Bethpage, N.Y.-American Movie Classics and Barbra Streisand's Barwood Films will salute four pioneering women filmmakers with a one-hour special, Reel Models: The First Women of Film, which will be hosted by Streisand and air May 30.
AMC is also presenting a daylong tribute to movie trailblazers Alice Guy, Lois Weber, Frances Marion and Dorothy Arzner, whose contributions to the film world are practically unknown.
AMC and New York Women in Film and Television will host a daylong retrospective of the featured filmmakers May 22 in New York, as well as screening the documentary and sponsoring a panel discussion. In Los Angeles, AMC will host a festival of the featured films May 15.
Reel Models, which was executive-produced by Streisand and Cis Corman of Barwood, will incorporate original film footage, film clips, interviews, first-person accounts and commentary from movie-industry figures such as Shirley MacLaine and Francis Ford Coppola.
Guy, Weber and Arzner were directors, while Marion was a screenwriter.
The special's executive producers for AMC were Marc Juris and Jessica Falcon.
Weber's use of frontal nudity in 1914 film The Hypocrites created a censorship outcry, while Arzner's The Wild Party showed Clara Bow as a sexy student who was thrown out of school for wearing a low-cut dress.
