ABSTRACT
The smart-chick film did not emerge in the twenty-first century without precedents in the twentieth century. The 1990s, with the success of Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), was marked by the girly film; however, the decade also includes a string of varied titles destined for a female audience, such as While You Were Sleeping (Jon Turteltaub, 1995), Marvin’s Room (Jerry Zaks, 1996), Selena (Gregory Nava, 1997), Random Hearts (Sydney Pollack, 1999) and Music of the Heart (Wes Craven, 1999), usually dependent upon an already established star, or some other form of pre-established awareness on the part of the public. In the case of Selena, the biopic of a successful Tejana singer who was tragically murdered by a fan, while the film proved to be a breakthrough role for Jennifer Lopez, its initial notoriety owed more to Selena Quintanilla-Perez (1971–1995) as a Latina music star than to Lopez. Sitting alongside these productions are genre films that feature female stars but fall largely outside the orbit of the woman’s film in terms of concerns, tone and audience, including franchises such as Alien (1979–1997), Terminator (1984–2015) and single-feature-length films such as Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996) and G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997), some of which have received considerable attention from feminist film scholars. 2 The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995) constitutes a notable example of how the woman’s film survived and even, at times, achieved a degree of success in an industrial context that did not favor its audience or the kinds of films that this audience preferred. Significantly, the mid-1990s also witnessed the first feature films directed by the women who would become the American female auteurs of the twenty-first 49century—noted for their “little movies”—such as Rebecca Miller with Angela (1995) and Nicole Holofcener with Walking and Talking (1995). 3
