By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer/director Nancy Savoca, who helmed True Love, Dogfight, Union Square, Dirt and Household Saints.
There’s a hideous, insidious and near inexplicable thing that happens to female filmmakers, and ends up making just about all of them Unsung Auteurs. On their first film, or first significant hit, a female director will often be feted, showered with praise, and hailed as the next big thing. But then, if they fail to follow up immediately with another obvious hit, their cache is instantly reduced, and the gloss is off them almost immediately. While most male directors get another shot (often several of them), female directors are seemingly allowed zero career missteps.
There are many unfortunate – and horribly unfair – examples of this, with the likes of Rose Troche, Allison Anders, Fran Rubel Kuzui, and Donna Deitch just a small selection of names on this cruel list. Sometimes, even having a huge blockbuster on their resume isn’t enough for a female filmmaker to be guaranteed a strong career. “I wanted to do other cool stuff, but I didn’t get the calls that you would expect after having made a $400 million success and launching a billion-dollar franchise,” Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke told FilmInk.
Another fine filmmaker on this list is Nancy Savoca, who was once a festival darling and media favourite, but now has a disappointingly threadbare resume – likely through no fault of her own – with her last feature film credit way back in 2011. Nancy Laura Savoca was born in 1959 in The Bronx, New York, to Sicilian immigrants with no connection to the film industry. Savoca, however, had a natural affinity for the medium, and went on to graduate in 1982 from New York University’s prestigious film school, The Tisch School Of The Arts. She started off big, taking out the coveted Haig P. Manoogian Award for overall excellence for her short student films Renata and Bad Timing. This put Savoca in good stead, and straight out of college, she worked on music videos and shorts, and eventually on the production crew of films by indie figureheads John Sayles and Jonathan Demme.
With solid mentors in her corner, and her solid base in student short filmmaking, Savoca debuted in 1989 with the low budget indie True Love, a wonder of gritty naturalism and the singular rhythms of the Italian-American experience. Starring Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard – both absolutely brilliant in their debut performances – as a young couple about to tie the knot but riddled with uncertainty and doubt, True Love (which Savoca wrote with her husband, Richard Guay) is somehow warm and surgically incisive at the same time, laying its deeply flawed characters bare with an honesty and authenticity rarely seen in cinema. True Love (which Sayles and Demme helped finance) was rightly feted at festivals, and Savoca found herself adjacent to other early-nineties indie wunderkinds like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.
For her follow-up, Savoca scored studio backing from major player Warner Bros. and worked beautifully with a bigger budget. Though the project didn’t originate with her, 1991’s Dogfight (which was scripted by TV regular Bob Comfort) felt deeply personal, and once again showcased Savoca’s gifts for working with actors. The late River Phoenix and Lili Taylor are talents like few others, and their work here – as a Vietnam-bound bruiser and the “ugly duckling” who wins his heart – is near transcendental. No traditional romance, Savoca is again unrelenting with her characters here, sugar-coating nothing and digging deep to get at the truth. There’s a burnished sadness at the centre of Bob Comfort’s superb script, and Savoca navigates it with aplomb. Though Dogfight certainly has its supporters (Criterion released it on DVD), this beautiful jewel of a film should really be hailed as a minor classic of the nineties.
Savoca sensibly stuck with the great Lili Taylor for her next film. Adapted by Savoca and Richard Guay from Francine Prose’s novel, 1993’s mini-epic Household Saints follows three generations of a New York Italian-American family, and features strong turns from Tracey Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio and a host of NYC characters actors including Michael Rispoli, Michael Imperioli, Victor Argo, Illeanna Douglas and Joe Grifasi. Like Savoca’s first two films, Household Saints resounds and reverberates with humour, warmth, idiosyncrasy, and utterly compelling characters that don’t subscribe to any of the standard Hollywood cliches. Despite positive reviews, the film pretty much vanished from view until it was restored and released in cinemas in 2024.
After Household Saints, Savoca moved into the world of television with episodes of Murder One and Dark Eyes, and two segments in the exemplary abortion-themed portmanteau 1996 telemovie If These Walls Could Talk. Savoca returned to features with the 1999 comedy The 24 Hour Woman (co-written again with Richard Guay, and starring Rosie Perez as a TV producer juggling work and motherhood), and then continued to move between the big and small screens, helming instalments of shows like Third Watch and The Mind Of The Married Man while crafting her own features.
Though she continued to deliver fascinating, against-the-grain films, Savoca’s work didn’t receive major attention despite its very obvious quality. She documented the stage act of the eponymous lesbian Latina comic in 2002’s Reno: Rebel Without A Pause, and crafted something truly special with 2003’s Dirt, a hyper-realistic drama about an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador working as a housemaid in New York City. A gritty, deeply humanist portrait of marginalised America, it showcased all of Savoca’s storytelling gifts, as well as her striking affinity for unusual characters not frequently seen on cinema screens. So did her 2011 comedy-drama Union Square – a comedy about two mismatched sisters played by Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard – which still stands as Savoca’s most recent feature.
Currently working on a documentary about Grammy winning tenor sax legend Gato Barbieri, Nancy Savoca is simply too talented and singular a director not to be working prolifically on feature films. It’s our loss as an audience that she’s not, but hopefully we’ll get to witness Nancy Savoca’s deeply humanist and deeply felt brand of cinema on the big screen again sometime soon…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
