From a NY Times article this week:

IF you are splashing around with a bunch of guys who are 93 percent white, an average of 45.62 years old and look as if they’ve done this before, you must be swimming in the studio directors’ pool.

Such is the profile of studio filmmakers, based on a survey of those who directed the 85 or so live action movies that have been released, or will be, in 2009 by the six biggest film companies — Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers.

Interesting so few female directors when the number of women studio execs has grown significantly over the last two decades.

Exactly how each of those lucky studio directors got into the club is anybody’s guess, though some patterns are clear. Perhaps a third, including Judd Apatow (“Funny People”) and Marc Lawrence (“Did You Hear About the Morgans?”), also write for a living. Many, like J. J. Abrams (“Star Trek”) and Betty Thomas (“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”) have deep roots in television.

But there are a lot of female writers as there are a lot of women with “deep roots in television.” What’s the hold-up? Digging a bit into the subject, I found this:

At a time when film schools are graduating almost equal numbers of men and women, why is the movie business still such a closed shop? Many women from every stratum of the directing world — established Hollywood types and shoestring independents, celebrated art-house stars and creators of light teen comedies, film school deans and movie historians — tell remarkably similar stories of deep-rooted prejudices, baseless myths and sexual power struggles that litter the path to the director’s chair with soul-wearing obstacles. “It is absolutely consistently more difficult for women from the beginning to the end,” says Debra Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit organization Women Make Movies.

And things might just be getting worse. According to a study by Martha M. Lauzen, a San Diego State professor who studies the role of women in film and TV, women directed 7 percent of the top-grossing 100 films released in 2000. (In a sample of the top 250 films, the percentage was a little higher, at 11 percent.) Last year, that already dismal number plummeted. “We’re just putting together preliminary figures for films released in 2001. The percentage [of the top 100 films] has gone way down. It looks like 4 percent, which means it’s below 1992 levels.”

Adds Martha Coolidge, president of the Directors Guild of America and director of such movies as “Rambling Rose” and “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” “I’m not seeing the hiring of women directors improving at all. It’s a terrible testament to where the industry is going.”

That’s from this Salon.com article dated August 27, 2002, almost precisely 7 years ago.

Then I found this blog post from the Film Experience.com:

runners up

15 $71 Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) Sharon Maguire
14 $74 Prince of Tides (1991) Barbra Streisand
13 $95 Michael (1996) Nora Ephron
12 $107 A League of Their Own (1992) Penny Marshall
11 $114 Big (1988) Penny Marshall
~~
10 $115 You’ve Got Mail (1998) Nora Ephron

02 $144 Doctor Dolittle (1998) Betty Thomas
01 $182 What Women Want (2000) Nancy Meyers

That’s a pretty impressive list. And good to see Catherine Hardwicke and Phyllida Lloyd hitting it big in 2008. But what caught my eye is all the screenwriter-directors: Meyers, Heckerling, Ephron, Hardwicke, Spheeris.

Which brings to mind The Fempire, screenwriters Dana Fox, Liz Meriwether, Lorene Scafaria, and Diablo Cody. How soon until they start directing movies?