Making a Film for ‘Women Your Age’

There’s nothing more fun than stumping the movie experts except watching an entire movie demographic do it. That’s what happened when Nancy Meyers’ hit “Something’s Gotta Give,” starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, defied convention and took in $80 million over the holiday season.

Not that Nicholson isn’t a megastar, with lots of recent hits under his belt, but here he wasn’t aiming for the fences with Adam Sandler. On the contrary, Jack was aiming for what his character, Harry, calls “women your age” and what prognosticators call the notoriously reluctant “upper female quadrant.” This is the portion of the moviegoing audience a marketing expert once described to me as “the quadrant hardest to convert from interest to ticket buyer.”

The upper female quadrant is the quarter of the moviegoing public made up of women over 24 -- of whom the most difficult to reach are those over the age of 35 or 40. This is because your average serial-dating 24-year-old isn’t hard to convince to buy a ticket to a lower female quadrant movie. But movie dating tips won’t get “women your age” into the multiplexes.

Up to now, this hard-to-muster clique has been beckoned with irresistible themes like “The Bad Husband” or “Where’s My Missing Teenager?” or “Searching for Sperm” or, if they’re really lucky, “My Great French Lover Who Left Me.” Real humdingers you can see racing out of your empty nest for.

It took Meyers to figure out that putting a glamorous mirror up to the faces of her powerful demographic would do the trick. The French know it (always have); they are selling racy lingerie to those of us who are over 40 by the mother lode. It took a woman who looks and thinks like Meyers to figure out that winning her gorgeous daughter’s boyfriend almost out from under her with sophistication and braininess was a winning ticket.

And who among us would want to miss the memorable answer to Harry’s nervous pre-coital inquiry about birth control? “Menopause.”

Movie studios cater to the younger portion of the female audience. This group has turned into a veritable hit machine, and their movies are not expensive to make.

Young women in this “Barbie quadrant” between the ages of 12 and 24 go often and in packs to movies they recognize are packaged for them by the casting of their own stars: Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and the newly minted Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan. (Who, you ask? Exactly.) They are a Friday night travel-in-packs, shop-in-malls, go-to-the-movies-in-droves crowd, and they have been driving the business almost as reliably as their brothers and boyfriends in the wildly determinate “lower male quadrant” have for more than two decades now.

But why did the experts think so little of the upper female crowd? Why has our slice of the pie been ignored, and why did we show up this holiday season for Jack and Diane?

Research convinced the studios that “women your age” were too busy to go to the movies and were certainly not known to travel in packs -- behavior necessary to make a real hit. They deferred their movie choices to others: their children, thus the success of the family film; their husbands, boyfriends, teenagers. Or they were just too exhausted from work and home obligations to go at all.

They were huge video renters and DVD purchasers, but the least-expected market to show up on the first weekend of anything, and first-weekend business is what drives the movie business. The stars representing this generation are considered less hot as well, their luster dimming with age, a terrifying prospect to each of them as they are drawn to the lure of the needle or knife as a way of prolonging their careers.

But some of the greatest actors, actresses and comediennes are pushing 50 and 60. Are we to take them into a field and shoot them? Keaton doesn’t think so. And her out-of-the-ballpark performance is peerless. She makes aging the sexiest thing a woman has done since Simone Signoret seduced Laurence Harvey in “Room at the Top.”

The supposedly stay-away crowd stayed away because nothing drew us to the theaters with a definite “need to see.” We needed our movie stars, our issues, our own happy endings. So Meyers built it and we came and defied the expectations that her audience would stay home. And there are a lot of us. So let’s ring in the new year by outing the femme in us: Stock up on lingerie, throw out the girdles. Drink vin rouge instead of Tab; enjoy pommes frites, not freedom fries. And let’s see more American “French movies.”

This means more work for our gorgeous and talented older actresses, as it has always been in France. Perhaps, as we see more of them seduced and seducing on screen, the idea of sexiness will start to stretch and American women will be allowed to age gracefully and beautifully. Salut, Nancy, Diane and Jack, for showing American men and women the way -- even if they need glasses to do it, it still sizzles, particularly under those vanilla Frette sheets you can’t afford when you are between 12 and 24. Vive la Revolution.