“I believe that there is a tremendous power in story. That power has been proven, and seen, and witnessed, and used for thousands of years.”
On any given day during the roughly 5-month period that makes up Hollywood’s Awards Season, the halls of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel are ripe for star gazing – the kind you can do during the daytime.
Director Patty Jenkins was there one day last fall. She was on hand for an A-list luncheon for trailblazing women in the entertainment industry.
For Jenkins, the word trailblazer barely covers it.
With “Wonder Woman,” Jenkins shattered records, silenced the big-wig naysayers who’d prevented movies like “Wonder Woman” from being made, and showed moviegoers just how super women can be.
Jenkins has known the latter her whole life, but didn’t always know how significant she and her work would one day be to the narrative.
Her mother, Emily Roth, is an environmental scientist who, by Jenkins’ account, became “a very self-realized person” and built herself a new life “in the face of sexism at the time.”
As Jenkins spoke, Roth, who’d accompanied her daughter to the interview and the awards presentation earlier, was just feet away, smiling.
“I feel so lucky that I was educated that the struggle was out there, but I was also led to believe that anything was possible for me,” she said. “And I really did believe that it was.”
This boundry-free approach to life served her well as she entered an industry with a history for creating and maintaining barriers for women and persons of color.
But when she found success, she realized some of her accomplishments were the first of their kind. That was telling.
“I thought I was in the middle of a story,” Jenkins said.
At the time of our interview, Jenkins and the entire entertainment industry were about to bear witness to the beginning of a different – but parallel– story about how women are treated in Hollywood.
Jenkins remained hopeful.
“We always have to be marching towards being better people and becoming a more enlightened civilization, because now we know how to do it,” she said. “Yeah, it bums me out to realize that we’re further behind that I thought that we were, but it just means that it has to be tackled.”
A job best tackled, perhaps, by some wonder women.
