The Girl Team: Joining Forces to Do It Themselves

While there are alarmingly few women helming movies these days, there are more and more behind the scenes. The role of producer is one that seems increasingly open to the industry’s women and here, The Independent profiles female production teams who are changing the industry, one little movie at a time.

Katy Chevigny and Dallas Brennan sit at desks only six feet apart in their loft-like office space at Big Mouth Productions on 14th Street in New York City. They are separated by a large bookcase laden with the usual small-office paraphernalia: haphazard piles of books and tapes, folders, and binders labeled by hand. They have little privacy and though, as partners, they run Big Mouth, their corner of office real estate is not particularly awe-inspiring. Chevigny, thirty-five, and Brennan, thirty-one, could be any harried young women at the helm of a fledgling business.

But it is this very arrangement—the office, the desks, the trappings of entrepreneurship—that makes Big Mouth such an unusual engine for documentary production. “A lot of people make documentaries out of their living rooms,” says Brennan. “It’s more feasible financially, but the burnout factor is much higher. They make one or two films and then they can’t face it again.”

Chevigny and Brennan work hard to carry the overhead of an office and staff because they want to be more than just independent producers who work project to project. “We wanted a certain continuity of staff across time and films,” says Chevigny, who founded Big Mouth with her friend and college classmate Julia Pimsleur in 1997. She had begun her career as a social worker, and then moved on to film production in Chicago. At Big Mouth, she and Pimsleur produced a series of social issue documentaries together. When Pimsleur left two years ago, Brennan became a senior producer. Big Mouth’s sixth film, Deadline, premiered earlier this year at Sundance…

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PUBLISHED IN:

The Independent

WRITTEN BY:

Elizabeth Angell

PUBLISHED ON:

March 2004

PDF VERSION:

PDF, 41 KB