Four diverse women share the story of how they became directors, what motivates them, how they lead, and how they overcome obstacles to create the most optimal working environment and work that makes a difference.

Seeing Is Believing: Women Direct

Mary Astor has to make a difficult choice after learning her personal diaries have been stolen.

Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor

Hal Ashby's obsessive genius led to an unprecedented string of Oscar®-winning classics, including Harold and Maude, Shampoo and Being There. But as contemporaries Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg rose to blockbuster stardom in the 1980s, Ashby's uncompromising nature played out as a cautionary tale of art versus commerce.

Beginning just before his debut as Frankenstein’s creation, this documentary compellingly explores the life and legacy of a cinema legend, presenting a perceptive history of the genre he personified. Karloff's films were long derided as hokum and attacked by censors, but his phenomenal popularity and pervasive influence endures, inspiring some of our greatest actors and directors into the 21st Century – among them Guillermo Del Toro, Ron Perlman, Roger Corman, and John Landis, all of whom and many more contribute their personal insights and anecdotes.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster

In 1950, 33-year-old black actor Sidney Poitier starred for the first time in Hollywood history in a film by Joseph Mankiewicz with the prescient title "The Door Opens". When he made his film debut a decade earlier, the self-taught young man, who grew up in the Bahamas before emigrating to New York as a teenager, was not allowed to eat his meals with the rest of the uniformly white studio staff. His character as a young surgeon confronted with racism revealed the hero's potential in a man who, until then, had only played the subordinate roles assigned to "people of color". With just a few carefully selected roles, Sidney Poitier, a staunch activist for the civil rights movement alongside his friend Harry Belafonte, became a star.