![\"Alexa](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/movie_magic_610.jpg\" "\\"movie_magic_610\\"")
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Foreman with Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne during TCM\u2019s Employee Co-host Festival in March 2011. She is introducing her movie pick, The Last of Sheila, a 1973 film written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, directed by Herbert Ross, and starring James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett, and Dyan Cannon.<\/em><\/p>\n By Sarah Achenbach \u201988<\/p>\n Like most of America, Alexa Foreman was smitten with child star Hayley Mills, but what she discovered that day at the theatre, popcorn in hand and eyes as wide as Mills\u2019, was a passion for the magic of the movies. This love has inspired her career as a film historian, author, producer, and, since the early 1990s, senior researcher with Turner Classic Movies. <\/p>\n As a teenager, Foreman graduated to watching Bette Davis and other icons in classic Hollywood films shown on WTCG, Atlanta\u2019s independent TV station. She even flirted with becoming an actress, but true to the Hollywood clich\u00e9, what she really wanted to do was direct: \u201cI love the idea of putting together the whole production and being in charge, not just being in a scene.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1973, Foreman\u2019s first year at Hollins, there weren\u2019t many female directors\u2014or a clear path for women behind the camera, only in front of it. What Hollins had, though, was a film studies program and a liberal arts curriculum that welcomed\u2014and expected\u2014students to create new paths. \u201cHollins pushed me in the right direction,\u201d says Foreman, who graduated with honors as a double major in English and film. \u201cWe were given full attention in class and full support as young women. We were able to cut to the chase and pursue the studies that we wanted.\u201d And film was finally garnering the attention she always felt it deserved: \u201cFilm was getting to be established as an art form and looked at like literature. I also became fascinated with it as part of history.\u201d<\/p>\n She knew a little about early women directors, editors, and screenwriters and learned more in film classes taught by English professor Richard H.W. Dillard and film professor Tom Atkins, such as Dillard\u2019s Short Term class on films of the Great Depression. Foreman immersed herself in all things film at Hollins, creating a short film, penning a seventy-plus page senior thesis on Citizen Kane<\/em>, and even serving a two-year tenure as president of the Hollins Cinema Society. (She laughingly admits that screening the Nancy Drew movies of her youth in Dana might not have been the most popular programming choice, but the experience helped secure subsequent jobs.) <\/p>\n Post-graduation, Washington, D.C., not Hollywood, beckoned. With Jimmy Carter in the White House, it was a good time to be a Georgian in the nation\u2019s capital, even one interested in a seemingly incongruent career choice for a town steeped in politics. She landed a volunteer job with the American Film Institute, eventually working her way up to theater manager and a whopping $3,000-per-year paycheck. \u201cMy job was to get everyone in the theatre and handle complaints, but I saw movies I will never see again.\u201d One such gem was a rare, nitrate (and highly flammable) print of The Scarlet Empress<\/em> with Marlene Dietrich. \u201cIt was silver and glowed. That\u2019s why they call it the \u2018silver screen.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n While in D.C., Foreman discovered an out-of-date encyclopedia of female directors and decided to write her own. Using her film knowledge gleaned at Hollins as the starting point, she researched Mary Pickford, Ida Lupino, Lillian Gish, Frances Marion, and other female film pioneers. \u201cWomen have been directing since 1895, but when movies started making money, the men pushed out the women,\u201d she says. The result was Women in Motion<\/em> (Bowling Green Popular Press, 1984), an in-depth history of women in film. Numerous articles and essays have followed, including co-authoring In the Picture: Stills from the TCM Archives<\/em> (Chronicle Books, 2004), a book of captioned, behind-the-scenes stills from silent films to the 1960s. <\/p>\n Cut to a location change to Atlanta and a montage of film and unrelated jobs, including a six-month stint as program manager (and popcorn-popper, ticket-taker, plumber, and exterminator) for the Rhodes Theatre. For nearly five years, she worked for Films Incorporated renting sixteen-millimeter movies to colleges. \u201cAfter videotape destroyed that market, I had several years of jobs that were taking me in a direction that I hated,\u201d explains Foreman, who studied computer technology from Oglethorpe University during this time period. \u201cThere is not an easy or direct journey to one\u2019s dream job.\u201d<\/p>\n Cue the happy ending. In the early 1990s, Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta launched Turner Classic Movies, a TV channel devoted to the films Foreman loved. Her wealth of film knowledge and writing and researching talents were perfect for the role as researcher. Her early days with TCM played out a little like a scene from her favorite movie genre: the screwball comedy. While the host introduced the next film, Foreman sat just off-stage B.G. (Before Google), fingers at the ready and a mountain of film reference books at her feet. \u201cI had books on the history of the Oscars and Leonard Maltin\u2019s books, just in case Robert Osborne [TCM host] mentioned the number of films Jean Harlow did with Clark Gable.\u201d Now senior researcher, Foreman researches every new title aired and works with the studio unit to make sure that all of the facts are correct.<\/p>\n A big perk of the job is the chance to work with the screen icons, past and present, including Meryl Streep, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Paul Newman, June Allyson, Jason Robards, Oprah Winfrey, Alec Baldwin, Drew Barrymore, and\u2014yes\u2014even Hayley Mills. Foreman has interviewed more than 100 actors, screenwriters, editors, etc., from Hollywood\u2019s golden age for short pieces that run on TCM. She produced Memories of Oz<\/em>, a TCM documentary about The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, and on occasion directs Robert Osborne\u2014the realization of her childhood dream of calling the action.<\/p>\n Another dream was naming an endowed scholarship at Hollins in memory of her biggest fan and fellow movie-lover, her mother Elizabeth Hitz Foreman. Her advice to anyone, not just burgeoning filmmakers: \u201cInterview your family. It\u2019s so important to capture their lives and memories.\u201d<\/p>\n A screenwriter might not have plotted her path precisely as she\u2019s taken it, but Foreman sees the value with every step\u2014and nearly every one of the thousands of movies she\u2019s watched and researched. \u201cMy life was leading to this job,\u201d Foreman reflects. \u201cFilm is something that lasts. You can watch the same movie again and again, and it will never change. You can remember how you were when you first saw it. Seeing all the behind the scenes does not ruin it for me. It\u2019s all part of the history and the magic.\u201d<\/p>\n Sarah Achenbach \u201988 is director of communications for Garrison Forest School in Baltimore. She writes for numerous regional publications and in 2008 co-authored Spirit of Place\/Baltimore’s Favorite Spaces<\/em> with photographer Bill McAllen, which City Paper <\/em>named \u201cBest Book About Baltimore.\u201d She also wrote A Century of Spirit: Garrison Forest School, 1910-2010<\/em>, a 180-page history of the school.<\/strong><\/p>\n Credit: Consider the life-changing powers of Hayley Mills. In 1960, a five-year-old Alexa Foreman \u201977 sat in the dark in Atlanta\u2019s original Rialto Theater. On the screen was Mills, that pluckiest of Walt Disney darlings, smiling and beguiling her way through Pollyanna<\/em>. It was Foreman\u2019s first movie, and after the houselights came up, everything was different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2611,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[44],"class_list":["post-2106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3695,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions\/3695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Consider the life-changing powers of Hayley Mills. In 1960, a five-year-old Alexa Foreman \u201977 sat in the dark in Atlanta\u2019s original Rialto Theater. On the screen was Mills, that pluckiest of Walt Disney darlings, smiling and beguiling her way through Pollyanna<\/em>. It was Foreman\u2019s first movie, and after the houselights came up, everything was different. <\/h4>\n
\nEdward Pio-Roda, courtesy Turner Broadcasting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"