It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of scrutiny to see that the technical jobs in entertainment are a male-dominated domain. Look around at concerts and theatrical productions or on the credits after a television program or a feature film—the LDs, the mixers, the gaffers and the techs are overwhelmingly male. (They don’t call them best “boys” for nothing.)
There are women in the ranks, however, more and more of them every year. On top music tours, on Broadway and in the media arts, the number of women working as lighting designers, lighting programmers and lighting directors is mushrooming. The trend comes from a confluence of factors: digital technology has removed some of the physical barriers to lighting with lighter consoles and less bulky lighting elements (though digital will never eliminate the need to crawl along a truss 50 feet in the air), changes in local and federal laws that have significantly banished genderism from the workplace and changes in social attitudes that make at least the perception of equality the baseline in most situations.
It wasn’t always that way. Anne Militello, owner of Vortex Lighting, was a pioneer woman in the lighting business, working first as a roadie for mid-sized companies in the Bay Area in the late 1970s while also running lights at punk clubs in San Francisco. Her résumé has many instantly recognizable names, including Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Pearl Jam, Josh Groban, Carlos Santana, The Dead Kennedys and The Band. Her memoirs of that era, though, will read with a bit more grit.
“During those ‘ancient’ times, which seemed like it was the Wild West, I slept with a crescent wrench in my hand,” Militello recalls. “I was once fired because the head electrician on tour told me he couldn’t get laid if I was the one controlling the lighting console during the show! In the ‘70s, Bill Graham’s production company, FM productions, told me flatly they wouldn’t hire me because I was female. I tried to get some kind of legal action going but at that time it was still difficult. Finally, after encountering a pretty serious violent physical attack on the road that left me on tranquilizers for a year, I re-evaluated life and moved over to theatre, where I flourished for many years.”
It’s ironic that the entertainment industry, which tends to wear its putatively enlightened social and political views on its sleeve—the Dixie Chicks weren’t breaking any new ground in London three years ago—has been one of the worst offender when it came to letting women rise through the ranks.
“It’s endemic to the music industry,” Militello asserts. “After working in architecture and on construction sites in the last few years where there are not gender issues anymore, I now see that the music industry is the one of the last holdouts of sexism in the United States. However, artists and managers are responsible for the overall atmosphere of their tours, and I’ve seen both extremes, good and bad. But look at commercial music these days and the message to men how to treat their ‘bitches’ and you see why there is a problem.”
Susan Rose got into lighting in 1994. At the time she was an aspiring singer in Nashville and working at the now-defunct Opryland theme park. There she encountered one of the first Flying Pig Systems Wholehog consoles and her enthusiastic curiosity convinced the park’s LD to teach her to run it. It didn’t take long for her to end up in the driver’s seat on that thennew technology platform, and she never lost sight of the fact that knowing just a little bit more than the next guy—literally—would be the key to success.
“I didn’t encounter really blatant sexism as I was coming up, but a lot of things had changed by then,” she says, speaking on a day off from her role of lighting director on Ringo Starr’s “All-Star” tour. “What I’ve learned is that I could create a niche for myself by becoming proficient at lighting design and programming. There are shows that I’ll do the programming for another designer. It ensures that I’m always busy.”
Rose agrees that this is one way in which technology has propelled greater equality between men and women in entertainment lighting. She says her pay has consistently been on a par with that of men for nearly a decade. “Once in blue moon I’ll get a guy who says girls shouldn’t be doing this kind of work,” she says. “But by the end of the day they’ll have a new respect for what I can do. I know my limits—if I need help lifting something, I ask for it, and I get it. But anyone can climb a truss if they’re careful.”
When Anne Militello was coming up, the idea of learning lighting technology in an academic environment was still a dream. She’s impressed with how that’s changed. “There are now excellent theatrical and architectural lighting programs that offer Masters Degrees,” she says. “Unfortunately, there are no extensive programs in concert lighting, though I recently taught a semester of this at California Institute of Arts.”
Susan Rose also teaches Hog operation and programming classes. She also authored a short book—the Whole Hog Reference Guide—that has traveled the world over the Internet and been translated into a dozen languages. Rose never tried to protect her intellectual property; instead, though she barely made a dime from the sales of the book, she says, “The PR was great for my career,” an attitude that suggests she will never suffer from heart disease or grinding of the teeth.
Both women see the road for women in lighting as being far more open and without obstacles, except perhaps for the ones that they put there themselves. Rose, who lectures on lighting at Full Sail, says the question the female students never fail to ask is, “What’s it like to be on the bus with all guys?” “I laugh but tell them to take themselves and their craft seriously, and so will everyone else,” she says.
Anne Militello is a bit more forceful. She reminds us that the leading pioneers in the field of theatrical lighting designers were women—Jean Rosenthal, Tharon Musser and others, and that Jennifer Tipton, a renowned contemporary theatre designer and head of the Yale University lighting program, was the first to receive MacArthur Genius Grant for work as a lighting designer. “This is considered the Nobel prize for artists and one of the highest honors for American artists, never before given to a lighting designer and may never again,” she says. She’s also wary of what she suspects is a trend towards shutting women out of more lighting roles on Broadway and theatre, the one area she feels has been where women have been able to gain consistent career traction.
Susanne Sasic, who since 1986 has toured with artists like Sonic Youth, David Byrne and REM and has lit AOL’s music webcasts (an area worth a future column itself ), agrees that music touring is the least-evolved area of entertainment, to put it bluntly. “TV and film seem more responsive than touring,” she says. “In 20 years of touring I still haven’t seen the number of female personnel on tours increase very much, whereas film and TV sets seem to at least have a much better gender balance, even if women are still underrepresented in key positions.”
Gender issues are never completely avoidable because, simply put, men and women are different. But I’ve never met anyone of any gender who finds that problematic. The problems arise when the differences are perceived and used as barriers instead of complementary forces. That will also change as time goes by, to everyone’s benefit.
Dan Daley can be reached at ddaley@plsn.com
