Unfurling Girls

It’s likely that no producer in Hollywood is more qualified to bring Good Girls Revolt to the screen than Lynda Obst.

“Sony was having trouble getting the rights to the book, so they came to me,” Obst says of the nonfiction bestseller (The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace) that inspired the Amazon show, which premieres all 10 episodes October 28.

“They figured I would know the author, Lynn Povich, which I did. And they figured I would know the story, because I’m so old.”

Obst’s dry wit is something she shared with her close friend, the late Nora Ephron. She produced the Ephron films This Is My Life and Sleepless in Seattle, and she depicts the journalist-turned-filmmaker — who worked at Newsweek around the time of the landmark 1970 gender-discrimination lawsuit — as one of the main characters in Good Girls Revolt.

“Writing Nora was impossible, because no one can write like she talked,” admits Obst, who is an executive producer on the series with Dana Calvo, Darlene Hunt, Jeff Okin and Scott Winant. “And she was the hardest character to cast”— until Grace Gummer came into the picture.

Grace’s mom, Meryl Streep, played a role inspired by Ephron in the 1986 film Heartburn (which Ephron had adapted from her semi-autobiographical novel), and “Grace knew Nora when she was a child,” Obst explains. “So she had a real sense of her that other actors didn’t have. Every time I saw Grace in that outfit and wig, I was happy.”

Ephron isn’t the only real person portrayed in Good Girls Revolt. Joy Bryant costars as Eleanor Holmes Norton, the activist (and future congresswoman) who first explained to the women employees of Newsweek that the glass ceiling keeping them in place as researchers, not reporters, “was illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1965,” Obst says.

“Women civil-rights leaders like Norton haven’t gotten their due, so we didn’t want to fictionalize her. We got her permission to make her a character, and she reads all the scripts. Isn’t that cool?”

Obst feels equally psyched to be working in streaming TV. “If I’d tried to do this as a feature film, it would’ve been an indie movie that would’ve taken me five years to make,” says Obst, whose previous television credits include TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland and The Soul Man. “On Amazon, it can reach many more people, and it only took me a year to get it made. Given your druthers, what would you do?”