Women Making Mighty Money

MAGIC IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA There are a number of women who make big bucks on Wall Street. So why does Hollywood ignore this as a subject for a movie? Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street kicked off America’s fascination with this world. Twenty-three years later he followed it up with Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

We’ve also had Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Boiler Room (2000) and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) plus The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). All are concerned with money and how to make it. Or, more precisely, alpha men wheeling, dealing and earning big bucks one way or another.

Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross

But we never see women doing this. Well that’s about to change because the first female-driven Wall Street movie, Equity -- which is the first project of Hollywood Insiders Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas – was screened recently at the Sundance Film Festival.

Sarah Megan Thomas and Anna Gunn in Equity

As Jennifer Gould Keil says in her article, Women’s Might Out that appeared in the New York Post, 1/18/16, it is billed “as the first post-financial crisis Wall Street film – where regulations are new, but the pressure to succeed has not changed.”

The film’s screenwriter, director and many of its investors are women. Reiner and Thomas interviewed about 100 Wall Street veterans (both women and men) and what they came up with is a story about women, power and corruption on Wall Street.

Investors in the film include Linnea Roberts, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, who says, “I’d love to think that women have a higher moral code, but these are issues of power. Women think more about consequences and take fewer risks. Men get hooked on the rush of adrenalin.”

It all sounds great to me. I can’t wait to buy tickets to this movie and watch how Anna Gunn, the actress, plays the protagonist, Naomi Bishop. Sparks will fly!

MAGIC BEHIND THE CAMERA New York’s Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is currently having an exhibit of the work of Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the groundbreaking photographer who spent 22 years at Harper’s Bazaar working alongside Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland and Alexey Brodovitch.

In the February 2016 issue of Bazaar magazine an excellent article by Charlotte Cowles titled The Pioneering Vision of Louise Dahl-Wolfe gives the background of this exhibit – which is on view until April 2nd and is called, The Women of Harper’s Bazaar, 1936 to 1958. 

Snow left Bazaar in 1957 and Brodovitch the year after. Dahl-Wolfe quickly followed suit when the magazine’s new art director paid a surprise visit to her studio and had the audacity to peer through her camera during a shoot.

I saw this event on Tuesday, March 1st, the first day it opened and, even though it’s a relatively small exhibit, it’s certainly worth one’s time. I found the signage particularly interesting, for example: “Dahl-Wolfe worked as an interior designer before turning her attention to photography. She is quoted as saying, “I believe the camera is a medium of light – one actually paints with light.”

Snow paid the ultimate tribute by saying, “She revolutionized Bazaar … because she developed color photography to its ultimate.” That says it all.

MAY WE SUGGEST…

Easter Sunday is March 27th so why not give your closet a spring cleaning and fill in a few of the gaps with ADEA’s Everyday Luxury. You won’t be sorry.

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