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“Joyce Chopra has written a devastatingly frank, candid, and unsparing memoir of her life as a film director—a ‘woman director’ in a field notoriously dominated by men. The reader is astonished on her behalf, at times infuriated, moved to laughter, and then to tears. Lady Director is one of its kind—highly recommended.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
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What People Are Saying
“Joyce Chopra, what a gift of an extraordinary filmmaker you are, and one of our great pioneers who forged a very difficult path. And for female filmmakers everywhere, we are so blessed to have you as a storyteller to forge the way to make it easier for others.”
— Laura Dern —
Actor
“Joyce Chopra’s memoir is like a mentor in my pocket. Her vibrant writing makes me feel like I'm right there next to her, and her stories resonate with me and inspire me as a filmmaker and artist working today.”
— Alexi Pappas —
Filmmaker and author of Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas
“Through the lens of an extraordinary, determined and adventurous career, Lady Director reminds us that present day female Oscar nominees for Best Director stand on the shoulders of women like Joyce Chopra. This surprising often shocking book is destined to become a classic.
— Honor Moore —
Author of Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury
from Lady Director
Excerpt
When I was about twenty-two or so, I purchased a Bolex film camera and never once dared to use it. It just sat on a tripod in the corner of my room, staring at me reproachfully. Becoming a movie director had taken a firm grip on my imagination, but I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how one managed to do that. There weren’t any film schools that I knew of, and, even more problematic, I couldn’t picture myself in the director’s role since I had never seen a movie directed by a woman. Even the film history books that I collected to educate myself never mentioned a single one. It didn’t strike me as odd; it was 1958, and that was the way the world was.
I would have been astonished if anyone had told me that a French woman exactly my age, Alice Guy, was the first person to direct a one-minute movie with actors in 1896 in Paris, or that twenty years later, an American woman, Lois Weber, would become the first person to direct a feature-length film, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, for the newly formed Universal Studios in Hollywood. I would have been equally amazed to be told that another woman I never heard of, Dorothy Arzner, directed major films all through the 1930s starring the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford, having begun her own transition into the new world of “talkies” along with the silent movie star Clara Bow. Miss Bow’s fear of microphones was so intense that it prompted Arzner to invent the boom mike by attaching a microphone to a fishing pole that followed the actress around the set where she couldn’t see it.
But none of these accomplishments would be recognized until many years later when scholars began to uncover women’s roles in the early days of moviemaking. It’s frustrating to think that I knew nothing of their work at a time when it would have helped me to feel less insane to think of such a career for myself.
