“When I was a young mother, and a battered wife, long before we had any shelters or understanding of the issue, I really believed that if only my husband had a job he liked he would stop beating me. So, I typed up his résumé, sent it out to motion picture companies, and diligently followed up with phone calls. One place responded, “You sound more interesting than he does, why don’t you come in for an interview?”  I did.

That was my first job in film, part-time and just enough money to pay for my children’s pre-school education.  My skills grew, and eventually the income from that job helped me get a car and some financial independence; two key factors in escaping an abusive marriage.  After I left my marriage, I became one of the first women to work as a cameraperson at George Lucas’s special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic and later, for Francis Ford Coppola at American Zoetrope.

Everything is easier to accomplish when you’re not getting beaten.

While I was going through therapy, keeping up the restraining orders, changing the locks, fighting the custody battles, searching for childcare and feeding my children,  I was also working on special effects camera stages with all male crews. It was a surreal world of smoke, mirrors, flying objects and rubber monsters, all taking place in “galaxies far, far away”.  So while therapists tried to give me strategies to engage in positive meaningful dialogues with men, the guys at work droned on, ‘if King Kong and Godzilla were to get into a fight, who would win?’ They were good, brilliant men. They became my family, my friends, my community. They taught me to trust and move on.

As my film career grew, so did my concern over society’s static perception of ‘the battered wife’.  Telling a story about  domestic violence is not easy.  There are good solid reasons why there are not a lot of stories about it and the reasons cannot all be blamed on the bias of Hollywood and the domination of blockbusters.  Many of us don’t make it out.  Many of us never find our voice.  It is a story people don’t want to hear and when they do hear it, often it is the clichéd, woman-as-victim-gets-self-empowerment-learns-to-kick-back-and-kill story. In truth, the complexity of the decisions any woman in this situation has to make is staggering.  

In the film we are making, OddFX, a young mother, a battered wife, fleeing from her husband finds a career for herself in the make belief world of film.   Cady Langton, lives in two worlds: the gritty world of an abused mother — a world of courts, shelters, protecting children and the imaginative world of special effects, a world where a woman can be safe, safe enough to fight her real life monsters. ”