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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Rediscovering neglected female Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
In this article, women directors who made films in the 1970s talk about the huge challenges they faced.
(Vanity Fair, approx 15 mins reading time)
In 1971 documentarian Chopra recruited Weill to handle the camerawork on Joyce at 34, a groundbreaking short about the birth of Chopra’s first child. Chopra had started out in 1960s Manhattan hoping to make dramatic movies, but after months of knocking on producers’ doors and being told she should be a secretary, she finally got a job working for documentarians Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. “There were three or four of us young pretty girls,” Chopra recalls. The young women all worked as assistants. “They never pinched us, but the joke was always they hired us to see our ‘cute little asses’ hanging over the print barrel.”
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