Motion picture industry veteran Lucy Fisher D ’67 is a prolific producer, executive producer, and studio executive who has had a hand in the success of such classics as The Color Purple (1985), Jerry McGuire (1996), and Men in Black (1997), as well as Academy Award winners Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and The Great Gatsby (2013). Now in her second term as President of the Producers Guild of America, Lucy is co-head of Red Wagon Entertainment, a production company she runs with her husband, Doug Wick. The company, which brought The Divergent Series to the big screen, is slated to begin shooting the upcoming TV series Joe Pickett, based on the bestselling book series, while three other film projects are underway.

Lucy has seen a lot of change over her decades in the industry. Most recent upheavals have centered on the impact of streaming, Hollywood’s reckoning with diversity, and the challenges brought by COVID-19. “It’s a different time and a different business and we’re all kind of in flux, but we know that you’ll always want to be entertained,” Lucy says. “People always want entertainment, and they’ll always want stories. It’s just a matter of how they get parceled out and the fact that it’s now called content instead of a movie.”

Lucy’s own career story has a few dramatic surprises. A self-described “kind of hippie” back at the Dwight School for Girls, she graduated from Harvard with a degree in English and moved to Los Angeles with the intent of going into publishing. Instead, a chance encounter set her on a path to become a script editor and reader at United Artists. She never looked back, ascending the executive ladder at a number of big studios, including MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Sony. One memorable, Hollywood-esque scene from her career was when Francis Ford Coppola “got down on his knees in the middle of the street” and begged her to be Head of Production for his Zoetrope Studios. Since her experience thus far had been on the administrative side of production, Lucy’s first reaction was: “I don’t know if I’m qualified to do that.” But then she thought of her mom, Naomi Bartoff D ’41, “a do-it-yourself kind of girl” who always said: “Any job you can get, you can do.” Mom was proved right yet again.

While she takes pride in the films she’s been a part of, Lucy is also proud of the work she’s done for other working mothers and families. During her tenure at Warner Bros., where she served as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Production, she asked her boss if she could reduce her hours and salary in order to spend more time with her husband and three daughters. Not only did she succeed in negotiating and extending her contract, she also founded the Warner Bros. Daycare Center, which has to date served over 2,500 families.

In Lucy’s mind, being a mother has helped her to become better at her craft. “Being a mother actually trains you to be a producer…because you have a lot of things go wrong,” she said. “You have to have enough faith in what you’re doing—and sometimes with very little to support that faith. Usually, it’s the producer’s care that is carrying this little baby across until it becomes a full human—something that somebody else can actually see and recognize. It’s a very good feeling.”