‘Feud’ Brutally Explains How Early Hollywood Killed the Female Director

The silent film era was packed with women behind the camera — and then studios vanished them

Bette and Joan is a long meditation on misogyny, fame and the ways we hurt each other in show business — but Sunday’s episode, set in 1962, delivers a brutal hypothesis on how women got booted from the directors chair as the studios came to power.

In a scene between Jessica Lange’s Joan Crawford and an assistant to “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” director Robert Aldirch, Lange delivers a blistering and concise monologue on how the studio system turned women filmmakers into glorified homemakers.

Pauline reminds Joan there is precedent in the female directors of the Silent Film Era — a forgotten generation of badass women like Alice Guy-Blaché who made the first narrative film in 1896, and was the first director to ever shoot on location and deploy a close-up shot.

Crawford cruelly laughs off the idea, asking Pauline, “What do you guess prevented the next great wave of women directors?” She then answers her own question: “Money.”