Arguably the coolest panel of my Saturday at WonderCon, the 11th 11th Annual Women Rocking Hollywood Panel: Surviving and Thriving in a Changing Landscape brought a group of amazing women of showrunners, directors, writers, and advocates to the convention to dig into how they’ve navigated a challenging business, making interesting shows and films, and their newest projects.
Panelists: Writer/executive producer Aeysha Carr (Woke, the upcoming Government Cheese), director Rosemary Rodriguez (Peacemaker, The Walking Dead franchise), producer/executive producer Dara Resnick (Daredevil, Home Before Dark), writer/executive producer Carla Ching (Fear the Walking Dead, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), writer/executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel (Up Here, Survival of the Thickest), and advocate Chandra Jackson (director of marketing and communications for Women in Film).
It’s pretty awesome to have Danielle Sanchez-Witzel on the panel given that her show Survival of the Thickest just debuted it’s second season on Netflix. She spoke a bit about how in the development of the show they’ve naturally made sure to hire the best people, which happen to be mostly women. An impressive amount of the department heads are women and the crew, which created the perfect environment to be creative and interesting.
Aeysha Carr (Apple TV show Government Cheese) is getting to be weird on Government Cheese, a show that is aiming to be darkly comedic and presenting the audience with characters they haven’t yet seen. She bonded with panelist Rosemary Rodirguez, who showed off a pitch book she’d recently put together to work on a feture, highlighting interesting camera angles and skills that she hopes to get to show off.
These women, alongside Dara Resnick (the Horrors of Delores Roach), have worked on recent projects that don’t necessarily fit in traditional fare and that means that they’ve gotten to dig into different parts of their experiences. For Resnick in particular, she was recently approached to develop a book based on Robert Durst. Rather than give us another psychotic killer, she’s trying to dig into the side of the victims and female agents.
I had to leave this panel a bit early but thoroughly enjoyed hearing these women speak about their past, present, and future projects, and how their identities and perspectives impacted their work.