W Is For Paula Wagner

Oh thank God, it's FRIDAY!!! I've got my youngest nephew's First Communion tomorrow, but tonight will be movies, beer and pizza. A triple ace night in my book. Anyway, enough about my weekend and on to the W day for A to Z.

Paula Wagner got her start in the early 70's in New York as an actress on Broadway, then became a talent agent at Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles when she and her then husband, set designer Robin Wagner moved out there. For 15 years she repped some of the industry's biggest including Sean Penn, Liam Neeson, Kathryn Bigelow, Oliver Stone and the couch jumper himself, Tom Cruise. In 1993, she joined with Cruise to launch Cruise/Wagner Productions and together they produced the Mission Impossible films, which have earned more than 3 billion worldwide. They also launched many of Cruise's other films like The Last Samurai, Vanilla Sky and Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

When she and Cruise bought into United Artists, she served as the studio's CEO from 2006 to 2008, a very rare occurrence for a woman in Tinseltown. She has since gone on to form her own production company, Chestnut Ridge Productions, which not only develops projects for film and television, but also for theater. In October 2012 CRP launched The Heiress on Broadway with Jessica Chastain and David Strathairn.

Paula is quite active in the realm of academia as well. She serves as adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and at Loyola Marymount. This coming fall, she will teach a course at UCLA entitled From Stage to Screen. Wagner also lectures at various universities her recent engagements included USC, Harvard Business School and my own alma mater DePaul University here in Chicago. In addition to her academic duties, Wagner currently serves on the boards of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Film Forum New York.

She has accomplished so much and continues to blaze trails for women in cinema.

Have a great weekend! I'll "see" you tomorrow for X, Very Hard Letter for sure.