinematographers,” says Reiker, who before “Adventures” had made a series of short experimental films with female directors.

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The two women will reunite as director and cinematographer this summer, with their indie feature “Us, Them and Me.” Still, the gender question isn’t one this director of photography is comfortable discussing. She points to a recent New York Times article that asserted female directors and indie directors in particular don’t have a good record when it comes to hiring women.

“You sometimes have to wonder if drawing attention to it doesn’t just perpetuate the problem,” Reiker says.

For her part, Kuras says, “Several male D.P.’s have bent over backward to help me [obtain membership] with the ASC,” which currently has five female members out of 255 total, and Kuras is the most recent. As with Reiker, her connections to major-studio productions began outside the system, albeit not with women.

“Mod Squad” director Scott Silver admired Kuras’ work on “Swoon” and “I Shot Andy Warhol,” among other films, and first wanted her to shoot his indie “Johns,” for which she was unavailable. Later, set to direct “Mod Squad,” he specifically asked for Kuras, as she puts it, to help give “the film an irreverent and sarcastic approach.”

A two-day shoot with Spike Lee on a never-aired short for HBO led to her lensing his documentary “4 Little Girls” for the pay-TV network. From there, they quickly segued to teaming on “Summer of Sam.”

As with Reiker, Kuras is not about to beat the gender drum too loudly. “Spike has the most incredibly interracial crew with so many women, including his production coordinator [Betty Chin] and production designer [Therese DePrez],” she says.

In the end, female cinematographers may become part of the establishment simply by living and working as long as the hallowed male majority.

Producer-screenwriter Ron Bass (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Stepmom”), whose films tend to focus on female characters, sees a kind of reverse age discrimination, rather than gender, at the heart of the problem. “The D.P. is always the most experienced person on the set,” he says. “And the biggest criterion for getting hired is getting the experience that proves you can do it. I haven’t seen a lot of young D.P.’s. People tend to fall back on the tried and true.”

Eventually that group will probably include Kuras, Reiker, Rinzler and maybe even ASC honoree Wiegand.