Maria Giese’s first movie was shown at Cannes in 1995. She hasn’t been paid to write or direct in good ole Hollywood since. In this amazing article, the woman who helped launch the ACLU’s Hollywood anti-gender discrimination campaign talks about how it all came about:
by Maria Giese
Twenty years ago I was a director, part of the Hollywood gold rush culture, chasing my dream. I pursued that dream relentlessly. By 2011, I had failed — utterly. A few months ago, my picture appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, then in Fortune with the headline: “Meet the Woman Who Started the EEOC Investigation Into Sexism in Hollywood.” How did it come to this?
When I enrolled in the graduate directing program at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, thanks to Title IX, my class was 50 percent women and 50 percent men. Still, I should have seen trouble ahead: There was only one female directing professor, and men had directed almost 100 percent of the films we studied.