Current Project: Maxine (a short film)

---

New York City, 1937. Maeve Beckenstein, a spitfire producer, writes the best radio plays at WARC, including her latest pet-project. She leaves her successful career behind to prepare for parenthood with novelist husband Ezra. After four previous miscarriages, Maeve is determined to carry this child to term.

But tragedy strikes, and Maeve’s dream of motherhood dies.

Maeve and Ezra bury their still-born daughter, Máire Maxine. After months in a depression, Maeve discovers that WARC has bastardized her pet-project. Her motherly instinct repurposed, she meets with her narcissistic, former boss, Ivan Olshansky, to ask for her job back. During the encounter, she recognizes her true value.

Maeve chooses never to work for this man again.

Pondering their future over drinks at a bar, Maeve and Ezra decide to start over in a new town and change their last name to Becker, Ezra’s pen name. To honor their daughter, Maeve changes her first name as well. When she suggests adapting Ezra’s novel for film, he balks at the idea. However, fate intervenes when the head of a major Hollywood studio, and an old family friend of Maeve, walks in. 

She greets him, introducing herself anew as…Maxine.

This story originated from two questions: What does it mean to be a mother? and What does it mean to be an artist?, And like a camera lens, the answer came into focus: their essence lies in the potential to create and then to nurture.

So, in a society which has inextricably - and unfairly - intertwined motherhood with womanhood, what happens when a woman cannot conceive or does not want to? How does that woman, who wants to create and nurture, navigate an unconventional path to these goals? A path fraught with obstacles designed to discourage and sometimes destroy. Out of these questions, I gave birth to MAXINE.

Maxine wants what many women want – to have control over her life, without the definitions and restrictions imposed by a patriarchal society. To create and nurture in the way that she chooses, not the way society has chosen for her. Her dreams. Her choices. Her responsibilities.

MAXINE imagines one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world, when the conventional pathway has been closed to her.

This is her story. This is my story. This is our story.