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Marcia Nasatir (May 8, 1926 – August 3, 2021) was an American film producer and studio executive. She was the first female vice-president of a major movie studio, when she became a vice-president at United Artists in 1974.
Marcia Nasatir | |
|---|---|
 Marcia Nasatir, from a 1977 newspaper photo | |
| Born | Marcia Birenberg May 8, 1926 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | August 3, 2021 (aged 95) Woodland Hills, California |
| Occupation(s) | Film producer, studio executive |
| Relatives | Rose Spector (sister) |
Marcia Birenberg was born in Brooklyn and raised in San Antonio, Texas,[1] the daughter of Jack Birenberg and Sophie Weprinsky Birenberg. Her parents were both Russian Jewish immigrants; her father was in the garment trade.[2] Birenberg graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1943.[3][4] She attended Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin, but did not earn a degree at either school. Her sister Rose Spector was a judge, and the first woman elected to the Texas Supreme Court.[5]
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Nasatir was a divorced mother of two young sons in 1955, when she took a secretarial job with Grey Advertising in New York. "I didn’t need to watch Mad Men — I lived it", she later quipped.[3] She worked as an editor at Dell Publishing and Bantam Books, and as a literary agent with the Ziegler Diskant Agency,[6] where she represented screenwriters including Robert Towne and William Goldman.[7]
Nasatir became a story editor at United Artists (UA) in 1974,[8] with the title of vice-president of West Coast Development.[9] Nasatir was the first female vice-president of a major film studio.[10][11] Among the films she developed at UA were Rocky (1976),[12] Carrie (1976),[13] and F.I.S.T. (1978).[14] In 1978, when Mike Medavoy, Arthur Krim, and three other partners left UA to form Orion Pictures, she became a vice-president at Orion.[5][15]
At Carson Entertainment and later as an independent producer,[3] Nasatir was one of the executive producers of The Big Chill (1983), Vertical Limit (2000), Death Defying Acts (2007), and the documentary Elle (2013), and a producer of Hamburger Hill (1987)[16] and Ironweed (1987).[7] She produced a number of television movies, including Stormy Weathers (1992), The Spider and the Fly (1994), The Courtyard (1995), The Ultimate Lie (1996), A Match Made in Heaven (1997), She made two on-screen film cameos, in Heart Beat (1980) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008),[17] and appeared in several documentaries, including The Big Chill: A Reunion (1999), The Human Face of Big Data (2014), Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women (2014), A Classy Broad: Marcia's Adventures in Hollywood (2016),[18] and What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018).
In 2008, Nasatir found a new audience on YouTube, in Reel Geezers, a film criticism web series, co-starring with her friend, screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.[17] From 2013 to 2017, she served on the board of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation.[3]
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Marcia married music industry executive Mort L. Nasatir in 1947.[19] They had two sons, Mark and Seth, before they divorced in 1953. She died in 2021, aged 95 years, in Woodland Hills, California.[5][15] Her papers are archived in the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[20]
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