A Chick Flick by Any Other Name

When Warner Bros. market-tested its new summer dramedy “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” the researchers asked members of the focus group, “Would you describe this as a chick flick?” For the men who liked the film, a rollicking saga about a warring mother and daughter and the mother’s lifelong friends, the mere question was an affront to their manhood.

That label meant the movie was somehow “off-limits for them or restricting the experience,” writer-director Callie Khouri recalls. “They would say, ‘It’s not a chick flick. It’s a movie about human relationships,’ as if there’s some difference. They think a ‘chick flick’ means it’s a weepy. This movie provokes plenty of tears, but it’s not sentimental. It’s pretty hard-core in terms of what it delivers.”

After spending almost a decade resisting the inevitable pigeonholing that came with her success writing the Oscar-winning, headline-generating “Thelma & Louise,” Khouri is now ready to embrace the mantle as a doyenne of the chick flick. “I don’t think of that as a negative thing. If it’s a movie directed at women, I have no problem with that whatsoever. Why not? It’s a huge audience. Oprah Winfrey didn’t get to be the richest woman in the world by not focusing on the female audience.

“In terms of feature films, there have always been movies, ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ ‘The First Wives Club,’ and what do you know? They made a hundred million dollars. It’s always a big shock, but there’s a lot of women in the world, and if there’s a movie for them, they’ll go for it.”

Welcome to the summer of 2002. A few hardy souls are bucking sequel mania and the joys of re-creating the testosterone-packed summers of 1995, 1999 and even 1977, with new installments of the “Austin Powers,” “Men in Black” and “Star Wars” franchises. This does not mean that the makers of “Enough,” “Unfaithful,” “Blue Crush” and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”--the summer’s four major studio releases about women--don’t want to go boom. They do. Only they’re using different tools to set the pulses racing. These are women’s films on steroids.

In the Hollywood of the ‘80s and ‘90s, “chick flick” was a pejorative term denoting movies about women that were soft, low-concept character studies. Worst of all in this bottom-line industry, most of them didn’t make money.

“What [angered me] is they just talked about films about women that didn’t work,” recalls Columbia Chairman Amy Pascal, who was involved with a range of female-driven projects from the commercial blockbuster “A League of Their Own” to the unsuccessful “28 Days.” “I called them dramas, not female films. Nobody ever said anything about ‘Charlie’s Angels’ being a chick flick and how terrible it was. If it didn’t work, it was a chick flick.”

Indeed, a host of the most successful movies of the last decade, everything from “Erin Brockovich” to the all-time champ, “Titanic,” featured female protagonists and were powered at the box office by female moviegoers. But those were simply perceived as everybody movies.

Screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (“Frances”) says that studios have grown increasingly reluctant to make adult relationship movies, the kind of movies that usually target female audiences. “What everyone is looking for is the material that if it’s done badly will still eke out its money. Relationship pictures, if done badly, die.”

Noting studio resistance to making full-blooded characters “with skill and dimension,” Kazan adds, “Women like to go to good movies about real people, and the only way you can make a relatively good movie about relatively real people is to put those people in jeopardy, not to put them into interesting circumstances which reflect the real world, but to put them into extreme circumstances.”

Hence, for this summer he wrote “Enough,” a Jennifer Lopez revenge thriller, the latest in a recent line of such women-in-jeopardy movies as “Panic Room” and a rash of Ashley Judd thrillers. The heroine in “Unfaithful” must contend with the consequences of adultery--her own; the surfer girls of “Blue Crush” are battling 20-foot waves.

A subtext running through these movies is girl power, but it’s delivered without any old-school feminist politics, or often without any of the messy nuances of real life that characterized earlier films like “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or “Broadcast News.”

Pascal points to last year’s big Columbia hit “Charlie’s Angels,” the chop-socky, butt-wiggling yarn of fabulous girl crime-fighters, as the prototype for the kind of chick flick she’s interested in making now: “I wanted to make a movie about girl empowerment. That’s what I set out to do, but I put it in a genre where it’s a piece of entertainment and where it can get the point across without hammering it over people’s heads.”

“The key is to find a fresh idea and get it to appeal to both men and women,” says Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000, which is releasing “Unfaithful.” “If you have a women’s picture that men are going to be dragged to, then you’re in a tough situation.”

What follows is a brief guide to the four high-profile women’s films of the summer. They’re more popcorn than pedantic, as Hollywood has applied the rules of high-concept filmmaking to the world of chick flicks, presenting women who stride across the screen self-confidently, and men who are either evil or supporting players in the girl-centric drama. (The films are listed in order of release.)

One thing that hasn’t changed, however--three of the four were directed by men.

“Unfaithful”

For years, Adrian Lyne has been the filmmaker feminists have loved to hate. His ‘80s zeitgeist film “Fatal Attraction” fueled talk shows and spawned magazine covers for its controversial depiction of the aftermath of an adulterous affair, which included a bunny-boiling career woman, vixen Glenn Close, and a helpless Michael Douglas trying to defend his family.

Yet the box office success of his oeuvre, which includes everything from “91/2 Weeks” to “Flashdance” and “Indecent Proposal,” is powered by a female audience hungry for the transgressive female fantasies that Lyne serves up with sensual, back-lit abandon. His films often work as modern parables of the garden of Eden, where the female character opts to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, with disastrous consequences.

In “Unfaithful,” due Wednesday, a happily married suburban housewife (Diane Lane) embarks on an affair with a young French book dealer (who, of course, was a boxer in the past).

“I think that women in general are much more open-minded to a situation like this than men,” Lyne says. “With ‘91/2 Weeks’ [about a woman who has a sadomasochistic affair], you would have thought women would be outraged, but women were much more open to the idea of liberating themselves, of being uncivilized for 10 weeks, and being tactile. I’ve found that men tend to be much more threatened by this situation. Why would she have this affair? What is her motivation?”One of the more controversial aspects of “Unfaithful” is that’s there’s not a putative excuse for Lane’s character to stray. She’s not married to a monster or even a bore.

“That’s what so rewarding, because that’s how affairs really go down,” Lane says. “How many times is there a justification, or an apology, or an excuse? Did the question even come up in Michael Douglas’ press conference? The word ‘philanderer’ doesn’t conjure a woman in people’s minds. The truth is that women have much more of an emotional risk [in having an affair] than men because they’re more emotionally connected to their sexuality. Would we want them to separate it like church and state, like men seem capable of? I doubt it.”

“Enough”

Many viewers might not lump “Enough” with such classic social justice pictures as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” “Philadelphia” and “Norma Rae.” But Jennifer Lopez is the first to say she was drawn by the message of the film (due May 24), in which she plays an abused wife who straps on brass rings, learns Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art, and takes on her vicious husband.

“Everybody gets into a bad situation, and through the power of you you can change that. The women-empowerment aspect of it was really attractive to me,” says the actress-singer.

Lopez’s stint as a victim-turned-Dirty Harry is the latest in Hollywood’s new favorite genre: “hell hath no fury ... “ pictures, in which the plot turns on woman’s anger--righteous anger.

“I just thought it was a popcorn movie with something interesting to say about people standing up for themselves,” director Michael Apted says. “I’d just done ‘Enigma,’ an arty film, so it’s nice to get a balance.”

Apted is another Hollywood pro practiced in the art of the women’s film. He guided Sissy Spacek to an Oscar in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a sensitive character study that is hard to imagine getting made in today’s climate. Yet he also directed the last James Bond installment, “The World Is Not Enough.” For this film, he not only worked on Lopez’s character, but also “the James Bond thing,” where “everything is slightly more fantastical than has been done before. It’s the same process to a greater or lesser extent.”

For screenwriter Kazan, the subtext of the picture is a little more ambiguous than simply “chicks kick butt.” Indeed, it’s a grim vision of the war between the sexes.

“This picture expresses not only the desire of women to strike back at men who mistreat them, but it also expressed the men’s anger toward women,” Kazan says. “Although the guy is clearly the villain, some of the things which he says are straight out of the mouths of people I’ve known, friends of mine. That’s terrifying, but it gives the picture resonance.”

Kazan is married to screenwriter Robin Swicord, who wrote one of the most beloved women’s films of the early ‘90s, “Little Women.” “Robin said that she would have loved to write the movie [‘Enough’], but had she written the movie, people would have thought it was an angry woman picture. I could get away with things she couldn’t get away with. I don’t know if it’s true. It might be.”

“Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”

As the most classic of this summer’s women’s films, it’s hard to imagine how “Ya-Ya” got made in today’s climate except that it’s based on the best-selling book by Rebecca Wells.

“It was really simple. We loved the book and thought everybody could relate to different aspects of the story in terms of their personal experiences with their moms,” says Warner Bros. Pictures President of Worldwide Production Lorenzo di Bonaventura. He adds that despite its reputation as the Home Box Office of testosterone, the studio has made “a few of these films over the years.” Indeed, for years in the early ‘90s, the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston romance “The Bodyguard” was the studio’s highest-grossing film, outpacing such staples as “Batman” and “Lethal Weapon.”

Khouri is the only female director on any of the summer’s women’s films, and Di Bonaventura had to plead with her to take the job.

“I didn’t want to get pigeonholed.... Any time there’s something with a woman in it, it comes my way as if I’m some expert on that,” she says.

When Khouri’s film “Thelma & Louise” was released in 1991, it unleashed a torrent of controversy and polarized critics: Some loved its gender-busting premises, and others found it degrading to men, a paean to violence and an insult to feminism. A decade later, the film, in which Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon go on the lam, seems simply prescient about the ways pop culture would progress.

Like “Thelma & Louise” and “Enough,” the plot of “Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” due out June 7, turns on anger, this time between a mother and a daughter. “If you’re dealing with drama and emotion, anger is the equivalent of a gun,” Khouri says. “The Vivi character [played by Ashley Judd and later Ellen Burstyn] has a tremendous amount of anger in her youth, and that gets passed on to her daughter. That’s a classic family dynamic.

“Anger is such a part of the human condition. Look at the world! Anger is just acted out on this huge stage of our life every single day! In this movie, anger is just the first thing that everybody deals with, but what they’re really dealing with is shame, fear, disappointment, and yet they’re all funny, lovely, loving people.

“When people ask if this is a movie for men, I say it delivers on the promise of this kind of movie and it packs an emotional wallop. If you’re man enough to take it, go right on in.”

“Blue Crush”

The first movie that Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer made for his daughter was “Fear,” a father’s nightmare of what happens when a daughter dates a psychopath.

His daughter is now 13, and Grazer is making his second girl movie, “Blue Crush,” an extreme sports movie (due July 12) about a trio of female competitive surfers in Hawaii. “I feel like I understand and have deep compassion for women and the fact that our daughters are forced to sublimate the identity.... They’re forced to relay their power, identity and accumulation of knowledge to get men and I resent it. Anytime I can do a movie that empowers girls, I want to do it.”

Being an avid surfer, he’s received every surf script that’s circulated in Hollywood in the last decade, but he found “90% of the scripts were about men, and it’s not very interesting. There’s no counterpoint. It’s just really aggressive guys in a really aggressive world. Here you have the beautiful counterpoint between the innocence and fragility, the softness of women in a sport that’s life or death, in a male-dominated subculture that’s rough and pretty barbaric. To see them triumph against these critically insurmountable odds--I think it’s poetic.”

“The surfing world is particularly sexist and chauvinistic,” says director and co-writer John Stockwell. “When we started shooting, all the real surfers on the film crew were saying, ‘Girls can’t surf the pipeline. Girls can’t surf big waves. You’ll never pull this off.’ By the end of filming, we turned their heads around. We had girls pushing the limits of female surfing.”

While “Unfaithful” and “Enough” evoke the chasms between men and women, “Blue Crush” treats men as sideline players in a woman’s life. “It’s a girl-with-a-dream movie,” Stockwell says. “The way I approached it was to try to turn all the gender issues on their head. The guy in this movie is what the girl would have been in a sports movie 10 years ago. He’s the one who has to stand on the sideline and cheer. He’s the one who’s the sex object in the film.”

Like Apted and Lyne, Stockwell has also forayed into the world of chick flicks, most notably with last year’s “Crazy/Beautiful,” a touching teen drama about lovers from opposite sides of the tracks. Unlike “Bring It On” or “Clueless,” it failed commercially, in part because teenage girl audiences were conflicted about the heroine, played by Kirsten Dunst, whom they perceived to be a “slut,” according to Stockwell.

“Girls are very judgmental about other girls,” Stockwell says. “You have to be careful when you have a female protagonist. There are certain things a teenage audience will and won’t accept. It’s not unlike being in high school. If you start pushing boundaries, the teenage girls have a hard time relating. Thankfully, I’m not dealing with that in ‘Blue Crush.’”

That’s not to say that the girl surfers, with their lithe, athletic bodies in bikinis, aren’t sexy. Admittedly, “that’s something that really appealed to the marketing folks at Universal,” Stockwell says with a laugh.

“Universal was very conscious of letting people know that it’s not a Gidget movie. That’s the reason the title changed from ‘Surfer Girl’ to ‘Blue Crush.’ If you had ‘girl’ in the title, it limited the scope of the audience. They want to let guys know that it’s ... hard-charging and not soft. If guys determine it’s a chick flick, they’re not going. Universal wants this movie to bring in everyone.”

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Rachel Abramowitz is a Times staff writer.