Meryl Streep Is Sponsoring a Screenwriting Workshop for Women
Because she's the Meryl-iest.
Meryl Streep famously went wild applauding for equal pay during Patricia Arquette's Oscars speech, and now, she's putting her money where her mouth is.
Variety reports that Streep is personally funding a screenwriting workshop exclusively for women over 40. The project was announced on Sunday during a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Streep's project will be called The Writers Lab, and will be run by New York Women in Television and Film. The program has already recruited a slew of mentors, including the women behind movies like Boyhood, 10 Things I Hate About You, and The Station Agent.
The lab will take place at a retreat in upstate New York from September 18-20, and promises participants a "springboard" to produce their promising films. The Writers Lab will take applications from April 30 until June 1, and will accept only eight participants.
The announcement comes at a pressing time for women in Hollywood. Even though it's 2015, it's still depressingly tough to be a woman writer, and female character leads aren't getting any more common.
But if Meryl's on the case, we already feel better. She can fix everything, right?
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Megan Friedman is the former managing editor of the Newsroom at Hearst. She's worked at NBC and Time, and is a graduate of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.