Rambling Roses and Valley Girls:The First Two Decades of Martha Coolidge By Stephanie Monohan (Joy of Sex, 1984, Cinématographe)

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The 1980s saw a new wave of female filmmakers in Hollywood, women who directed mainstream hits that would come to be known as some of the defining films of the decade. Directors like Amy Heckerling, Penny Marshall, and Susan Seidelman (to name a few) managed to square a seemingly tricky circle, making films that told stories from women's perspectives while also finding success at the box office. Another of these key figures is Martha Coolidge, who remains best known for the surprise teen rom-com hit Valley Girl, but whose prolific, diverse body of work crosses genres and forms from documentary nonfiction to crime/mystery. Her impact on women's place in filmmaking extends beyond her own career as well, having served as the first female president of the Directors Guild of America from 2002 to 2003, and remained the only female president up until 2021.

Coolidge has gone on to have a long career, working predominantly in television from 2000-onward, but it's her first two decades of feature film work that speak to her artistic focus on the struggles and desires of teenage girls, and the ways in which young women must navigate the sexual politics of their time. These themes are also represented in her own experiences in the film industry, and the obstacles she was forced to overcome—and sometimes simply could not overcome—in producing such work. Joy of Sex is the standout example of one such fraught production in Coolidge's filmography, an experience she has publicly stated she doesn't look back on fondly. However, viewed within the context of her body of work, and also within the wider landscape of teen sexploitation cinema of the 1980s, the evidence of Coolidge's attempts to subvert genre expectations remain onscreen.

Before embarking on a career in narrative film, Martha Coolidge's focus was on documentary. Her early features include More Than A School (1973), which followed the lives of several students in an experimental program at a Long Island high school, and Old-Fashioned Woman (1974), a loving portrait of Coolidge's grandmother. Her biggest achievement in this era, however, is Not A Pretty Picture (1976). In this meta docu-narrative hybrid, Coolidge restages with actors a sexual assault she experienced as a girl. She initially presents the story as a straightforward teen drama about a girl named Martha—played by Michelle Manenti, a fellow assault survivor—who leaves her prep school dorm one weekend to catch a ride with some older kids to a party in Manhattan. Instead, she finds herself stuck with them at an unoccupied run-down apartment, with one of the older boys aggressively propositioning her for sex while she's unable to leave. It is at this point that Coolidge shatters the fourth wall and appears onscreen and within the scene itself, rehearsing the attack with Manenti and Jim Carrington, who plays her rapist. Both director and lead actress are attempting to achieve something through the project—if not catharsis, then at least understanding: the former grasping at control over the traumatic event that she could not wield in the moment, and the latter trying to access repressed memories by re-inhabiting the same physical and mental space once more. It's a stunning centerpiece that exposes the violent struggle between the characters for the violation that it is, made during a time in which the concept of "date rape" had yet to enter national discourse. By the time that happened, Coolidge would be making teen movies in an era of raunchy sex comedies whose humor reflected normalized rape culture.

When the fictional Martha returns to school, she finds that her classmates seem to know what happened to her, but not her side of the story. They taunt her and call her a whore, both to her face and by spraying the word on her dorm room door. The treatment she receives, and her fear of pregnancy, seem almost worse than the assault itself; we learn from Coolidge that it took her years to view her experience as rape, and even longer for her to stop blaming herself for what happened. In other interview segments in the film, Coolidge speaks with cast and crew members about their relationships to the subject matter, and it's Carrington's admissions that are perhaps the most illuminating. In observing his own performance, he claims to be startled by how much he identified with his character once he was embodying the role of sexual aggressor in the pivotal assault sequence, and how easily he, too, felt frustrated by Martha's resistance. He reflects on his upbringing and how many of the young men he grew up with likely violated girls, without understanding their actions to be rape at all. Watching Coolidge's subsequent work, from teen comedies to serious dramas, Not A Pretty Picture feels like a skeleton key to understanding her cinematic perspective: one that treats women and girls' emotions and experiences with care and depth, whether or not they are the protagonists. Gender and sexual dynamics would continue to be important themes throughout her career, especially in the 1980s, when Coolidge was making Hollywood movies aimed at young audiences.

Martha Coolidge would break into Hollywood in 1983 with the teen cult classic Valley Girl, a charming Romeo and Juliet redux that was initially conceived as an exploitation film capitalizing on the "valley girl" trend. Instead, Coolidge—along with co-screenwriters Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane—created a sexy and sensitive romantic comedy that captured the electricity of falling in love and launched a new star in Nicolas Cage. A surprise hit for the independent production company Atlantic Entertainment Group, Valley Girl stood out among the plethora of forgettable bawdy teen movies; 1983 alone saw the release of Spring Break, Losin' It, Screwballs, Private School, Getting It On, and Porky's II: The Next Day. The teens in Valley Girl are undoubtedly horny and hormonal, but their emotional lives take center stage, especially that of the titular valley girl, Julie (played by Deborah Foreman), who wrestles with whether she should follow her heart and be with Randy (Cage), the cute punk from Hollywood, or cave to the peer pressure of her judgmental preppy friends.

In interviews about the making of the film, Coolidge has detailed the ways in which she asserted a female perspective during production, including advocating for the casting of Cage. After finding him among a stack of headshots, she claims the studio executives couldn't see how he could be their movie's leading hunk. But Coolidge assured them he had the offbeat kind of sex appeal that the role required, and that young women would recognize. Her deal with Atlantic also involved a handshake agreement that she would make an exploitation film aimed at guys and include at least four scenes with naked breasts in the final cut, with the context of their inclusion at her discretion. Coolidge fulfilled her end of the bargain—bare breasts and sex scenes are indeed present in the film—but they're incorporated in ways that feel far less gratuitous than in the other teen sex comedies of the era, and crucially, don't involve the violation of teen girls' bodies that many such movies played for laughs. Comb through the previously mentioned films and a common trope is sex crimes passed off as typical hijinks. The entire plot of Getting It On, for instance, revolves around teen boys secretly filming revenge porn of neighborhood girls.

With Joy of Sex, however, Coolidge had a much more difficult time securing creative control and keeping the film true to the perspective she wanted to present. The project came into being after Paramount Pictures purchased the rights to Alex Comfort's best-selling sex manual, solely due to the commercial potential presented by the title, and went through multiple, vastly different iterations of screenplays and creative teams before landing on hiring Coolidge to direct a script by Kathleen Rowell (The Outsiders) and J.J. Salter. The film follows Leslie (played by Michelle Meyrink, who Coolidge brought along from Valley Girl), a high school senior who has trouble dating the boys at her school because her dad is their Phys Ed teacher. After discovering a mole on her chest, a ridiculous misunderstanding at the doctor's office leads Leslie to believe she has mere weeks to live, so she is determined to lose her virginity in the time she has left. Her classmate Alan (Cameron Dye, also of Valley Girl) is also on a quest to achieve this sexual milestone, but his attempts are thwarted each time in absurd ways. By the film's end, after various sexual hijinks in which the characters find themselves in compromising situations, Leslie and Alan form a sincere connection at a school dance and experience their first time together, in a sentimental ending that feels counter to the rest of the movie's raunchiness.

After failing to include the amount of gratuitous nudity that the studio required, Coolidge was fired from the film. The resulting Joy of Sex feels like a mess at times, and Coolidge would agree with that assessment, having nearly removed her name from the project, but instead choosing to maintain it in order to retain the right to talk about her experience publicly. Coolidge details the issues in a 2019 interview with "Rediscover the '80s": "They had thought they were going to get a Porky's but the script was more from a girl's point of view (as was Valley Girl). It was actually a romance and certainly the women writers and I weren't the people to get a Porky's from. The movie wasn't what the execs thought it would be, they freaked, took me off the movie, cut it down, and tried to make the humor broader, which made it more disjointed." Her attempt at repeating the Valley Girl formula was sabotaged. Perhaps that lightning-in-a-bottle quality couldn't have been captured twice, but the film's humor and the performers' charisma that remain intact gesture at a version of Joy of Sex that could have "worked" better than the one that so much creative interference led to.

However, with this knowledge of the film's troubled production, Joy of Sex is a fascinating watch, since Coolidge's sensibilities and social critiques do manage to peek through at times. Even in the theatrical cut, which was significantly shorter than what Coolidge initially turned in, one can see her attempts at making a movie with bigger feelings and bigger issues, like Leslie's campaign to help get her pregnant classmate un-expelled from school. While the movie is full of sexually charged humor, it rarely feels as acidic as the gags in many other movies of the time, and doesn't make the girls and their bodies and sexuality the butt of the jokes. Rather, it mostly skewers adults, who do the vast majority of teenage sexualization, from the undercover female narc who uses her final night in deep cover to pounce on Alan at a drive-in theater, to Leslie's doctor who (barely) investigates the mole on her chest by fondling her breasts. The main characters are trying to enter an adult world of sexuality, and what they find are practically ravenous grown-ups around every corner. It's an interesting running theme within a genre created by adults producing sexploitation movies about teenagers.

Martha Coolidge continued directing comedies through the rest of the 1980s, with Real Genius (1985) and Plain Clothes (1988), before pursuing the dramatic period piece Rambling Rose (1991), written by Calder Willingham (The Graduate, Paths of Glory), who adapted the screenplay from his own 1972 novel. Rambling Rose is structured around an adult man named Buddy (played by John Heard) reflecting on his youth during The Great Depression and the sweet but troubled young woman who left her mark on him and his family. Laura Dern plays the 19-year-old Rose, who is accepted into the stately home of the Hillyers (Robert Duvall and Dern's real-life mother Diane Ladd) after a traumatic youth: She was orphaned and forced into sex work in Birmingham, Alabama, leaving her yearning for real love and care, but with a skewed sense of boundaries. She develops a crush on the upstanding patriarch Mr. Hillyer, who rejects her advances, before she seeks inappropriate comfort from 13-year-old Buddy (Lukas Haas). She causes a stir in town as she flirts with men who end up fighting over her and it's implied by everyone around her that she's promiscuous. When she develops an ovarian cyst that requires surgery and the doctor recommends a full hysterectomy which will cure her of her "nymphomania," it's the outspoken and proto-feminist Mrs. Hillyer who intervenes, having never judged Rose throughout the film.

Rambling Rose went on to win that year's Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature, with Coolidge winning Best Director, and both Dern and Ladd receiving Academy Award nominations for their performances, making Rambling Rose the peak of Coolidge's career in terms of critical recognition. It also feels like a capstone on covering Coolidge's work, at least in the period for which she is most well-known. Coolidge has stated how personally passionate she was about making the film, and it's evident in the tenderness with which she treats its main character. As Coolidge mentions in an interview about the film, connecting it to Not A Pretty Picture, "I was raped, but in those days we didn't call it rape. People thought I was promiscuous. I got a little reputation after that. So I know what it's like to be judged sexually." If transposed onto the 1980s, it's easy to envision Rose among the friends in Valley Girl, looking for love and gossiping about which boys at school are attractive. It's also easy to envision her in Not A Pretty Picture, judged by her classmates for events out of her control, the narrative shaped by the boy who attacked her. Put in such direct conversation with one another, Coolidge's earlier body of work reads like a larger statement on the perception of young women, both on film and in the wider culture, calling into question how and why we view girls and their desires the way we do.

Stephanie Monohan is a writer and illustrator from New York City. She is a regular contributor to Screen Slate, covering repertory film screenings in NYC, and is also a member of the collective behind Spectacle Theater, a microcinema that specializes in showcasing rare and under-seen cinema gems.