Paula Patton has officially attached herself to
the currently in development film project Audrey’s
Run, written by Emily Abt which
deals with an African-American woman running for mayor in Boston.
Abt’s script
was one of four scripts to make the first ever Athena List, created by the Athena
Film Festival, as a counterpoint
to the more well known Black List – the yearly list of supposedly
great but, as yet, unproduced screenplays.
However the
Athena List is designed to be more gender conscious, created to bring recognition to great unproduced feature screenplays with “strong
female protagonists”.
The inaugural
batch of scripts and the screenwriters will be honored at the festival this
weekend in New York City.
Melissa
Silverstein, who is one of the co-founder of the Athena Film Festival said: “If you follow Hollywood, you know the Black
List and you know how it has become important in itself, being on this list. There
seems to be a need out there to have a conversation about this lack. Hopefully
it will spur people to think that you can make a movie about a woman running
for office as easily as you can about a man running for office…. A lot of the
time, people get stuck in what they’re comfortable with. Our objective with the
Athena List is to make people pay attention for a moment.”