Originally published by Women’s Media Center. Find a screening of Lilly near you at lillymovie.com.

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Lilly Ledbetter worked for 19 years at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant before she learned she was being paid significantly less than her male counterparts.

In 1999, she filed a pay discrimination lawsuit against Goodyear, which seven years later ended up before the Supreme Court. When the Court ruled against Ledbetter the following year, her fight continued. Two years after the SCOTUS ruling, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, strengthening protections for victims of pay discrimination in her name.

“It takes a long time to get anything worthwhile done,” Ledbetter told director and screenwriter Rachel Feldman over a decade later, “and you’re going to have highs and lows.”

That hard-earned wisdom guided them both through another long journey: Over the course of 12 years, they collaborated to bring Ledbetter’s story to life on screen. Lilly, coming to theaters nationwide on May 9, stars Patricia Clarkson as Ledbetter, John Benjamin Hickey as her husband, Charles, and Thomas Sadoski as her unrelenting attorney John Goldfarb — and was directed, co-written, and produced by Feldman.

“It’s been a long journey to get the movie to screen,” Feldman recalled in an interview with WMC. “But it was really a testament to Lilly and John believing in me.”

Feldman still remembers the moment when Ledbetter took the stage at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. “There I am, watching television with my husband and very excited, and this Alabama grandma came on stage — with her presence, and her beautiful face, and her lipstick, and her bleach blond hair, and the accent, and she started speaking about fair pay and gender equity in front of millions of people.”

Feldman, whose previous work, primarily in television, ranged from psychological thrillers and science fiction to musicals, grabbed her husband’s shoulder. “There’s a story here,” she said. “This is a movie.” Lilly is her first feature film.

She called the fair pay champion on the phone the next day, but Goldfarb and Ledbetter both advised that she call back in a few years: Ledbetter was already tied up writing her autobiography, Grace and Grit. “There were other people chasing the rights to the book and chasing Lilly’s story who had a lot more Hollywood clout, and certainly a lot more money, than I did,” Feldman explained. But she beat out the studio executives and “highfalutin producers” who also came calling, securing the exclusive movie rights to Ledbetter’s story with the blessing of Goldfard and his legendary client.

“I came to Hollywood at a time when only less than 1 percent of the film and television that was produced was being directed by women,” Feldman pointed out. “Not only did Lilly represent my own story, but the story of so many millions of women — no matter what profession they have been in.”

It seems fitting, then, that Lilly was made possible by women. Inextricably tied to the powerful story of one incredible woman, with Feldman as co-writer and director, the film also boasts, of eight producers, six women alongside her, and a post-production and music department that is “99.9 percent women.” Lilly also wouldn’t be coming to theaters nationwide this week if not for a group of women of a certain age who were hungry to see their own stories take up space.

Although Feldman’s screenplay won prestigious awards, her agents didn’t believe in the project. The studio heads were even harder to win over. “I heard all the clichés: that no one wants to make a movie about a middle-aged woman, nobody wants to make a movie that’s in any way political, nobody wants to make anything that’s vaguely historic.”

Over the course of five years, four producers optioned Feldman’s script, but none got the project off the ground. One even pushed for Feldman to be removed as director, and then rejected 10 other well-known women Feldman suggested as her replacement. It was then that Feldman realized: “This isn’t about me. This is just about the state of gender discrimination in Hollywood.”

When an old friend reached out about helping Feldman find independent funding for the film, she found a way forward. “I don’t come from money. I don’t know how to talk about money,” Feldman explained. “I’m not comfortable raising money.” But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Feldman and Ledbetter found themselves hosting events on Zoom to do just that. Some convenings had 20 people; others had 150. But no matter the size, Ledbetter’s story touched the hearts of everyone who logged on.

“Every woman who invested,” Feldman said, “said, ‘This happened to me in this industry.’ ‘This happened to me in that industry.’ … It became clear that Lilly’s story was a rallying cry for women across the world.” Feldman estimates that 85% of the over 200 investors and donors who made this film possible were women in their 50s and 60s.

When Lilly premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival last October, Ledbetter was already in poor health. She heard about the crying and cheering from the crowd, and its standing ovation for the actors and crew, when her daughter returned to Alabama shortly after. “We really feel like she hung on just to hear about it,” Feldman said. “She passed just a few hours later.”

Ledbetter was deeply involved in the making of the film. She read drafts of the screenplay, offering suggestions on what her character might say. During a private screening of an early cut, she told Feldman: “There’s not enough ballroom dancing.” Before she died in 2024, at age 86, she saw the final cut of the film; Clarkson spins and flies on the dance floor in dance scenes throughout it. “She loved it,” Feldman shared.

“She really understood the heart and mind connection between telling a story that hits you in the heart, and then affects you in the head — a movie that both entertains and enlightens,” Feldman observed, “and she very much wanted her legacy to continue, and for younger generations to know her story.”

Lilly tells the story of “a transformation of a woman from being lost to finding her voice,” Feldman emphasized, “and not only finding her voice for herself, but finding her voice for the world.” The viewer watches Ledbetter in muted colors struggle against misogyny, sexism, and outright discrimination. When she finally steps into her purpose, her world becomes technicolor.

“I wanted to make a movie about a woman,” Feldman enthused, emphasizing that the politics were secondary, to her, to the human story of Ledbetter’s activist evolution. “I wanted to make a movie about a character who has [the] incredible backbone to stand up to justice and get what’s right. I wanted to know what that feels like to be a wife and a mother and a grandmother and put a target on your back, and be the voice and the face of an issue.”

The dark forces that stood in Ledbetter’s way — and continue to stand in the way of feminist progress — also come to life in Lilly. Her male coworkers sexually, physically, and verbally harass her. When she becomes a political force, powerful men have conversations behind closed doors about the dangers of equal pay laws for their business interests before they pull strings to block votes on the equal pay law passed in her name. When Ledbetter travels for the cause, she finds her hotel room ransacked and her brakes cut.

Clarkson’s Ledbetter responds to each obstacle with impressive courage in equal measure. “What gives people this incredible resilience?” Feldman sought to answer in Lilly. “She grew up without electricity and running water. She grew up in poverty. She grew up with a mother who loved her but never said, ‘I love you.’ She grew up in very harsh circumstances, and those circumstances are the kinds of things that can either crush a character or make a character, and it made her one incredible human being. All she really wanted was a life of purpose, and that’s what she got.”

A social impact campaign unfolding alongside Lilly’s theatrical release brings together more than 200 advocates, influencers, large national organizations, and corporate allies — ranging from the Girl Scouts to AARP and including the Women’s Media Center — leveraging Ledbetter’s story as a call to action for economic equality. This Mother’s Day, they urge, give your mom Lilly.

Clarkson confessed to an audience in Los Angeles last week that her mother cried with joy when she found out her daughter was going to play Ledbetter. “It was the greatest privilege of my career, of my life,” she announced before the film screened at the Museum of Tolerance. “Lilly is everybody across this great land — from the north to the south, to the east to the west, whether you are Black or white or brown, whether you are gay or straight or transgender, whether you are Baptist or Jewish or Muslim or Catholic. Lilly is representing all of us — because when women make equal pay, we all win, we all thrive, we all survive.”

Lilly gives us the rare opportunity to share in the stuff of life with a contemporary working-class hero. We watch her dote on her grandchildren, reconnect with her estranged son, and care for her spouse — in sickness and in health. We watch her glide along the dance floor, and we watch her sleep in the car in the parking lot to make it to work on time. We watch her sacrifice so that her children can have a better life, and she can build a beautiful home.

And then, we watch her move mountains.

Lilly reminds us that we each share their very human capacity for grit and grace — that within even the most ordinary of us is a seed that can spark change. It’s a powerful message for this moment, in which attacks on the federal workforce threaten women and families everywhere; women’s names are being literally erased from history; sentiment against diversity, equity, and inclusion threatens to erase decades of progress for women in the workforce; and, in the 15 years since Ledbetter’s namesake legislation for paycheck fairness passed, the wage gap has narrowed by only 7 cents.

“We’re gonna have good times. We’re gonna have bad times. We’re gonna have progressive times and retroactive times,” Feldman observed. “The more people are like Lilly, the more people do stand up and speak out, the better our world will be.”