First Boss! (or, what playground politics did and did not teach me about being a female director)
When I was in kindergarten, I made up a game. It was called “First Boss.” The rules were simple.
- Be somewhere with your friends.
- Yell at the top of your lungs “Let’s Play First Boss!”
- Then, really at the top of your lungs, yell “FIRST BOSS!!!” before anyone else has a chance to do so.
- You win. You get to be the first boss!
Needless to say, the game was very popular amongst a very, very select few children. The privileges afforded the winning first boss were unclear, but the confidence and the thrill of winning definitely put a spring in your step. I’ve also found it’s not a bad way to prepare to be a film director in a world where too few of us are women.
When you grow up, it can feel harder to just declare it. If you want to be treated like the boss, you need to act like one. But sometimes you question yourself, sometimes society questions you. As a woman, you are never made to feel by others that you are entitled to be First Boss. You have to fight for it. You have to fight for things that need fighting for, and fight for things that shouldn’t have to be fought for. And it can be exhausting, and draining, and daunting, and no doubt we lose a lot of talent because of this fight. And certainly this applies not just to women but also — and even more so — to people of color in our industry.
On one of my earliest projects, on which I worked many, many years, for next to no money (the usual), my deal with my male filmmaking partner was that we would share producer and director credit. Three years later, after I had brought in one of the two financing deals, spent nearly two years in the field and a year in the edit room, and maxed out a personal credit card in order to get the film finished, as we were doing the credits in post this fellow suggested that we share just the directing credit but the producing credit rest solely with him. Huh?
In the moment, I thought — “Over my dead body.” But I found myself unable to assert myself the way I had in my schoolyard game. It was a Friday, and I spent the weekend nauseous, processing, overprocessing, thinking, overthinking. Was I entitled to that credit? What did a producer really do? Maybe I didn’t understand enough about the business, I was a newbie, maybe I was undeserving? I was sick and anxious and second guessing every impulse.
And then, I thought of Barbara Kopple and the strikers. And her example returned me to the clarity of my childhood roots.
Let me back up a bit here. When I was in my senior year of high school, video cameras first became widely available to consumers, and I made a film shot over my last month of school. After a rudimentary, linear in-camera edit, I showed it to a group of friends and their parents. One parent, who was a documentary filmmaker himself, said, “Lizzy, you’ve made a documentary!” I didn’t really know that was what I was doing, but I liked the sound of it. Later, in college, I began dabbling further, and consuming the films of Chris Marker, Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, DA Pennebaker, and Ross McAlwee. Then, I came across Barbara Kopple’s HARLAN COUNTY, and in 1990, my Sophomore year of college — I watched her on TV winning the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for her stunning film AMERICAN DREAM. SHE was very clearly the first boss. Why couldn’t I be that too?
So I thought about Barbara, of my credit card debt and my sweat equity, and I returned to my first impulse — “Over. My. Dead. Body.” And I said it out loud. To him. Inside I was trembling, but I demanded our deal be honored. And, ultimately, it was.
Atallah Shabazz said of Nina Simone, “She was not at odds with the times, the times were at odds with her.” There’s truth to that for so many of us. We have dreams, big and small, public and private, lofty and petty, and the “times” will get in our way. Each one of us, as we yell First Boss softly or loudly, has to push when our heads bump hard on that ceiling. But we also need community — a society around us to validate that push, to come together behind us, and tell us YES we should yell, yes we are right, yes we belong. And maybe there will be a time, soon, maybe for my daughter, when there can be less yelling.
