We’re counting down the 40 days to NYWIFT’s 40th Anniversary Muse Awards with a look at some of our favorite honorees, all women of vision and achievement who have contributed to the film and television industry. Join us as we look back at #Muse40for40, and buy your tickets for the Muse Awards on Tuesday, December 10th at nywift.org/muse!
#38: Mary Bailey
By Katie Chambers
Mary Bailey was the script supervisor on Rosewater, August: Osage County, Men In Black, and A League of Their Own, among other notable films. With a career spanning more than 50 films and several TV projects, Bailey has worked with a range of producers, actors, and directors, including Mike Nichols, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Jonathan Demme, and Scott Rudin. Her most recent credits include The Goldfinch and The Greatest Showman.
She used her Muse Awards speech to discuss the importance of the role of script supervisors, who are not just “office workers who have wandered onto the set and now perform secretarial duties,” and emphasized that the future of this position needs to be viewed as not a tech-savvy position only, but as the key person in charge of making sure the editing room has everything they need to make a film. She joked that Richard Pryor once told her she was the only “sane person on set”.
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