To tell real women’s stories through alliances with female Hollywood heavyweights, Glamour magazine has partnered with bicoastal/international Moxie Pictures to produce Reel Moments, a series of short films based on stories from the magazine’s readers. Matching five tales with celebrity talent has proved a powerful way to call attention to smart women behind the camera.
“We all know that the best stories are the real stories,” Moxie Pictures co-president and executive producer Dan Levinson pointed out. And the production company had plenty to choose from. Glamour readers submitted approximately 4,000 essays of 750 words or less about moments that inspired or transformed them. The resulting films are Dealbreaker, written and directed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Mary Wigmore; Gnome written and directed by Emmy-award winning Jenny Bicks who wrote and produced for Sex and the City; Little Black Dress, written and directed by Talia Lugacy who is a producing partner with Rosario Dawson (the latter stars in this film); Wait directed by Trudie Styler and written by Emmy-award nominated writers Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky (Sex and the City); and Good Morning Baby, directed by Lisa Leone and written by Danielle Lurie.
The short films, except for Dealbreaker, which was accepted in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, are on Glamour.com and all are on a DVD in the January issue. (Sundance prohibits Web broadcasts of films that are showing at the festival.)
FINDING THE PERFECT FIT
Each of the films was sponsored by an advertiser who is acknowledged in the opening credits of the film. “One of the things that we had to kind look after was that we had to be respectful of Glamour’s brand, which is about empowering women,” producer and head of film and television for Moxie Pictures Francesca Silvestri shared. “And then, in terms of the advertisers–Mercury Milan, Bebe, Nokia [and Elizabeth Arden]–it was important that there be some brand affinity with the stories that were chosen and the people that were involved with the film, that was something that we had to pay attention to as well.”
Along with the positive message of this project, co-president and executive producer at Moxie Pictures Robert Fernandez said that they liked the idea of blending Hollywood and Madison Avenue. “You’re combining filmmakers and marketers. It’s really a convergence of art and commerce in this thing and at the end of the day the films needed to stand alone, on their own, and not just based on the novelty of having marketers sponsoring them.”
The advertisers were looking for specific elements in the films they sponsored, though the filmmakers ultimately selected the stories they wanted to bring to life from 20 to 50 essays that Moxie Pictures submitted to them. For example, Bebe sponsored Good Morning Baby, which is about an engaged young woman briefly freelancing for a magazine in New York City when her fiancée back home calls off their engagement. For this film, the sponsor was looking for an evocative and moody tone. The clients at Mercury, on the other hand, wanted a romantic film, which ended up being Wait. That story is about a woman who ends up with the love of her life after a surprising twist of fate.
Elizabeth Arden sponsored Little Black Dress, a story Silvestri described as being about a woman’s ability to hold on to her femininity while climbing the corporate ladder. Glamour alone sponsored Gnome. This story is about a preppy young woman who, after hitting a car full of transvestites with her Lexus SUV, ends up unexpectedly enjoying the company of these women of whom she was initially wary.
Sponsored by Nokia, Dealbreaker follows a single woman’s dating life and all of the dealbreakers she has experienced. The most recent, and grossest, is the turning point of the piece. The main character does use a cell phone in the film, but its appearance seems incidental.
“The sort of coup de grace is one of the films [Dealbreaker], which was in effect a branded film sponsored by a client, ends up in Sundance,” Levinson commented.
Fernandez said that it was important for the advertisers to understand that the films were not going to be product specific and certainly not 13-minute long commercials. Instead, the tone of a film should be in line with the brand. “This was about the way the product makes you feel, what the product represents, as opposed to any specific product attribute,” Levinson said. “They wanted women to feel good about a Mercury Milan because of the story that was told.”
All of the editors on the project were female too. Julie Drazen who cut Dealbreaker through 89 Editorial, New York, related that it is always nice to work with women who have a similar sensibility. “Gwyneth and Mary were very clear about what they were looking for and that in turn gave me a strong foundation from which to work and build from,” she explained. “There is often a level of trust and understanding between women that can be very refreshing in the editing room. There still aren’t enough of us making our mark so it felt really good to be a part of a project that celebrates women.”
Jinx Godfrey edited Gnome through bicoastal Cosmo Street; Jennifer Dean of Lost Planet, New York, cut Little Black Dress; Saska Simpson cut Wait withCut + Run, New York; and Trish Fuller edited Good Morning Baby through The Whitehouse, New York.
MORE PIECES TO THE PUZZLE
Dealbreaker was Oscar-winning Paltrow’s first endeavor behind the camera and her longtime friend Wigmore’s first narrative directing experience. “We were well aware that Gwyneth is extremely smart because she’s our friend and obviously she’s smart, and Mary, they complement each other very well so when you put the two of them together we were very confident in their ability,” Levinson said of selecting first time directors. This was also Styler’s foray into narrative directing (she had directed the documentary The Sweatbox in ’02), and Bicks first helming experience. “It’s just recognizing folks that have the talent and ability to be able to do something like this,” Fernandez noted. Additionally, since Glamour specifically sought a large audience for the films, the cachet of these big names is helping to achieve that goal.
Other celebrities are on the advisory board that Moxie Pictures and Glamour assembled. The board consisted of Meryl Poster, former co-president of production, Miramax Films who is now with NBC Universal; Caroline Kaplan, partner, Applehead Pictures; Cara Stein, COO, William Morris Agency; Leslie Russo, associate publisher, Glamour; and actresses Lucy Liu, Katie Holmes and Julianna Marguiles.
On why it was important to have actresses on the board, Levinson said, “Hollywood is very intriguing to a lot of people and certainly it’s intriguing to advertisers who gave the money, so the idea was, in order to gain awareness we all decided that we had to get people in the press that would be high profile, who would be behind it.”
In addition to encouraging women in filmmaking and recognizing the powerful stories of women in general, Glamour is making a cash contribution to FilmAid, a charitable organization that supports educational films on topics like HIV/AIDS and human rights, as well as films that are meant to entertain. The organization also teaches refugees basic filmmaking and sometimes employs them to operate the program.
“It was a great partnership we have with Glamour, basically we worked completely together on this entire thing,” Fernandez said of the collaboration with the magazine. Though the films have just been released, the publication is already soliciting entries for the next Reel Moments contest. The call is for stories that describe an “event, encounter or moment” in a reader’s life that was “incredibly hilarious, empowering, unsuspecting and inspiring.”
Kevin Chinoy of Roundtable Management, New York, was a producer along with Silvestri, who oversaw the project. Silvestri pointed out that she and Glamour’s associate publisher, the aforementioned Russo, co-conceived the idea for Reel Moments after Russo expressed interest in creating short films with reader involvement.
Director of photography credit goes to Tony Wolberg for Dealbreaker, John Thomas for Gnome, Helge Gerull for Little Black Dress, Trish Govoni for Wait, and Steve Fierberg for Good Morning Baby.