PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN.

- CLAUDIA WEILL PHOTO (COLOR): THE WAY THEY WERE A still from Claudia Weill's 1978 film, Girlfriends. Weill discovered while editing the movie that Stark had hired a shadow editor, working just around the corner, to secretly cut a version different from Weill's. With an $800,000 boost from PBS's American Playhouse and a Sundance premiere (along with Richard Linklater's Slacker and Todd Haynes's Poison), it finally made it to movie screens and became the first feature movie by an African American woman to be distributed theatrically in the United States. When the film wrapped, Tewkesbury asked Altman if she should go to film school. [Extracted from the article]