Donna Deitch

I’m fully aware not all indie directors want to do anything big budget. On the other hand, it’s also an indictment of the system that there isn’t room for more lower-budget movies. Not everything needs to have an MCU budget, and smaller movies require smaller success. It would also allow the studios to do more than has niche appeal. I’m fully aware I’m preaching to the choir about this here on Media Magpies, but it’s still worth noting and directly relevant to the person we’ll be covering today.

If you know Donna Deitch, it’s almost certainly from directing Desert Hearts. It was her first feature and her first narrative film, at least according to IMDb—she went to UCLA for film, if I’m reading this correctly. There’s no detail I can find about what student films she may or may not have been involved in. In fact, she’s another one of those people about whom details are incredibly sparse. Her Wikipedia and her personal page have basically the same biography. IMDb is different but not much more detailed.

And I mean, Desert Hearts by itself is worth discussing here. It was a movie deliberately made to have two women in love who neither end up with men nor kill themselves, and in 1985, that movie didn’t exist. What’s more, Deitch wanted it to have crossover appeal. The women in the movie are drawn as people, not just as Generic Lesbian Type One and Generic Lesbian Type Two—and there are more than just lesbians in the movie, come to that. It shows the women as capable of having friendships with straight women and even with men.

So okay, even before I’d finally gotten around to Desert Hearts almost exactly a year ago, I had already seen directorial work from Deitch, mostly because she has done a lot of television. She did nine episodes of Crossing Jordan and one of Judging Amy, my two favourite “pun on a main female character’s name” TV shows. She directed The Devil’s Arithmetic with Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy. Oprah apparently hand-selected her for The Women of Brewster Place. It’s only a bad resume if you want more Desert Hearts.

She said at one point she was writing a sequel, actually, but that was several years ago and she doesn’t have any credits at all more recent than a 2016 episode of Greenleaf, a show I’ve never seen because it’s on OWN. It’s possible that, at the age of 79, she just doesn’t want to work anymore. But since it’s one of two projects I see a reference to her trying to find the funding for, I think it’s at least as likely that there isn’t the budget for movies like hers. And that’s a shame—from what I’ve seen, she’s really good at what she does and there needs to be more room for it beyond just Law & Order: SVU.