Women and Hollywood

Melissa Silverstein is the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, one of the most respected sites for issues related to women and film as well as other areas of pop culture. Women and Hollywood educates, advocates, and agitates for gender parity across the entertainment industry.

She is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Athena Film Festival. The 4th annual festival will take place from February 6-9, 2014 at Barnard College in NYC.

Melissa recently published the first book from Women and Hollywood, In Her Voice: Women Directors Talk Directing, which is a compilation of over 40 interviews that have appeared on the site.

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Blog Roll

Guest Post: Loaded Questions

Features

I started working on my first feature film Fully Loaded in 2007. It was like climbing a mountain four times as high as it says in the damn guidebook. It was like changing churches. It was like having a relationship with a gorilla who keeps waking you from a dead sleep. I had been making theatre my whole life. I gave birth virtually without drugs to two kids. But making a movie terrified me. As it turns out, many fears (bears, poisonous snakes, feature films) are reasonable, healthy fears. Directing my first feature was far more twisted and tangled than I ever imagined and it required a stamina that spanned years.