1 in the Chamber

We made 1 IN THE CHAMBER because Diana had a SECRET BABY. A few years earlier, Annie had waddled into a final interview 9 months pregnant. It turned into a grill-sesh about how she couldn’t possibly fulfill her responsibilities with a newborn. So when Diana got pregnant during the pandemic lockdown, she realized thanks to Zoom she could completely hide her pregnancy to avoid hurting her career. She told no one--not agents, managers, bosses. Only a handful of close friends and family knew. After 18-months of surreal situations, she came clean on social media that she had a 1-year-old. It was a weird way to do it but Covid made people do weird things.

The gender pay gap has barely closed in the past two decades. In 2022, American women earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. In 2002, they earned 80. Claudia Goldin, Harvard professor and 2023 Nobel Prize winner for her trailblazing research on women in the labor market, found the bulk of the gap emerges after the birth of a woman’s first child. Over half (52 percent) of mothers have faced discrimination at work, with one in five having to leave their job.

They say “write what you know” and we wanted to unpack this on screen in a fun way. Our experience was in entertainment, but we figured the next most cutthroat, action-packed, anti-moms-in-the-workforce industry is probably contract-killing. So we channeled our frustration at workplace discrimination into a delightful action-comedy. A spoonful of sugar makes the social-justice-revolution go down.