Last week we started a brand new series looking into female filmmakers with a look at Susan Seidelman. Today's female director is a little less known, but her contributions to indie films (and movie nudity) have been critically praised. Let's talk about Claudia Weill and her film Girlfriends!
Claudia Weill was born in New York City and she graduated from Harvard in 1969, so she was no clueless dummy. Claudia was the creme-de-la-creme and she was armed with good education to take her into the world of filmmaking. She worked on Sesame Street and freelanced as a camerawoman for a bunch of documentaries before she decided to make her very first film Girlfriends in 1978. She directed the script written by her friend Vicki Polon. Two women working together to bring us an indie movie that is filled with nudity.
Girlfriends starred Melanie Mayron with co-starring roles given to young Christopher Guest and Bob Balaban. What a stunning cast, right? This film was independently made and shown at huge indie film festivals like Cannes and Sundance which is where it caught the attention of Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers then distributed it and the film has gone on to be a cult classic. The move took several years to make because it went over its initial $80,000 budget that was attained through a National Endowment for the Arts grant. They really could have saved on clothing by just having Melanie go nude more.
Melanie plays a young woman who is trying to make it in NYC as a photographer. She lives with her best friend and aspiring writer roommate Anne, played by Anita Skinner, who is going to move out to get married. Melanie's character does not like this unwelcome change in her life and everything spirals from there as she tries to figure out her career, household, and love life while her best friend moves on without her. She ends up doing okay - so much so that her bestie winds up getting jealous of her friend's newfound independence. The two are jealous and resentful of each other and they show that by...going nude in separate scenes. I'm kidding, of course, but Melanie does run around her apartment naked with Christopher Guest. Be our guest, Mel!
This is a lovely portrayal of female friendship - complete with realistic female nudity that makes it feel like we just so happened to be in the room when the stars take their clothes off - and the film feels like an obvious grandmother to Frances Ha which starred future filmmaker Greta Gerwig. Weill herself said she made this movie out of "a feeling like I didn't actually see myself in the movies" and because of that, we got to see Melanie nude. That's one reason why we do get so many unique films from female filmmakers. Many of them are making reflections of their own stories that they aren't seeing on film or television, so they decide to just go on out and make it themselves.
Weill's follow-up to Girlfriends was the 1980 film It's My Turn in which actress Jill Clayburgh let one of her breasts pop out from underneath the covers. This film had a bigger budget and a studio behind it, but Weill did not have the best experience playing by a big studio's rules. She said in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine that "I was ill-prepared for what you have to do in Hollywood, which is humor people, deal with them very tactically, kind of say you're going to do something their way but then not do it. I was just like, "You want me to do what? No, no way." I didn't have any political skills, so I had no idea how to deal with these studio types who were telling me what to do with the movie." That's a shame because the movie is not actually bad and I would have loved to see what else Claudia could make with real studio money. This is sort of a common refrain with outsiders into Hollywood - even those who had the kind of nice background and education that Claudia had. As a female filmmaker in 70s and 80s Hollywood, she was still considered something of an outsider so messing up or not understanding how to play the game correctly does not result in second chances.
She has found a lot of success as a theater director and she has spent the later years of her life as a mentor and teacher at colleges across the country. I'm happy that Claudia did not turn her back on her true calling entirely, but I would have sincerely loved for her to have made more big budget movies for us. Not only were her stories beautiful and unique, but it was really great to see this young female filmmaker not get shy about nudity! Watch one of those nude scenes for yourself to see how playful Weill was about filming nude scenes:
