Liberating Hollywood

Maya Montañez Smukler’s Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema is an exciting and topical examination of a transformative group of female filmmakers whose stories and struggles have too often been forgotten. At once an eye-opening analysis and a significant contribution to feminist film scholarship, Liberating Hollywood persuasively challenges the received wisdom about a period of American cinema (the so-called time of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls) in which women are routinely banished to the margins. As Smukler demonstrates, women were always there – making movies, good trouble and American history. Manohla Dargis, film critic for The New York Times

A counterintuitive feminist history of the new Hollywood that convincingly challenges widely held assumptions about the boys’ club movie brat auteur renaissance. In Liberating Hollywood, Maya Montanez Smukler is remarkably attentive to the industrial as well as sociopolitical histories that made such a new women’s cinema and such a suddenly liberated Hollywood possible. Jon Lewis, author of Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Both long overdue and coming right on time, Liberating Hollywood richly expands our understanding of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1970s. Expertly researched with stories from those who were there, Maya Montañez Smukler’s book tells the stories of female directors working in Hollywood in the 1970s and fighting for their rights as mediamakers. Miranda Banks, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

100 Women, One Hotel, and the Weekend Retreat That Presaged Time’s Up By 18 Years' by Cari Beauchamp Vanity Fair

Smukler sees the increase of independently produced features in the ’80s as a turning point for women no longer at the mercy of a slow-moving studio system. She’s right, though working independently puts the onus of proving artistic and commercial viability directly on individual artists’ shoulders, dependent on a world of potentially prejudiced funders with no centralized power to reform, however incrementally. That said, it’s impossible to read Liberating Hollywood and not recognize the progress that has been made, even though too much remains sadly familiar. It’s still rough out there, but histories like these keep me moving forward. Film Comment

How the 1970s Marked a Turning Point for Women Directors in Hollywood' by Dan Schindel Hyperallergic

Highly recommended. Choice

 'A fascinating series of profiles of trailblazing filmmakers.' Sight and Sound

Liberating Hollywood is an invigorating, detailed account of the women who were denied seats at the directors’ roundtable and sat down anyway. Their bittersweet but valiant efforts paved the way for feminist reform. Smukler’s book is valuable not just because it covers an important piece of Hollywood history, but because it’s a reminder that progress is not to be taken for granted. Movie Maker Magazine

[An] essential book. New Yorker

[An] excellent and deeply researched book. Variety

An ambitious [and] compelling book....Smukler has done an excellent job of researching and writing about the individual careers of her directors. The stories are both empowering and heartbreaking, and she has out the available oral histories to good use. Cineaste

This engaging and timely book is a long-overdue corrective to the histories of 1970s Hollywood that have celebrated the iconoclasm of 'new Hollywood' without also asking why that iconoclasm did not extend to changing Hollywood's production culture, and why, at the height of second-wave feminism, Hollywood continued to define media-making as men's work. Journal of American History

Book List: Celebrating Women in Film and TV History UCLA Library Film & Television Archive