How Marielle Heller Conquered Hollywood One No at a Time
How Marielle Heller Conquered Hollywood One No at a Time
The uncompromising writer, director, and actor - think Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and The Queen's Gambit to name a few - has built a career on sticking to her guns
Jenna Scherer, provided by
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Marielle Heller had tried everything. She was nearly a year into her campaign to adapt
The Diary of a Teenage Girl, cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel, into a play, and she was no closer to her goal. At the time, around 2007, Heller had zero writing or directing credits to her name. But she was convinced that Gloeckner’s story, about a 15-year-old testing the limits of her sexual desires in 1970s San Francisco, was one that she wanted to tell. So she busted out the nuclear option.