Thursday Minute
No. 35 | February 18, 2010

Women Behind the Camera I

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron
Wednesday    —   Claire Denis

Anne Fletcher

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  The Proposal; nominated for 1 Golden Globe; worldwide box office, $314 million. 

Anne Fletcher grew up in Detroit.  A dancer trained in the Cecchetti method, she left for California after high school where she eventually found work dancing in films such as The Flintstones (1994) and The Mask (1994).  She was choreographer on Boogie Nights (1997), The Wedding Planner (2001), and dozens of film and television productions.  Her first directing job was Step Up (2006), a drama-romance about a street dancer from one side of the tracks and a dance student from the other.  Then came 27 Dresses (2008), starring Katherine Heigl, a romantic comedy about the perpetual bridesmaid (27 times!) who’s in love with the man her sister will marry.  The two films did poorly with critics but well at the box office, each crossing the $100 million mark worldwide.

Fletcher’s third directing effort, The Proposal, is another wedding-centered story.  The big event this time is a sham, arranged to avoid deportation to Canada for a book editor played by Sandra Bullock.  Hollywood has been turning out romantic comedies for years, and this one may not break new ground.  It has no ambitions beyond a few laughs for its audience.  Perhaps on that score, the film did well.  Critics, as with Fletcher’s other films, were still lukewarm.

For years men in the film biz have been making genre pics that reel in their target audience.  Fletcher has shown that women, when given the chance, can do the same.  Her movies so far haven’t generated a lot of award buzz, but with her three films all hits, she’s likely to be around for a while.  Stay tuned.

Beyond the final credits
Sandra Bullock had an unusually award-worthy year in 2009.  She starred in three films:  The Proposal (nominated for a Golden Globe), The Blind Side (won a Golden Globe, nominated for an Oscar), and All About Steve (nominated for a Razzie…oops).

---

The Proposal (2009)
Anne Fletcher, director
Trailer

---

Interview with Anne Fletcher

---

One of the Greats
Edith Head had a long and distinguished career as a costume designer for hundreds of Hollywood films.  She was active from the mid-1920s through the early-’80s.  For decades Head worked at Paramount, and later at Universal, while designing for top actresses such as Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Grace Kelly, and Audrey Hepburn.  She was a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock’s.  Head won a total of eight Academy Awards and was nominated 35 times (both are records for women, and no doubt she’d have had more if the Academy had presented awards for costume design before 1948).  Head was honored by the Postal Service with a commemorative stamp issued in 2003.  She was the inspiration for the character of the fashion maven Edith Mode in Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004).

…58…59…60.