Strong Female Characters

Casting is one of the film industry's most misunderstood processes, and it also happens to be a field dominated by women — but one woman, Sarah Halley Finn, gave us the MCU as we know it (and a plethora of hotties named Chris).

The Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, was a poet, a philosopher, a scientist, a philanthropist, a socialite, and a pioneering sci-fi author who helped to create the literary genre we adore so much to this day.

Vera West worked to no credit and died under very mysterious circumstances, but her costuming work on Bride of Frankenstein helped craft the aesthetic of women in the golden age of horror.

You've definitely heard of Kevin Feige and maybe Louis D'Esposito, but did you know there's a third partner in the MCU triumvirate? Her name is Victoria Alonso, and she's a kickass producer who's been part of Marvel Studios since the beginning with over 20 blockbusters under her belt.

On today's episode of Forgotten Women of Genre, we turn our attention to the woman who made action movie history with her editing on Mad Max: Fury Road, Margaret Sixel.

Debra Hill was a producer, screenwriter and the "godmother of indie filmmaking,” whose successes in Hollywood opened the door for future generations to follow in her footsteps.

As a silent-era director, Lois Weber created some early works of genre that still hold up surprisingly well by today's standards.

This week, Preeti and Courtney celebrate the greatness of the Avengers: Endgame trailer and welcome Shang-Chi and Destin Daniel Cretton to the MCU, and we present part two of Cher's interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick.

Living in a society beleaguered by the horrors reported from the frontlines of WWI, Gertrude Barrows Bennett — under the pen name Francis Stevens — created dark fiction the likes of which the world had never before seen.

From her breathtaking work on Bram Stoker's Dracula to the boundary pushing baroque madness of her collaborations with director Tarsem Singh, Japanese production and costume designer Eiko Ishioka created some of the most striking and revolutionary clothes ever seen on film.

Despite not being credited for it in her lifetime, Delia Derbyshire wrote the Doctor Who theme song and contributed a great deal of work to British TV and film through the late '60s.

Leigh Brackett, who wrote the very first script draft of The Empire Strikes Back, but long before she lent her talents toward shaping what would eventually become the second ever Star Wars movie, Brackett was a young girl with a love of science fiction and romance who knew early on what she wanted to do for a living — even if it meant facing down opposition and sexism at every turn.

With the release of Snow White, Walt Disney became an international success story, patenting his famous multiplane camera and reinventing animation into a viable format for a feature-length film, except someone else did it first and her name was Lotte Reiniger.

While the surprise success of Guardians of the Galaxy would make James Gunn a household name, it never would have existed if it weren’t for Nicole Perlman, the woman who brought the MCU to the cosmos.

This week, Cher, Preeti, and Courtney discuss Captain Marvel — the Goose, the bad, and the ugly — and Cher talks to Kelly Sue DeConnick in part one of an interview so good we had to cut in half.

In Black Panther, production designer Hannah Beachler created a world we all wanted to visit in Wakanda, and won an Academy Award for it.

She co-created Spider-Woman and is in the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame. Marie Severin worked as a colorist on so many Marvel and EC titles, it would take hours to discuss them all.

Pauline Hopkins is hailed as one of the most prolific African-American woman writers of the 20th century. She's also considered on of the architects of Afrofuturism, one of the most important cultural movements and subgenres within sci-fi and fantasy.

Japanese actress and singer Meiko Kaji has performed in over 100 films in Japan. But despite never turning her sights on Hollywood her impact is still felt. Most notably it was her starring role in Lady Snowblood that heavily influenced Tarantino's Kill Bill series.