DESERT HEARTS is a groundbreaking film by one of the greatest American women filmmakers. Director Donna Deitch spoke to Women and Hollywood and told the story of how feminist icon Gloria Steinem helped get her film in front of an audience, “Here’s what happened. This was in the early ’80s, maybe 1980 itself. I had bought the book [Jane Rule’s 1964 novel Desert of the Heart] and then I had written a script and I had it in my mind that if I could only meet Gloria Steinem, if I could only meet Gloria Steinem, she would really understand this movie, and maybe she would help me.
I don’t know where that idea came from, so I proceeded to go all around asking everybody I knew if they knew Gloria, and someone introduced us, and neither Gloria nor I can remember who in the world that person was. But I went over there to the Ms. [the magazine Steinem co-founded] office and we chatted and she’d read my script by this time and she said, ‘Have you ever made a film before?’
I said, ‘Well, I’m a documentary filmmaker, I’ve never made a narrative feature before.’ And she said, ‘Can you just show me something, can we look at something?’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll bring over my thesis from UCLA (where I was in graduate film school) and I’ll show you that.’
And the movie’s this 60-minute documentary and it’s called Woman to Woman: A Story of Hookers, Housewives, and Other Mothers, and I showed her that film.
And then she said those famous words, that if you’re ever lucky enough to have bestowed upon you: ‘How can I help?’ And that was the beginning because I had this idea to structure my investment approach, raising money on Broadway backer parties where you go and you hear and you hear about the project, you’re kind of selling your shares.
So Gloria agreed to let her name be on the invitation, along with a few others like Lily Tomlin and Stockard Channing. So I would go into a city, I started in New York, and I would just start asking everybody, “Who do you know who might be interested in investing?”
