Screen Writer

Donald Clarkeon the female of the Hollywood species

As the old year drew to a close, Mamma Mia! notched up another remarkable record. Kicking dust in the face of Titanic, Phyllida Law's raucous musical emerged as the most financially lucrative film ever at the UK box-office.

Now, consider this. For years women have been under- represented behind the megaphone. Yet a director named Phyllida has managed to draw more British loot to the cinema than any number of Stevens, Christophers and Georges. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Catherine Hardwicke's Twilightbecame a smash and confirmed the director of Thirteenas a mainstream force.

Will the commercial success of female directors in 2008 finally shatter the most resistant glass ceiling in Hollywood? Well, we can dream.

The dearth of female directors remains a puzzling business.

"I never really thought about it," the bizarrely uncommunicative Sofia Coppola, director of Lost on Translation, told me a few years ago. "It is really not my place to discuss why there aren't more female directors."

Kirsten Sheridan, the successful Irish director, was a little more helpful: "Part of it might be to do with that thing where, when you tell producers you have children, they say they understand and so on. But they don't really."

There can be little doubt that barely concealed sexism has a great deal to do with the slow advance of female directors in Hollywood. There has been a disproportionate number of female editors in the business since the silent era. Female producers are common and, when Sherry Lansing became CEO of Paramount in 1992, she reminded the world that women - though still more rare than they should be - have a significant presence in the boardroom.

Yet women still face resistance when they seek to grab control at the coalface. Sofia Coppola is, would you believe, still the only female American director to be nominated for an Oscar.

Successes are often dismissed as exceptions to some rule the mandarins have just found scribbled (in their own handwriting) on an adjacent napkin. What's that you say? With Near Dark and Blue Steel, Kathryn Bigelow has proved that women can direct action pictures? She is clearly an aberration. What about Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman and Mira Nair? Ah well. They're mostly foreign, largely high-brow and, anyway, they all make "women's films".

This particular piece of defensive sophistry will, sadly, prove hard to overcome. The defiantly cheesy Mamma Mia! and the surprisingly bewitching Twilight have been written off as fodder for two distinct generations of female viewers. We may have to wait for a woman to direct a film in which aliens eat Cleveland before that ceiling is entirely annihilated.

Still, until then at least we can, look forward to another Twilightfilm from the gifted Hardwicke.

Hang on. Some news has just come in. It seems that, due to "scheduling conflicts", Chris Weitz has replaced Catherine for the next episode of the vampire series.

The new dawn is, yet again, postponed.

dclarke@irish-times.ie