ABSTRACT
While female viewers were important to classical Hollywood in terms of determining the wider array of films that it would offer in any given year, it also made films for that particular audience that have been retrospectively described as “woman’s pictures” or the “woman’s film.” This cycle (defined by its intended audience and a loose set of attributes) dominated screen narratives for female audiences during the studio era, from about 1925 to 1950. It made way in the 1960s and 1970s for the new woman’s film, and a series of sub-genres: the independent woman’s film (associated with the 1970s), the female friendship film (emerging in the 1970s and fading from view in the late 1990s), and the chick flick or girly film (marked by the success of Pretty Woman in 1990 [Garry Marshall] and largely disappearing after 2010). While the chick flick in the form of the “girly film,” following upon the 2007–2011 global financial crisis, has literally disappeared from view, the new woman’s film has continued to develop in the independent sector, including re-workings of girly film formulas, producing what might be termed “smart-chick films,” which begin to appear in the late 1990s.
