Warren Beatty looked bemused. This should have been so easy for him. He was the hottest film star in the world, the cameras were rolling and he was being interviewed by a gorgeous blonde who had the sexpot body of a 60s Brigitte Bardot. What's more, the subject was women. Or, more to the point, the women's movement. Perhaps he just wasn't prepared for the provocative questioning. When the blonde suggested to him that men might go to rehabilitation centres to be reoriented in society, his reply was rambling. She egged him on and he called her a female chauvinist. She calmly said she wasn't and he tried to sound smooth: "You think you've really licked it, don't you?" Then, his legendary charm really evaporated. "You've changed," he spluttered, as the cameras closed in. "When you came and talked to me at the Beverly Wiltshire, I liked you very much but I don't think you were very direct and very firm the way you are now." The woman deadpanned back: "Well, I was talking about something I didn't feel very firmly about. Which was you."
The woman was the 36-year-old poet, author and first-time film-maker Sandra Hochman. The year was 1972, and the interview was the opening salvo in Hochman's astonishing documentary, Year of the Woman (1973). The good news for Beatty and other men skewered in the film is that few people ever saw it. It has recently been screened at the Sarasota film festival in Florida, but has spent the past 30 years locked in a Manhattan film vault, too radical or too weird for distributors to touch.
The film is set at the Democratic political convention in Miami in July, 1972. The convention was the scene of the first meeting of the newly formed National Women's Political Caucus, which nominated congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as the first woman presidential candidate in American history. Hochman had gone to Miami with an all-woman documentary crew to make the first ever film on the women's movement and she returned with extraordinary footage. The film features a cross-section of American cultural icons, among them Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron and the radical black feminist activist Florence Kennedy. Germaine Greer even appears at one point, standing moody and alone at the back of an auditorium.
The hand-held camera follows Hochman as she prods male politicians, delegates and celebrities into sharing their views on women and the feminist movement. Like Beatty, most of them hang themselves. Future Democrat presidential candidate Gary Hart says no woman is "sufficiently qualified" to be president; a delegate from Alabama is bemused when Hochman calls him sexist for saying women should never be truck drivers. In one extraordinary scene, Hochman sneaks into a packed convention hall with a curvy blonde stripper dressed in a revealing gold sequin dress. The convention literally stops as men gawp at the woman like dogs on heat. "All because Liz Renay has breasts!" Hochman reflects afterwards from a beach chair. "But if a man walked into a convention with a huge cock, would women rush up and ask, 'Who is he, where is he, what's his name?'"
Interspersed with Hochman's poetry, fantasy dream sequences, and some hysterical ad-lib repartee with the beloved Washington Post political humorist Art Buchwald, the film caused a sensation when it showed for five nights at the the Avenue Cinema in New York in October 1973. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr told Hochman it was the greatest documentary he had ever seen and wrote that: "Hochman and Buchwald are the best new comedy team since Hepburn and Tracy." It sold out each night and women queued round the block to see it. And then it disappeared. It was bought in 1974 for $65,000 by a wealthy 23-year-old Filipino woman and her two brothers, who were convinced it was a masterpiece. Yet no film company would touch it. Before Sarasota, it had appeared only once since, at a million-dollar gala-night screening at the Lincoln Centre in New York in 1985. Today it is not on video or DVD and few people have even heard of it.
That may be about to change. Hochman was at the screening in Sarasota and hopes that other festivals will pick it up, leading to a distribution deal. The time is ripe. 2004 is an election year, another Democratic convention is round the corner (July in Boston), and she believes she is sitting on a monumental historical document. "It is as if you had a documentary made during the civil war," she says. "It's a masterpiece."
Sixty-seven years old and twice divorced, Hochman lives alone in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. In many ways she has gathered as much dust as her film. Her dozen novels and books of poetry are out of print and she has not found a publisher for her memoir. Her hair is greying and her once sensual voice now rasps from too many Benson & Hedges. But she has lost none of the wit and in-your-face attitude she had in 1972.
Back then she was the It girl of American literature, the toast of New York intellectual society: winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, a friend of Truman Capote, Pablo Neruda and Arthur Miller; a columnist for Harpers Bazaar. (In 1968, before feminism, she made the magazine's top-100 lists for both the most beautiful women and most intelligent women in America.) She was turned on to the women's movement by another friend, Gloria Steinem, and after her acclaimed 1971 novel Walking Papers, about the gruelling break-up of her marriage (Philip Roth compared Hochman's work to Kafka), she became the movement's unofficial poet laureate. "I realised it was going to change the world," says Hochman. "The Vietnam war was on and everyone was protesting but they didn't realise that the most important revolution in history was happening right under their noses."
She vividly recalls the night in 1972 when Porter Bibb, the associate producer of the classic Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, came to her luxury Manhattan apartment with a proposition: he wanted her to go to the Democratic convention to make the first film on the women's movement. Women from around the world were going to be meeting at the Women's Political Caucus and no man knew what the women's movement was. "I said to him, 'Why me? I'm a poet, not a film-maker.' He said: 'You're a poet and a troublemaker. Go cause some trouble.'"
Bibb introduced her to a group of ambitious young New York filmmakers and Hochman selected four as her camera and sound crew. Today, Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Rambling Rose), Claudia Weill (Girlfriends) and Barbara Kopple, winner of Academy awards for Harlan County, USA and American Dream and director of the brilliant 1998 Woody Allen jazz documentary Wild Man Blues, are among the most powerful female directors in Hollywood.
Bibb gave Hochman $15, 000 and she and the crew checked into a fleabag hotel on the wrong side of town to stay in budget. There was only one problem: no one would talk to them. "I'd never made a film before. People thought we were this silly bunch of girls with cameras. They ignored us. Then my assistant said to me: 'You know Warren Beatty, don't you? He's staying at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami Beach. Maybe he'll be in it.'"
Hochman had interviewed Beatty a year earlier in Beverly Hills for an article for the New York Times, and they had got on famously. "He was the most sophisticated man I met in Hollywood. We spoke about Yevtushenko." She called him up in his suite and was grateful when he agreed to be interviewed. The rest is a little bit of lost film history. "I interviewed him spontaneously," Hochman recalls. "I didn't mean to put him down, but he sounded like such a fool that he comes across as a fool. And this was true of all of the men we interviewed. They wanted to look like they knew what they were talking about when it came to the women's movement, but they knew nothing. Every time they opened their traps they made total arseholes of themselves." With Beatty on board, however, Hochman had a film. "When word got out that the biggest star in Hollywood was in our movie, suddenly everyone wanted to be in it. People were ringing us!"
Even so, getting it shown was not so easy. For months Bibb and Hochman hocked the film to companies and distributors, but no one wanted to invest in it. Eventually, they took it to the owner of the Fifth Avenue Cinema in New York, who agreed to put it on. "He was a notorious misogynist," recalls Hochman. "He said he would show it on condition he didn't have to watch it."
Thirty years on, Hochman says the world is a different place - and she is proud to have helped change it. She is no longer a member of a feminist organisation and she never made another film, but she still works feverishly, teaching writing classes.
And more than ever, she is still a troublemaker. Year of the Woman played again in Sarasota on a Tuesday afternoon, and I stayed on in Florida to watch it with Hochman. She was 10 minutes late and the 130- seat cinema was nearly full. The only seats free were in the front row and we took places on the end. Hochman immediately asked the woman sitting next to her to move up. The woman scowled at her, then complied. Soon afterwards Hochman began to chew gum so loudly it was hard to concentrate. Then, three rows behind us, a couple started arguing about the film. The man was saying: "This is bullshit! These women are being idiots!" His wife was telling him: "Shut up, you might learn something." Hochman let out a deep, triumphant cackle: "Some people are arguing! Isn't that brilliant?"