The Green Girl
Synopsis
Susan Oliver is most famously known as Star Trek's first iconic Green Orion Slave Girl in the original 1964 pilot. One of the most recognizable women of the 1960’s, she was a highly prolific actress who worked frequently from the 1950's until well into the 1980's. Susan was also a record-setting female aviator who won five world records for light planes and eventually became one of the first women qualified to fly the Lear Jet.
The 1970’s saw her interests turn largely towards writing and directing. An original member of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women in 1974, she fought Hollywood’s entrenched “boy’s club” mentality to eventually become one of the only women directing major TV shows in the early 1980's, including M*A*S*H.
Tragically taken by cancer in 1990 at just 58 years old, Susan Oliver has been inexplicably forgotten by many in the industry to which she gave so much of herself. This documentary chronicles and celebrates the remarkable achievements of her enigmatic and all-too-short life.
Cast & Credits
Cast:
Susan Oliver (Peyton Place / BUtterfield 8)
Lee Meriwether (Batman)
David Hedison (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea)
Nancy Malone (The Twilight Zone / Star Trek: Voyager)
Kathleen Nolan (The Real McCoys)
Crew:
Written, Produced & Directed by: George Pappy (Few Options)
Editor: Amy Glickman Brown (Hollywood 411)
Composer: Lyle Workman (Superbad / Forgetting Sarah Marshall)
Festivals & Awards
Winner: Best Documentary, Valley Film Festival
Winner: Audience Award, FirstGlance Film Fest Hollywood
Winner: The Documentary Award, The WIFTS Foundation Int’l Visionary Awards
Reviews
“A masterful piece of work. Breathtakingly good.”
-- Kathleen Nolan, actress & former President of the Screen Actors Guild
“A terrific movie. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen about sixties and seventies television – and unfortunately, I realized as I typed that sentence, one of the only documentaries about sixties and seventies television.”
-- Stephen Bowie, The Classic TV History Blog
“I was seriously moved by the film. Her story is one that needs to be told.”
-- Mary Czerwinski, DVD Geeks
“A triumph of research, clip choices and editing, the documentary combines two threads, the biographic and the historic, involving thirty years of film and television, from the 50s to the 80s.”
-- Maria Elena de las Carreras, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
“There is a compelling story in Ms. Oliver's near-stardom, another essay on the vagaries of Hollywood, with its liberal sensibility propelled by a conservative business model. Or perhaps that the value of a well lived, effervescent life should trump that of any legacy or estate left behind.”
-- Kurt Halfyard, Twitch Film