Daradata Yaakizaki

Welcome to You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten

histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm your host, Karina Longworth, and this is another

installment of our ongoing series, Polly Platte, The Invisible Woman.

One of my main questions heading into this season was, if Polly Platte was the secret weapon

behind so many male filmmakers career defining films, why didn't she direct a film herself?

When Polly had been the production designer on Astara's born in the mid-70s, she hadn't been

able to fathom co-directing that movie. This was due in large part to the climate of gender

imbalance in Hollywood at that time. The only woman who had directed more than one studio movie

that decade was Elaine May. And though her second feature, The Heartbreak Kid, had been a hit,

the fact that her movies had a tendency to go over-schedule and over-budget gave credence to a false

stereotype that women were too emotional to handle the nitty gritty realities of directing.

Though much would change over the next couple of decades, as directors like Penny Marshall and

Catherine Bigelow efficiently helmed hits, female directors still had to work harder for a modicum

of respect. This idea and that women couldn't handle it, that was something that came up a lot.

Allison Anders, who made her directorial debut in 1987, and became one of the most prolific female

independent filmmakers of the 1990s, says this stereotype persists to this day.

And I'll tell you that still, if you're not kind of holding authority in the same kind of way

that men hold authority, you're still running into just a constant like questioning.

Do you really know what you're doing? Hmm, let's second guessers.

Certainly, the misogyny of Hollywood had impacted Polyplats career and had limited her opportunities,

because women weren't taken seriously, because she had internalized the sexism of the world she

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