Jan Haag obit

Jan Haag, Founder of the AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women, Dies at 90

She got the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Maya Angelou, Lee Grant, Julia Phillips, Lily Tomlin and Nancy Walker involved in the ground-breaking program that kicked off 50 years ago. 

She was not on the list.

Jan Haag, who a half-century ago founded the landmark Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute, has died. She was 90.

The remarkable Haag, who also was an actress, painter, poet, novelist, playwright, writer of travel stories and creator of needlepoint canvases, some of which required hundreds of hours to complete, died Monday in Shoreline, Washington, according to the AFI and the MB Abram agency.

Haag had directed dozens of educational films for the John Tracy Clinic and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare when she became the first woman accepted into the Academy Intern Program at the AFI in 1970, three years after it was founded by George Stevens Jr.

She was assigned to Paramount’s Harold and Maude (1971), directed by Hal Ashby, then joined the AFI staff in 1971, and among her duties was to administer the nonprofit’s film grant program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Three years later, with $35,000 in start-up funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, Haag launched the Directing Workshop for Women with help from Tony Vellani, Joan Didion, Mathilde Krim, Eleanor Perry and others.

(From the mid-1930s through the mid-’60s, only Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino could boast of having sustainable careers as female directors in Hollywood. Elaine May was the sole woman to have directed for a major studio with A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid in 1971 and 1972 since Lupino had helmed The Trouble With Angels in 1966.)

Haag realized that the initial participants needed to be women who had already experienced success as actresses, producers, studio executives, editors, writers, etc. That would draw Hollywood’s attention to the workshop.

The first year’s group included Oscar-winning producer Julia Phillips, actresses Ellen Burstyn, Lee Grant, Margot Kidder, Karen Arthur, Susan Oliver, Lily Tomlin and Nancy Walker, writers Maya Angelou and Joanna Lee, SAG president Kathleen Nolan and Columbia Pictures casting executive Nessa Hyams.

Others like Joanne Woodward, Anne Bancroft, Dyan Cannon, Cicely Tyson and Randa Haines would soon follow.

The DWW provided AFI student crews and resources to the participants so they could make short films on videotape that could be used as calling cards.

“If you had started the workshop with completely unknown women, you could not have had nearly that kind of bombshell effect on the whole Hollywood scene,” she said in 2014. “When [we had] Julia Phillips and Lee Grant, Kathleen Nolan, Ellen Burstyn participating in it, that really shook the studio heads awake.”

The AFI paid tribute to her in an Instagram post:

“Jan recognized the need to give women a seat in the directing chair, and her visionary spirit lives on in this trailblazing program today,” it wrote. “She left an indelible mark on the over 350 filmmakers who have participated in the program, and her legacy is having launched one of the first gender impact programs of its kind in the cinematic arts.”

Jan Marie Smith was born on Dec. 6, 1933, in Marysville, Washington, and studied art, painting, dance and law in schools around the country, then performed in regional theaters and directed plays. In 1957, she married John Haag, a professor and poet in residence at Penn State (they divorced in 1968).

She continued to run the DWW at the AFI until 1982, when she moved to India to focus on her art and writing.

Survivors include her two nieces — Suzanne Hawley, retired professor of astronomy and former dean at the University of Washington, and Jana Hawley — and nephew Sam Hawley.

According to the MB Abram website, Haag created 23 contemporary needlepoint canvases, working on some of these simultaneously, from 1975-2008. One took a decade to complete.

She walked alone through India, Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal, Russia and Europe, memorializing her travels in a series of free-form needlepoint diaries later exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and international shows.

“Over the years, working on these pieces has become one of my primary ways of understanding both the world and my experience of it,” she once said. “The works … transmit knowledge. Not only the powerful subjective awareness of light and color, but the pleasure associated with study — in this case, study of music, astronomy, mathematics, travel, archaeology and the iconographic, mystical and esoteric traditions of many cultures.”