Nell Cox lives on the Upper West Side in one of those kooky apartments you see only in Nora Ephron movies—quaint with a certain country flair (her living room furniture includes a daybed topped with a vintage quilt), filled with precarious stacks of books and papers and knicknacks and the odd glass trophy commemorating a long creative life, the kind of perfectly charming mess that indicates an artist is in residence. When I arrive, on a freezing afternoon in early February, her radiator is hissing like a threatened snake. Cox, who is in her "seventies and happy with my age," doesn't seem to mind; we have a mission to complete. I am at her apartment to talk about her experiences as part of "The Original Six," a group of women directors who spoke out against gender discrimination in Hollywood in 1979, and who formed the Women’s Steering Committee, a branch of the Director’s Guild of America that advocates for female employment on film and television sets at the directing level. Cox and I are speaking on camera—her daughter, Rebecca, who is also a filmmaker and lives in Brooklyn, has never before heard her mother sit down and speak about her activism, and she wants to capture the interview for the family archives.
"She never talks about this," Rebecca says to me, handing me a glass of water and adjusting her camcorder (her father, who also works in the industry, handles a second camera nearby; no home movie made by a triad of filmmakers could ever just have one angle). "When we heard she was going to speak about this time in her life again, I knew I had to be here."
[For more of this story, written by Rachel Syme, go to http://www.psmag.com/books-and...ory-hollywood-sexism]
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