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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My Week With Marilyn

The sad reality that I admitting to here is that I really don't know much about Marilyn Monroe. Here's what I knew before I saw the film. She died of a drug overdose realtively young. She sang happy birthday to JFK in the 60s and supposedly had an affair with him. She seemed really sad. She was a size 16 (in today's movie star world she would be deemed too fat.) And two of her husbands were playwright Arthur Miller and baseball player Joe DiMaggio - two very, very different men.

And she was a huge star. Watching the film you see she was one of the first woman in our culture who just was larger than life. Larger than herself. An icon. Huge. The film shows the toll it takes on the real person living life in the spotlight. It asks the question where does Marilyn the star end and where does Marilyn the woman begin? Are they the same?