Joyce Chopra, known for her documentary, television, and filmmaking career, recounts her experiences in a new no-holds-barred memoir,Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond. But it wasn’t until she read her book’s promo blurbs that Chopra says she understood she had completed “a history of how hard it was for women to ever get a chance to make fiction films.”
Lady Director makes it clear that Chopra, a Charlottesville resident, always had the people skills and the business sense needed for a successful artistic life. As a bored 21-year-old graduate of Brandeis University, she opened Club 47 in Boston for jazz aficionados, but soon an unknown Bob Dylan was playing there, and Joan Baez was singing on Wednesdays for $10 a ticket.
In her book, Chopra talks about casting her 1985 feature debut, Smooth Talk, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She cast Treat Williams as the malicious hunk Arnold Friend, but struggled to find someone to play the young female lead. A friend suggested a neighbor’s daughter, the gifted teen actor Laura Dern, resulting in a performance that propelled Dern’s career.
Chopra and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Tom Cole, asked a different neighbor, James Taylor, if he’d give them the rights to his song “Handyman” for two scenes in which Dern and screen mom Mary Kay Place dance. Taylor asked if he could write music for the film.
Other vivid anecdotes in Lady Director include being bullied in an editing room (but not assaulted) by lecherous producer Harvey Weinstein, as well as details of other toxic Hollywood behemoths’ behavior, including Oscar winners. When producers in Paris grabbed her up and down, “It was considered annoying but normal,” she says.
Hollywood’s aggressors do destroy people, such as Marilyn Monroe in Chopra’s TV miniseries “Blonde” (not the Blonde currently on Netflix), but the director was more interested in portraying the lives of typical young women, like in her short, bittersweet documentary Girls at 12.
Chopra’s own path was easier with Cole, who assisted greatly once their daughter was born. When it was suggested that Chopra make a documentary about her pregnancy and childbirth, her reaction was that it was “the most narcissistic thing imaginable.” But she did, and the film, Joyce at 34, captures tough decisions, exhaustion, and the beauty and bedevilment of another lifeform altering a body.
Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, when that adult daughter, a UVA dean, made a new creative suggestion: Write a book about your life. (Her daughter is the reason Chopra moved to Charlottesville, a few years after Cole died in 2009.) The director pulled out a familiar argument when she said, “Writing a memoir is narcissistic!” But restless without film work, she wrote one sentence, and finally some more. Memoirist Honor Moore showed the work to an agent who contacted San Francisco’s City Lights Books, a well-known publisher of the Beat writers.
Now that Chopra’s book is out, the accomplished yet modest director asks how she might get followers on Instagram. Make a note to follow her when her Insta and other feeds go live.