Wellywood Woman

I've been writing an article about women New Zealand women who write and direct feature films (not docos). Lots of statistics. New Zealanders based in New Zealand produced at least 75 features during the six years ending December 2008, some not yet released.  Women wrote and directed seven of these films (about 9%): Perfect Strangers, The Strength of Water, Apron strings, Jinx Sister, Vintner's Luck, Piece of My Heart, Home by Christmas. Women   were directors or writers or co-writers or directors in nine more (12%) but I don't categorise these as 'women's' films because what men think and feel, including what they think and feel about women as an audience, will have been more influential than in features that women write and direct (though I don't like 'pink & blue' thinking about writing and like to write interesting male characters myself). There are 97 writer credits on the 75 films and 20 (21%) are women's. There are 82 director credits ...

Women script writers don't often write about their working lives for publication: one reason I went back to re-read Virginia Woolf about women writers.  But men do.  David Mamet's Bambi vs Godzilla   entertained me and gave me a title for my thesis: Living with deferred hope: Autoethnography and New Zealand women's participation in script writing for feature films . ("Dramatic structure consists of the creation and deferment of hope... The reversals, the surprises, and the ultimate conclusion of the hero's quest... in direct proportion to the plausibility of  the opponent forces.") And Joe Eszterhas' T he Devil's Guide to Hollywood; The Screenwriter as God! gave me a helpful slogan, among his advice about laptops, and masturbation, and writing six pages of script a day, in a chapter called "Slit a vein and drip it on the page!" (He seems to like exclamation marks, and ...  though one teacher told me that scriptwriters don't use them: Use ...

Galvan's on YouTube , almost five years after we finished making Sister Galvan, soon after he died.   Gary-the-editor did it. His email heading: late Xmas gift. Wonderful Gary. A clip of Galvan in his shower talking about his life as an ageing and castrated gay man. Another one where he talks about Holocaust gay artist Richard Grune. And one where he talks about New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. And the clip where he talks about what makes gays gay, what being gay means to him.  So now, just before he would have had his 68th birthday ("more than likely I'll live till I'm 86," he says in the film, how I miss him)  I'm asking friends to translate the tags into French and Spanish (there's a Spanish DVD) and monitoring viewer demographics on Insight. New Zealand viewers I can understand. And California. But why are most other viewers in North Carolina, Texas and Saudi Arabia? Korea, Ireland? And how can I get more viewers? 

I was excited: two films made by women and about motherhood, showing at the Embassy Theatre, just down the road. Apron Strings , a New Zealand film written by Shuchi Kothari and Dianne Taylor and directed by Sima Urale (with mothers who cook for a living) and M amma  M ia  (with a mother wearing a carpenter's apron). That was my second photograph. With a mother crossing the road and people sitting at the celebrated Deluxe cafe next door to the Embassy. And yes, it's the same Embassy Theatre where The Return of the King  had its premiere in the era when Wellington became known as Wellywood because Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh made the Lord of the Rings  trilogy here. I've been trying to find out why Apron Strings  is the first New Zealand film written and directed by women since Gaylene Preston's Perfect Strangers (2003). Does the New Zealand Film Commission, the state agency that develops and supports our film-makers and feature films prefer to su...

Movies didn't help. Though I experienced some wonderful moments among the afternoon audiences. (I arrived late for Nights in Rodanthe and thought the woman along the row and I were the only viewers-- until the credits rolled, and from out there in the darkness I heard sobs and many many sniffs; and noses being blown.)  Architecture books and atlases in bed at night didn't help. Even the quince and then the apple blossom-- Even finding tomato volunteers that had survived the winter tucked up against the compost heap-- Even the return of the bumblebees and each day a solitary honey bee among the blossom and flowering sage and borage and calendula-- Even sowing marbled round beans that someone's soldier uncle smuggled back to New Zealand in the toe of his sock at the end of the Second World War-- Nothing helped. After two years working on my PhD I was desperate.  Yes, I could have partied for a week or two. Got over it. But I wanted my daily life to be as Virginia Woolf descr...