“They’re out there,” Holly said. “Find them.” The room emitted a collective yawn. Maybe Holly was nervous, maybe she was reading the speech for the first time. It had the feel of something that had been written for her, cooked up by someone fresh out of school, maybe, still thinking in the mode of term papers and evidence, not rhetoric and charisma.

“Many people don’t know this about my husband. He has put more women in roles of significant responsibility than any other director of mainstream films. From his very first films, The Starfighter trilogy, to his latest movie, The Libretto, Ted has collaborated with women every step of the way. Today 25 percent of Stabler Studios’ employees are women, and Ted has taken the Genders United pledge to grow that number to 50 percent over the next five years. Ask yourselves, What can I do to join the effort?”

Phoebe’s ears rang and scalp burned as Holly stood up there now with her implied credentials, accrued to her by marriage, making it all sound easy. What did Phoebe expect? It was her own fault for coming, for buying a ticket on a carousel that spun in only one direction. Again and again over the course of his career, Ted was congratulated for work he himself hadn’t done and about which he understood none of the pains and losses.

Phoebe had been the only woman in a role of significant responsibility on the first two Starfighters. (On the third film, after she’d left, Ted replaced her with a guy named Vic.) She hadn’t let herself think about it too much with the first film; it was such a small production. Everyone, including her, had at least five jobs. But when they went into preproduction for the second film, and Phoebe brought in a female AD whose first feature had just won the audience award at Sundance, Omega objected; the woman was green, untested. Maybe you’d hire her as a second AD to work under a more experienced AD, but to just throw her in there with a crew that big and a shoot that complex? The execs shook their heads. This was a business after all. There were millions of dollars at stake. They wouldn’t have blinked if the AD had been a man, Phoebe knew it. She encountered the same resistance each time she put forward a woman or a person of color or really anyone who hadn’t come up through nepotism or the USC film school. We don’t need them, the execs said. We have you. Over and over again, a rebuke that was supposed to make her feel prized, like a blue-ribbon cow at a 4-H fair, but which still filled her with a shame that made her shrink, even all these years later. Because back then, there could be only one.