In the 1970s, you could count the women who produced film or television on one hand. By the 1990s, there were hundreds. What happened? That's the dramatic, firsthand story in Women Who Run the Show. Based on more than 125 interviews with women in virtually every segment of the entertainment business-from feature films to television, from corporate offices and new media to the back lot-Women Who Run the Show is the unfiltered account of women's lives in the Hollywood workplace from the 1970s ("No one wanted us there") to 2000. How did they make it in one of the toughest industries around. The women include:
-Gale Ann Hurd, Producer of The Terminator and Aliens
-Mimi Leder, director of ER and The Peacemaker
-Kathleen Nolan, the first female president of the Screen Actors Guild
-Jane Alexander, actress, producer, and head of the National Endowment for the Arts
-Polly Plat, producer of Broadcast News
-Martha Coolidge, director of Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and the first female president of the Directors Guild
-Sherry Lansing, chairman of the Motion Picture Group, Paramount Pictures
The women came from rich families and poor, from all over the U.S. and from other countries. They talk about a wide range of subjects, including the cost of success, sexual harassment, the "boy's club," their three roles-wife, mother, worker,-or of the children they did not have ("I woke up one day and I was fifty"), mentors, how their parents influenced them, the joys of work, and learning on the job. They reveal the truths they've learned about careers, life, and women's increasingly influential place in the business of entertainment.
Women Who Run the Show is a lively, tough, and joyous-but, above all, candid-conversation with the women of Hollywood.