Lizzy Harding at Bookforum:
ELAINE MAY DIDN’T SET OUT to become a director. What she really wanted to do was write. Her first film, A New Leaf, came about partly because it was 1968 and Paramount knew it would look good to hire a woman director. And partly because May wouldn’t sell her script without being guaranteed director approval—the only way to ensure her work didn’t get turned into something else entirely. The studio said no but told her she could direct the film herself; they also wouldn’t let her cast the female lead, but the part was hers if she wanted it. As May tells it, she had been offered $200,000 for the script alone, but as writer-director-star, she received just a quarter of the original fee. “You can’t expect to get that much the first time you direct,” her manager explained. Charles Bluhdorn, the industrialist who owned Paramount, told May that he was going to make her the next Ida Lupino. On the first day of shooting, when the crew asked May where she wanted the camera, she couldn’t find it. “I began sort of on one foot,” May remembered, “and just continued that way.” It was a fitting start for a woman who had become famous for improvising.
more here.
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