WITASWAN News from Quincy, Illinois
Speaker will focus on issues
faced by women filmmakers
By Deborah Gertz Husar
Herald-Whig Staff Writer
Jan Huttner wants women and men to remember the Golden Rule of American Business: The customer is always right.
When the customer wants more films made by women and focused on issues important to women, that will happen. Until then, though, women face a so-called “celluloid ceiling” in the film industry.
“It’s very, very hard for women to get their movies made. The perception of the major players in Hollywood, studios and distributors is that people don’t want to see films by women,” Huttner said.
Huttner is managing editor of Films For Two: The Online Guide for Busy Couples, a Web site devoted to promoting films of interest to male and female audience members, and director of college/university relations for American Association of University Women-Illinois.
She speaks at 11 a.m. Saturday at a public event sponsored by the Quincy branch of AAUW and featuring a showing of
A JURY OF HER PEERS, a 30-minute film by Sally Heckel based on a 1917 novella by Susan Glaspell. Heckel struggled to find funding for her 1980 Oscar-nominated short film, which tells the story of two rural women who uncover clues to a murder, clues that were completely overlooked by the men responsible for investigating the case.
“When you see JURY, you see a story not just about women but told in the voice of women and the way in which women communicate with each other, solve problems, come to understanding,” Huttner said. “What I’m trying to do in all these presentations is to get people to understand when you have a world with no woman’s voice out there, you’re losing half the experience.”
The energy and discussions spurred by the film led to Women In The Audience Supporting Women Artists Now, an AAUW-Illinois project involving an informal alliance of women who have pledged themselves to helping women filmmakers break through the celluloid ceiling.
WITASWAN members make a commitment to see at least one film every month either directed by and/or written by a woman, either in a theater, on television or on DVD/VHS. They share the concept with male and female friends and encourage rental outlets to obtain copies of films on a WITASWAN recommended viewing list.
“The covert message here is take back the multiplex,” Huttner said. “If we don’t like the films that are there, if we think they’re all of interest to teenage boys, then the thing to do is say we want something else. It seems so simple. This is really consumer-driven. We have to get women to understand if they want to see a different kind of film, they need to go to that kind of film.”
Huttner recommends what she considers quality films for male and female audiences on the Web site done in cooperation with her husband Rich.
As a healthcare computer consultant for 20 years, Huttner became known as “the movie person” always ready to recommend a movie to colleagues.
The site “started as a joke, but the more we did it, the more people we talked to, the more people encouraged us. We had more than 5,000 unique visitors last week,” Huttner said. “Folks out there are reading this. I feel like I’m doing something that makes a little contribution.”
On the Net:
www.films42.com/witaswan.asp
www.aauwil.org/WITASWAN
To contact staff writer Deborah Gertz Husar:
dhusar@whig.com
(217) 221-3379
AAUW hosting presentation
The Quincy Branch of American Association of University Women presents
A JURY OF HER PEERS,” at 11 a.m. Saturday in the Quincy Museum.
The film by Sally Heckel is based on a story by Susan Glaspell and introduced by Jan Huttner.
Inspired by events covered during her years as a court reporter for the Des Moines Daily News, Glaspell crafted a story of two rural women uncovering clues to a murder, clues that were overlooked by the men responsible for investigating the case.
Louise Crede with the Quincy branch of AAUW hopes the program draws community residents and young people to take advantage of a showing of an “arty” film often not available in Quincy. People say they read about movies coming out that never come to Quincy, but Huttner “encourages us that if they don’t come to Quincy in the theaters, hit a video store. If they don’t have it, you can request it,” Crede said.
Glaspell wrote 13 plays, 14 novels and more than 50 essays, articles and short stories — and she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Heckel, a Manhattan-based independent filmmaker, is best known for JURY, the 1980 Oscar-nominated dramatic short film.
More information about the presentation is available by calling Crede.
