Exploiting Feminism
An Interview with Stephanie Rothman
The Viennale (the Vienna International Film Festival) will be organizing a special tribute this year to filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. They will be showing a range of Rothman's works, including Group Marriage (1973), Terminal Island (1973), The Student Nurses (1970), The Velvet Vampire (1971), and The Working Girls (1974). Here's what they have to say about her work on the festival's website:
In the mid-1960s the young director Stephanie Rothman started to work as the first and only woman at the time at Roger Corman's "New World Pictures".
Rothman launched an impressive and highly successful debut with The Student Nurses in 1970, the story of a group of attractive nurses told in a previously unknown, ironic and intelligent combination of sexploitation and social criticism, nudity and a feminist brand of "girls and guns".
In the mid-1970s Rothman made her last film and then fell into oblivion - and with her one of the most headstrong and interesting women of American cinema of the 1960s and 70s.
Because I had written an essay about Rothman, which appears in The Wow Climax, I was invited by the festival's director to do an interview with her for the festival program. They have been nice enough to allow me to reproduce the interview here for my regular readers. Here, Rothman provides some interesting background on what it was like to work for Corman in the 1970s and about the claims made for her work by feminist critics.
Roger Corman was an early mentor for you. What did you learn from your work with Corman?
Roger Corman was not an early mentor, he was the only mentor I ever had. It was he who first offered me work as a filmmaker and I will always be grateful to him for that. He hired me in the fall of 1964, when it was rare for anyone who did not have family connections to find employment in the film industry, in or outside of the jurisdiction of the labor unions. It was even rarer for a woman to be hired. It was traditional to exclude us from nearly all types of work behind the camera.
I met Roger because I was the first woman to ever win the Directors Guild of America Fellowship, which was awarded annually to the director of a student film. He hired me as his assistant and put me to work immediately on low-budget independent films that he was personally financing, or that he had bought completed but that still needed further improvement. I did everything: write new scenes, scout locations, cast actors, direct new sequences and edit final cuts. It was a busy, exhilarating time.
Roger did not teach me these skills, I learned them in film school. But he did share his greater experience with me, giving me useful criticism and, equally important, information on how to efficiently organize work on the set so that a film could be shot on schedule. The schedules he set were much shorter than those of the major studios. Since it was his own money he was using, Roger did not want a film to go either over schedule or over budget.
He also taught me a valuable lesson in psychology: he encouraged me, often expressing his confidence in my abilities, and I therefore tried to do the best work for him that I could. It worked to my advantage too, because less than a year after I began working for him, in the fall of 1965, he financed It's A Bikini World, the first full-length theatrical feature film that I co-wrote and directed.
Corman had a number of women working for his company in those days. Was there a gender divide behind the scenes or did the male and female directors, both of whom were emerging from the film schools for the most part, support each other's work?
There were no women hired by him to work in production, while I was directing. I was the first woman he ever hired to direct, and the very small number of women who directed films for him after me, made them long after I was gone.
There was no gender divide and no mutual support when I worked there, because directors met each other infrequently and it was usually in the process of passing each other coming in or out of meetings with Roger. We were all involved in our own projects and there were no shared working spaces, such as offices or sound stages. Furthermore, our backgrounds and areas of interest, judging by our films, were different.
Many of those who worked with Corman describe a kind of compromise--work within exploitation formulas and in return gain a certain degree of ideological and creative control over your work. How do you think that balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced your work?
In 1970, Roger started his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures. He invited me to direct the first picture to be made there. It was called The Student Nurses. My husband, Charles Swartz, co-produced and co-wrote the story with me. We made it while Roger was out of the country, directing a film of his own, Von Richthofen and Brown, so we were free to develop the story of the nurses as we wished, as long as there was enough nudity and violence distributed throughout it. Please notice, I did not say sex, I said nudity. This freedom, once I paid my debt to the requirements of the genre, allowed me to address what interested me--and continues to interest me today-- political and social conflicts and the changes they produce. It allowed me to have a dramatized discussion about issues that were then being ignored in big-budget major studio films: for example, a discussion about the economic problems of poor Mexican immigrants--who were and still are America's largest immigrant population-- and their unhappy, restive children; and a discussion about a woman's right to have a safe and legal abortion when, at the time, abortion was still illegal in America. I have always wondered why the major studios were not making films about these topics. What kind of constraints were at work on them? My guess is that is was nothing but the over-privileged lives, limited curiosity and narrow minds of the men, and in those days they were always men, who decided which films would be made.
But, to return to your question: How do I think the balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced my work? There was always a struggle in my mind between the two. I would have covered the same topics, but made the films very differently, if I had not had these constraints. I knew it then. But I tried not to be discouraged and, as I said in answer to an earlier question in this interview, I tried to do the best I could.
The Student Nurses was very successful. Some critics welcomed its unapologetic feminism. It made a lot of money for Roger and he wanted me to make a sequel to it, but I wasn't interested. I had said all I wanted to about student nurses, and so he hired a series of male directors to make the sequels.
I never watched them, so I cannot say if they contained any feminist ideas. But the lesson Roger derived from my film's success was that you could make exploitation films whose narratives included contentious social issues, including feminism, and he consequently encouraged his directors to do it.
What did it mean to you to be working within the exploitation genre? Were there aspects of that formula that created discomfort for you? Were there special opportunities you saw there?
I was never happy making exploitation films. I did it because it was the only way I could work. While I do not object to violence or nudity in principle, the reason audiences came to see these low-budget films without stars was because they delivered scenes that you could not see in major studio films or more supposedly ambitious independent American films. (Today, of course, you can see these scenes and more, but we are talking about standards operative in the mid-nineteen sixties to seventies when I was working.) Exploitation films required multiple nude scenes and crude, frequent violence. My struggle was to try to dramatically justify such scenes and to make them transgressive, but not repulsive. I tried to control this through the style in which I shot scenes. That was one of my greatest pleasures, determining how my style of shooting could enhance the content of a scene. Comedy was another method of control I used. I have always enjoyed writing and directing comedy-- I was, in fact, more comfortable working in a comic idiom than a dramatic one--and so I also used comedy to modulate a scene's tone. Visual style and comic invention were my personal salvation or, as you put it in your question, the "special opportunity" to escape what troubled me about the exploitation genre.
"I think films are a compromised and corrupted art form, a combination of business and art. And I think filmmakers who treat it completely as a business fail. A business-oriented film is too blatant. It must have something more. To me, films that succeed are those that are slightly corrupted, that attempt to be both business and art, knowing they can never be a full work of art and should never be a full work of business." -- Roger Corman
Two women -- one white and blonde, the other black and wearing an Afro -- are harnessed to a plow, struggling to move forward through thick muck. Glistening sweat slides through their exposed cleavage and down their taunt, muscular thighs. Their expression is at once determined and humbled. They are dressed in tight cut-off jeans, halter tops tied off at the midriff, no bras and no shoes. Behind them, a man snarls, driving his human "cows."
This disturbing image is the core icon on the advertisements for Terminal Island. In the same ad, we see a stereotypical image of the black "buck," his broad chest bare, crushing a black woman's head into the dirt with his foot, "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby!" The promotional campaign for an exploitation film characteristically reduces the movie to its most sensationalistic images, images that make its desired audience want to see more. Terminal Island is being "exploited" as a film where one can see beautiful women "put in their place" by powerful men.
Another image circulates around Terminal Island -- the only photograph I have been able to find of its director, Stephanie Rothman. Rothman, an attractive young woman with flowing black hair, is directing an early scene set in a television studio control-room. Her look is passionate, her expressive hands stretch wide, as she is delivering instructions to the actress who plays a documentary film maker in the movie. The actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Rothman herself. As a result, the image takes on a reflexive quality -- the woman director as artist producing an image of the woman director. The caption alongside this Omni magazine article reads: "Terminal Island is consistent with her other films in that it is about several men and women who unite, then live together as friends and lovers without sexual distinctions being made, or infighting and petty jealousies developing. Her ideal world is one of equality and harmony."
Omni identifies the elements in Terminal Island and the other Rothman films, such as Group Marriage (1972), The Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Working Girls (1973), which attracted feminist interest.
Omni's juxtaposition of these two images leaves unreconciled two contradictory accounts of the film's politics and its audience appeals. Images of women as chattel compete with images of women as artists. Appeals to fantasies of male control compete with appeals to fantasies of "equality and harmony." Any film which negotiates between these two competing discourses warrants closer consideration. Such films may help us to better understand the ideological fault-lines within the popular cinema.
As Christine Gledhill suggests, the political commitments of filmmakers often have to get "negotiated" through generic traditions for constructing stories and marketing appeals which sell those stories to demographically desirable audiences. Such "negotiations" produce ideological contradictions within the texts being sold, contradictions which, in turn, get "negotiated" by viewers seeking certain kinds of pleasures from going to the movies. In Rothman's case, a further series of "negotiations" occurred amongst feminist critics: after an initial flurry of articles advancing her case as a feminist filmmaker, references to Rothman all but disappeared. A generation of critics schooled in Screen theory and in Laura Mulvey's assault on "visual pleasure" found it difficult to resolve the ideological contradictions surrounding a feminist exploitation filmmaker. They stopped looking for signs of feminist resistance in such an unlikely place and recoiled with puritanical discomfort over her eroticized images. Rothman's Terminal Island suggests the complexity of the "negotiations" which occur between feminist politics and popular entertainment within the marginal commercial space of the exploitation cinema.
As more recent feminist critics have sought a more complex account of the pleasures of popular culture, a reconsideration of Rothman seems in order. Re-examining Rothman in the 1990s seems of critical importance, since the issues she poses are closely related to those raised by a whole range of contemporary Hollywood films which similarly seek to insert feminist politics into commercial genres (Aliens, Blue Steel, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, A League of Their Own). Many of these films were either directed by veterans of the exploitation cinema or were strongly influenced by its legacy. To fully understand the complex ideological negotiations within these equally "corrupted" works, we need to reclaim both the progressive generic traditions upon which they build and the critical tools by which an earlier generation of feminist critics sought to interpret and evaluate those traditions. This essay examines what may be at stake for feminism in the exploitation cinema, using Rothman and Terminal Island as a point of entry. Rothman "exploits" the progressive potential already embedded within the exploitation genres to get her liberal feminist messages to a larger viewing public; Roger Corman's New World Pictures "exploits" the topicality of feminism in the early 1970s and the volatile emotions which surround it to attract an audience of men and women filmgoers. Emerging in this context of negotiation and exploitation, Terminal Island will be analyzed as a "partially corrupted" film, one which resists placement in a simple ideological category but which never-the-less shows the possibility of expressing resistant politics within mainstream genres...
Now the interview:
Your works were embraced by feminist film scholars such as Claire Johnson and Pam Cook. Were you aware of their celebration of your work and if so, how did it impact the ways you thought about your films.
I was unaware of their interest in my films until fairly recently. I met Pam Cook for the first time about seven years ago and it was only then that I read what she had written about me. It was around then I also learned that my films were initially in favor and then later fell out of favor with some feminist film scholars and critics. For this reason,I am very grateful to scholars like Pam Cook in the English speaking nations and Verena Mund in the German-speaking ones
for taking a serious continuing interest in my work.
I am happy that people have observed the thread of feminism that runs through my films. When I was making them, the main thrust of the women's movement was to establish equality in the workplace and the family, through law and custom. Since then, a more far-reaching body of thought has developed, some of whose concerns my films don't address.
Feminist critic Pam Cook argued that one of the most progressive aspects of your films is the way you play with and encourage our awareness of the stereotypes which were the basic building blocks of the exploitation cinema. For example, the key characters in Terminal Island are introduced through a discussion of the casting of a documentary. How did you reconcile the exploitation genre's reliance on broad stereotypes with your apparent interest to provide a more complex understanding of women's experiences.
First, let me say that I wanted to provide a more complex understanding of the experiences of both women and men. Men are also stereotyped in some exploitation films. While there is a feminist viewpoint in my films, it was not intended to be the only one. I viewed this initial stereotyping of both sexes as an opportunity, a starting place, from which to surprise and intrigue the audience, as the characters behavior upended the audience's expectations.
The introduction of the characters in Terminal Island with their prisoner identification pictures, or mug shots, and a brief summary of their crimes, was deliberately done for another reason besides stereotyping: It was as an efficient narrative device for introducing a large number of characters, so that the audience would recognize them when the story switches to Terminal Island itself.
Perhaps the one stereotypical element in the film that I have never been comfortable with is some of the costuming and makeup of the women prisoners. One of the exploitation rules I had to follow strictly was that the women must always look very attractive and "sexy," which meant they couldn't look the way women really would as prisoners on an island with harsh living conditions. I have watched Terminal Island several times in recent years with audiences who have an interest in seeing revivals programs. When they first see the women prisoners on the island, there is sometimes laughter at their unrealistic appearance. I don't take any offense at this, because it just validates my own uneasiness with the message sent by the way the women look.
When you left Corman and started your own production company, Dimension Pictures, you continued to produce exploitation films, even though you had much greater creative control over your work. Can you share some of the economic, creative, perhaps even political factors that went into that choice?
I stopped working for Roger Corman because he did not pay me a living wage. In his opinion he didn't need to pay one to his directors, since he was giving them the chance to have their work seen widely, which might lead to more and better paid work, maybe even with a major studio. And for a very few, it did. For most, it did not. My work was seen, and I received a few offers, but only to make more exploitation films.
Dimension Pictures was a new company, partly financed by the same regional film distributors who distributed my earlier films. My husband and I were offered a minority share in the company and a living wage. In return, we were expected to make exploitation films that we co-wrote, he produced and I directed. But we did not have final approval over the subjects, advertising, or distribution plans for them. In no sense, did I have greater creative control over my own work while I was working there.
Exploitation cinema no longer exists today--except perhaps in terms of direct to video production. Yet many of the genres which dominated the exploitation cinema have become a part of the commercial mainstream. What do you see as the consequences of this loss of the b-film mode of production?
I say let the commercial mainstream have the exploitation genres. Today, I don't think filmmakers need to start the way I did, working within the restrictions of exploitation films, because the same financial and work place limitations no longer exist. I can't speak about other nations, but in America the following changes have occurred.
Due to new laws, motion picture and television unions have had to open up their apprenticeship programs; they can no longer discriminate by race, ethnicity, or sex. Today more attention is paid to the work of outstanding student filmmakers by artists' agents and film and television studios, and some of these students even find work as writers and directors soon after graduation.
Then there are the film festivals that have multiplied worldwide, and that are open to exhibiting unusual and adventurous independent films. Sources of financing and distribution can be found at these gatherings that were either nonexistent or difficult to find in my time.
Arguably the most revolutionary changes are the new advances in technology, which among other things have brought increasingly cheaper camera equipment and computer programs for editing and special effects. This benefits everyone, including filmmakers who work independently, by choice or necessity, outside the system.
Finally, there is also the future potential of the internet itself as a method of distribution, not just for major production and distribution companies, but for self distribution.
With all the options that exist today, if I were beginning my career as a filmmaker, I would not choose to make exploitation films.