Today's filmmaker for Female Filmmakers is the writer and director Lisa Gottlieb who is responsible for one of the hottest and most skintastic teen comedies of the 1980s. Let's take a look at her work!
She began her career in the early 1980s in the casting department of major films like The Blues Brothers. This gave her a hands-on education on how films are cast and developed which wound up being very important to Lisa as she moved on from casting to work on her own films.
In 1985, she wowed the world with her film Just One of the Guys. She directed the script written by Dennis Feldman and Jeff Franklin and she transformed this adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into an American classic.
In this film, Joyce Hyser plays a cute girl who aspires to be a writer. She feels a coveted writing internship was given to a man over her, so she goes undercover as a man to prove that men are treated better than women. Well, if she showed her chest as she does at the climax of this movie, then she would get treated great!
She winds up falling for a male friend of hers and she plays a man so well that he has no idea that she is a woman. When she opens her shirt to reveal to him that she is a he, he gets scared. He got scared, but we got horny. What a chest! And what a great use of nudity as a pivotal plot point.
In 1994, she made the classic indie dramedy Across the Moon. The film starred lovely actresses Elizabeth Peña and Christina Applegate as two women who live together in an old trailer near the state prison where their boyfriends are both serving time. They want to be close to their boyfriends for those conjugal visits and they support one another by doing sex work. Christina does not go nude, but Elizabeth lets her pair out when she strips nude to take a skinny dip in muddy water with her man.
She's worked on a series of television series as well like Boy Meets World where she directed several family-friendly episodes. She even directed episodes of the series Dream On which is widely regarded as one of the first sitcoms to dare to use skin in several episodes. That's how you make it in Hollywood and Lisa and the gang knew that back in the 90s!
Lisa took several decades off from writing and directing and decided instead to focus on teaching the next generation of filmmakers how to write and direct films. She has taught at USC, Miami University, Columbia College in Chicago, and most recently at Ringling College of Art and Design. Imagine having the director of Just One of the Guys as your professor! What an absolute treat!
She takes time between her projects, but her latest film Black Friday is currently in post-production, and Gottlieb wrote and directed it. We can't wait for it to be released someday because the black comedy sounds great.
