Director Donna Deitch is an independent U.S. filmmaker who makes movies about women. Prior to becoming a feature-film director, Deitch had worked as a still photographer for feature films, a cinematographer, an editor, and a director of several documentaries. In 1985 she made her first feature film, Desert Hearts, a lesbian love story set in Reno, Nevada during the '50s. She later went on to...……..

Ten years gone
The director of the lesbian love story Desert Hearts sees that some things in Hollywood never change—even after a decade
By Barbara Pepe
From The Advocate, August 20, 1996

“Did Desert Hearts accomplish everything I wanted it to?” asks director Donna Deitch. “No. But then again, what ever does?”

One wonders what accomplishments she had in mind. As it is, Deitch’s landmark lesbian film—which is being honored August 3 with a gala tenth-anniversary celebration at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center—remains one of the defining events of gay cinema.

Determined to film a simple lesbian love story with a happy ending, Deitch went out and raised the money, check by check, from private investors. “I wanted to make the film I wanted to make, and financing it myself was the only way,” Deitch recalls. “I was obsessed.”

The movie she made has proved to be enduringly popular—it still does a thriving business in video rentals—and Deitch’s now-legendary struggle inspired a generation of lesbian filmmakers. “I was 21 years old, and Desert Hearts really moved me,” recalls Maria Maggenti, who went on to direct The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. “I volunteered to pass out programs so I could see the first screening.”

Nicole Conn, writer-director of Claire of the Moon and the upcoming Cynara, is quick to agree. “For me, Desert Hearts was the grandmother of all lesbo films,” she declares. “It was a great film experience and a great lesbian experience. It made a cathartic change in my life.”

But ironically, Desert Hearts didn’t lead Deitch to follow her inspirational debut with a gonzo career in independent film. To catch up with the successful director now, her fans have to dip into the very middle of the mainstream—network television.

“I really didn’t think I’d be working in TV,” says Deitch—surely an understatement. But after Desert Hearts, she says, the feature projects that came her way were less than attractive. “I received a lot of scripts and offers to do things that I just didn’t want to do, including a lot of very sexually explicit material,” she remembers. “Not that I have anything against that, but a lot of it was exploitative. It’s odd that I was pigeonholed that way after Desert Hearts, but that’s what happened.”

When Deitch did get a serious offer, it was to helm the 1989 ABC-TV miniseries The Women of Brewster Place for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. An Oprah guest had mentioned on the show that seeing Desert Hearts helped her come out as a lesbian. At the time, Winfrey was seeking a director to bring the lesbian-themed Gloria Naylor novel to TV. She chose Deitch, and the show received an Emmy nomination.

During the years that followed, Deitch remembers, “I continued to get feature scripts that I didn’t want to do, so I began to migrate toward television. Besides, with TV there’s that networking thing. Somebody sees something they like, then you’re in on a meeting, and then you’re doing NYPD Blue.”

She’s speaking literally. Since 1994 Deitch has regularly directed not just NYPD Blue but also Murder One and ER. In these sophisticated dramas she seems to have found a world where she can exercise her skills within the realm of the possible. “I love NYPD Blue,” she says. “I love the style of it, and I love the actors. I like the people who work over there.”

They also like her. “NYPD Blue is a tough show for anyone, especially a woman,” states its cocreator, TV megaproducer Steven Bochco. “It’s a male environment, the cast and crew. They’ll test anyone. But Donna knows exactly what she wants and is a very talented professional.” Adds cocreator and executive producer David Milch: “I think it would be a disservice to Donna to categorize her talent in terms of her gender or sexual orientation. She’s just a great director. Maybe there’s a prior process she goes through where she doesn’t have the customary reticence that a woman director might have. But she’s just a great shooter and works well with the actors.”

In the process Deitch has learned to draw a sharp line between her personal vision and her work for hire. “When I’m executing someone else’s vision, it’s not my movie,” she says. “It’s my job. In this business that’s something you have to learn and remember.

“Some directors will do only their own stuff, and they just go to meeting after meeting trying to get something off the ground—they don’t work for months at a time,” Deitch observes. “I did that for a while. But I don’t want to be just pushing my own projects and not working at all if they don’t get going. So now I try to find a happy medium.”

Although Bochco may acknowledge the testosterone level on the set, Deitch says she’s had no gender-based problems. “I’m sure that before any of these jobs are decided on, somebody behind the scenes is saying, ‘We don’t want a woman, we want a man.’ But once I get there, it seems to work out fine.”

Neither, she insists, has her sexual orientation been a cause for conflict. “Heterosexual males love dykes: They all wanna fuck ’em, right?” she says. “As I see it, it’s sort of an asset. If you’re out and you’re honest about it, you don’t have to be part of that segment of the female population that could fuck this person—or might want to or might be coerced into it—or any of those stories that actresses often tell.

“It doesn’t happen to me,” Deitch continues. “I’m not out in the sense that I have my lover over to the set to hang out. I don’t even like to have my agents over; it’s too distracting. But I’m out. Everybody knows. I’ve brought my lover to all the parties.”

Writer Terri Jentz, Deitch’s partner of four years, says she’s always felt welcome in those social situations. “There might be a millisecond of a pause, but that’s all. So far, we’ve been accepted just like any heterosexual couple.”

The two first met at a dinner party. For Deitch, it was love at first sight. “It was the look in her eyes—such a perfect blend of brilliance and heat,” Deitch recalls. They live separately—mostly because, Deitch explains, “we’re space queens.” How ever, Jentz does reside a stone’s throw away from the 1909 craftsman-style home Deitch shares in Los Angeles with two cats and a chocolate-color Labrador retriever.

The couple spends time powerboating near Deitch’s vacation home off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, and indulging their other love: travel. In fact, Deitch directed a 1994 project filmed in Hungary partly so they could visit the village where her mother, Eleanor Green, was born.

Although she never came out to her parents before they died some 20 years ago, Deitch says she’s been open about her sexual identity ever since. Being visible as a lesbian when she made Desert Hearts didn’t concern her. “Maybe I was just too naive,” she reflects. “I wasn’t thinking, If I make this as my first movie, I’ll never get another job.”

Actually, Deitch’s problem has turned out to be just the reverse. She wishes her industry jobs allowed her more time to pursue her personal movie projects. “It’s very difficult to get a movie made,” Deitch declares. “But between jobs I’m constantly going to meetings and trying to get my stuff off the ground.”

One such project, of course, is a sequel to Desert Hearts. “It’s been in the back of my mind ever since I made the first movie, but I’ve never been able to face doing it in the same way,” Deitch admits. “I just couldn’t stand to get out there and raise that money again. I had some interest at one point from a studio, and I went to a horrible meeting where they sat there talking about what they wanted to do, how they saw it. At a certain point I thought, I don’t want to do this. Why do I want to make your vision of the sequel?”

Still, Deitch isn’t saying never. A trace of the old salesman surfaces as she adds, “I’d do it if I were approached by people with money. I see the story continuing in New York in the ’60s, with a triangle shaping, a third party being brought in. It could all come to fruition very quickly if there was some energy and interest.”

In the meantime, Deitch insists she doesn’t want to direct any of the gay-themed studio projects now in development. “I don’t want to regress,” she insists. “I don’t want to make a film that’s retro or repressed or inauthentic because it’s looked at from the outside. I don’t want to deal with any subject matter—whether it’s NYPD Blue or gay subject matter—in a way that’s not real.”

As for her reputation as the pioneer of the lesbian film movement, that’s a label Deitch is reluctant to accept. Asked how Desert Hearts stacks up against the lesbian films of the ’90s, she declines to comment. “I always feel uncomfortable discussing other people’s movies, because I’m not a critic,” she says thoughtfully. “But I think that since Desert Hearts came out, times have changed to some degree, and that happened with or without the film. Desert Hearts perhaps opened the door a little bit, but those movies would have been made with or without it. They were coming anyway.”