Marcia Nasatir

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.

Early life Marcia Birenberg was born in Brooklyn and raised in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Jack Birenberg and Sophie Weprinsky Birenberg. Her parents were both Russian Jewish immigrants; her father was in the garment trade. Birenberg graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1943. 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.

Career 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. where she represented screenwriters including Robert Towne and William Goldman.

Nasatir became a story editor at United Artists (UA) in 1974, with the title of vice-president of West Coast Development. Nasatir was the first female vice-president of a major film studio. Among the films she developed at UA were Rocky (1976), Carrie (1976), and F.I.S.T. (1978). In 1978, when Mike Medavoy, Arthur Krim, and three other partners left UA to form Orion Pictures, she became a vice-president at Orion.

At Carson Entertainment and later as an independent producer, and Ironweed (1987). 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), 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. They had two sons, Mark and Seth, before they divorced in 1953. She died in 2021, aged 95 years, in Woodland Hills, California.