By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: American director Joan Freeman, who helmed Streetwalkin’ and Satisfaction.
Legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman is famed for giving major career leg-ups to filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola and many more, and though he doesn’t receive as much credit for it, he also gave many female filmmakers their first shot too. This obviously grinds considering Corman’s financial fondness for the audience-luring qualities of female nudity, but the likes of Unsung Auteurs Barbara Peeters, Stephanie Rothman, Katt Shea Rubin and more are all indebted in some part to the late, great Roger Corman.
Even more under-celebrated than the above-mentioned female filmmakers is Joan Freeman, one of many female directors who should have been given more of a shot than the two feature films that sit quietly on her resume.
Freeman was born and raised in Cleveland to an arts-inclined family: her mother was a sculptor and her sisters were classical musicians. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1976 and then made a number of thoughtful, refined documentaries for PBS’s Nova science series. Freeman’s entrée onto the film scene came a little later with the award-winning 1976 short Toilette, a claymation take on the subject of female identity.
An aspiring feature filmmaker, Freeman wanted to make a gritty, honest film about vice and street life. She took the project to Roger Corman, who had just started the production company Concorde Pictures after selling his famed exploitation house New World. “I love films that take you on a trip to another world – a new country that may be only a couple of blocks away,” Freeman told The Orlando Sentinel of her inspirations behind the film.
Intrigued by the pitch but unsure of Freeman’s bona fides, Corman was reluctant to back the project, so Freeman and her producer husband Robert Alden (a Harvard business grad) penned a short film for Freeman to direct called Brainwash, about a girl kidnapped by a cult. This was enough for Corman, and he agreed to fund what would become Freeman’s 1986 debut Streetwalkin’. Corman knew what sold, and it was a “hot” time for street-based flicks, with the likes of Vice Squad (1982), Angel (1983), Fear City (1984), Stripped To Kill (1987) and others digging successfully into the lurid world of prostitution, stripping and crime.
Though Freeman had to toe the Corman company line by including nudity and violence in Streetwalkin’, this is a considerably less exploitative affair than its tawdry but entertaining street brethren. First establishing her knack for casting major talent, Freeman chose as her lead the dynamic Melissa Leo, who would later find acclaim on TV’s Homicide and then an Oscar for her extraordinary work in 2010’s The Fighter. Leo is great in her major debut role here, grounding the often-lurid Streetwalkin’ with an authenticity and sensitivity nicely in tune with Freeman’s gritty approach.
The film follows Leo’s Cookie, a teen who flees her neglectful family and ends up on the streets of New York City, where she finds herself in the employ of Duke (a menacing Dale Midkiff), a violent and abusive pimp. Brutal and uncompromising, Streetwalkin’ resounds with grim detail and visual style. Freeman threw herself into the project wholesale. Police vice squads in New York and Boston helped with research, and Freeman even posed as “pimp bait” in a sleazy Boston bar. Though she chafed a little under Corman’s exploitative strictures, Freeman turned in an impressive low-budget debut with Streetwalkin’, which now has a small but appreciative cult.
Streetwalkin’ was successful enough that it saw Freeman tapped to direct 1988’s Satisfaction, a major big screen production from TV network NBC and uber-producer Aaron Spelling which was distributed by 20th Century Fox. A girl group comedy drama, the film was built around rising TV star Justine Bateman of the hit sitcom Family Ties, who plays the lead singer of femme-driven band The Mystery. “Luckily, we’re just supposed to be a garage band because my voice is very far from Sarah Vaughan’s,” Bateman said. “I wouldn’t call Satisfaction light comedy. Remember the Jodie Foster movie Foxes? It’s similar to that feeling.”
A sassy charmer with enough grit to mark it as a Joan Freeman film, Satisfaction marked the major debut of Julia Roberts as a member of a band, and also featured an early performance from Liam Neeson. Freeman obviously had an eye for talent, with impressive players Scott Coffey and Trini Alvarado also in the cast, along with music industry notables Debbie Harry and Steve Cropper. Despite its strong cast, Satisfaction was a major box office disappointment, and it failed to kick-start Justine Bateman’s big screen career.
Like many female directors, one financial failure (most men get at least five shots, often more) was all it took for Joan Freeman to fade from the film industry. With two rock-solid, likeable, grit-infused, female-fronted films on her resume, she should have been given the opportunity to make many more…
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