Author: Elissa

This is part two in a two-part series of my conversation with Jill Golick. Part one can be found HERE. Jill of Many Trades Women in View Executive Director, Jill Golick, is a self-professed Jill-of-many-trades.  Golick is a veritable Grande Dame of storytelling in the Canadian industry. The former Writer’s Guild of Canada President has over thirty years of experience spanning writing and producing, showrunning, and transmedia storytelling. She was one of the first Canadian screenwriters to experiment in transmedia storytelling over a decade ago and has created, written, financed and produced four original multi-platform series. Her most recent being…

This is part one in a two-part series of my conversation with Jill Golick. Jill of Many Trades Women in View Executive Director, Jill Golick, is a self-professed Jill-of-many-trades.  Golick is a veritable Grande Dame of storytelling in the Canadian industry. The former Writer’s Guild of Canada President has over thirty years of experience spanning writing and producing, showrunning, and transmedia storytelling. She was one of the first Canadian screenwriters to experiment in transmedia storytelling over a decade ago and has created, written, financed and produced four original multi-platform series. Her most recent being the internationally-acclaimed, award-winning digital detective series…

Paula Froehle is a producer, director, visual artist, educator and entrepreneur based in Chicago. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chicago Media Project (CMP) an innovative philanthropic community that exists to support social impact films and filmmaker sustainability. Paula has overseen more than $3 million dollars of grant and equity funding for numerous documentaries including the current top-grossing biopic of all time WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?(Focus Features), THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (Tribeca 2018), THE FOURTH ESTATE (Showtime) and STEP (Fox Searchlight), to name a few. She also served as an executive producer on 306 HOLLYWOOD (Sundance 2018),…

I was watching an episode of ‘The Good Place’ recently. I was disappointed and confused to see the use of wild and exotic animals in a television show starring not one but two supposed animal rights activists – Kristin Bell and Ted Danson.  The episode, ‘Existential Crisis’, featured a crowded party scene with a live chained bear, giraffe, an elephant, a tethered diaper-wearing primate, a bin full of dogs, and a horse decked out like a unicorn. Whether we want to admit it or not, our industry encourages and funds the abuse, exploitation, and neglect of both wild and domesticated…

Today, October 1 of this year I turn 39 years old. In Hollywood years, I am bordering on geriatric. Hollywood doesn’t like an aging woman. The preferred femme on screen is young, often times underweight, probably has been enhanced with the likes of fillers, Botox or implants, and seen through a sexualized male gaze.  Of late I’ve been told, “You don’t age!” It’s positioned as a compliment. But what it really reveals is a lack of value for the ‘older’ woman and the gift of aging. Should we all be so lucky to live a long life. Patriarchy conditions both…

UPDATE 9/10/2018:  A report was released today by Nancy Wang Yuen, PhD. et al titled ‘Terrorists & Tyrants: Middle Eastern and Northern African (MENA) Actors in Prime Time & Streaming Television.  It provides tremendous depth on this topic. AVAILABLE HERE. The duty and responsibility of fostering loving kindness and spreading peace is on all of us. And as such, everyone is to be held to account. Everyone irrespective of one’s social status, profession, ethnicity, nationality or economic station, has a duty to humanity. And this brings me to Hollywood, a self-identifying liberal universe. Hollywood is tone deaf from its consistent…

Los Angeles – At the time of writing, brown-skinned children are separated from their parents, being detained in modern-day internment camps in our country. (I am an immigrant to this country but my skin is white and my passport is Canadian so I don’t have to worry about cages, racial profiling, and xenophobia.) A Mexican-American man and his mother are called ‘rapists and animals’ by a racist white woman in Running Springs, California. Lakota children are being forcibly seized from their homes by the state, violating the Indian Child Welfare Act and at rates wholly disproportionate to white families. The…

VANCOUVER – “Arch your back for me. More. More. There we go. Hold it there.” Aside from the few lights on C-stands glaring down on me, the sound stage was completely dark. I couldn’t see their faces but I could hear their snickers and murmuring. It was a 2nd unit shoot for my first real acting job. I was twenty years old. It would be my first experience with the easy exploitation and degradation of women in the entertainment industry. I remember sitting on an apple box in nothing but a pair of underwear. I can’t recall if I got…

Jen McGowan is a powerhouse; a veritable no-nonsense tour de force and breath of fresh air in an all-too-often white hetero male dominated film landscape. Her first feature film, KELLY & CAL, starring Juliette Lewis, Cybill Shepherd and Jonny Weston premiered at SXSW where she won the Gamechanger Award. It was released by IFC Films, opening to rave reviews. With a BFA from the prestigious NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in directing at USC in her toolkit, Jen is an active member of The Alliance of Women Directors and Film Fatales and most recently created filmpowered.com,…

Anyone who knows me well knows I love me some Angeline Jolie. I adore the Angie. I don’t know the woman personally; we’ve clearly never met.  But I love – LOVE – and respect her choices as an actor, producer, director and writer. As the founder and CEO of an NGO, it’s a no-brainer that I also respect her relentless efforts in the humanitarian world. With that being said, of course I own pretty much every single film she’s been in like any proper fan would. Okay not Cyborg 2. I just can’t. I was watching Salt for the umpteenth…

This list is just the tip of the iceberg of women who’ve played a very important role in the development of film.  I barely scratched the surface of American cinema let alone Global cinema. Although all of these women have achieved some very cool milestones, it’s also a great reminder that gender equality (and race and sexual orientation equality) in film and in our global culture is still very much needed.  We have a lot of work to do; work that can only be achieved when we respect, support and uplift each other.  So here’s to celebrating the achievements of…

Do you have a set of habits? Dedicated activities you carry out with disciplined consistency to stay on track and achieve your goals? If the answer is ‘no’ or you have no idea what I’m talking about, then I encourage you to read on. There can be a whole lot of talk and very little action when it comes to artists and entrepreneurs believing in themselves and going big. When push comes to shove many back down, fail to show up in their life, and then fail to achieve the dream, the goal, the life they want. To borrow from…

At the time of writing this article, President Obama announced that he intends to attack Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons pending Congressional vote. As an NGO director, I work in and have visited parts of the world that have seen nothing but armed conflict, genocide, extreme desperation and suffering.  His announcement wasn’t exactly one I was high-fiving.  Countless questions like “Why did you wait until now? People have been suffering for so long. What happens to all the refugees? What happens to the innocent women, men and children that your ‘attack’ will devastate?” rattled through my head. …

It’s often that I get asked about NGO work: what can people do to get involved or how can someone start their own NGO.  I appreciate people asking – if you don’t ask, you won’t know! And although I am by no means an expert, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned over the years. Without sounding like a Captain Obvious Debbie Downer, an NGO is a huge undertaking. It’s something – like any business venture – that should be taken very seriously.  You’d be surprised how many people fall victim to the self-romanticized idea of humanitarian work. They commit…