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What Did It Take to Make ‘Equity,’ a Film About Women on Wall Street?

Anna Gunn in “Equity.”Credit...Sony Pictures Classics

When Sarah Megan Thomas and Alysia Reiner were pitching “Equity,” their film about female executives on Wall Street, they showed potential backers a video of the way women were typically depicted in finance movies: as demeaned assistants, “background players, hookers, strippers,” Ms. Reiner said. Rarely were women the bosses who made the deals, or even the negotiators who enabled them.

And rarer still was the female power player who declares, as the heroine of “Equity” does early on, “I like money.”

“I’m so glad we can sit here, as women, and talk about ambition,” the character, played by Anna Gunn of “Breaking Bad,” continues. “But money doesn’t have to be a dirty word. We can like that, too.”

With “Equity,” a financial thriller that opens Friday, July 29, Ms. Thomas and Ms. Reiner, co-stars and producers of the film, set out to portray the women who take that as an unapologetic stance. In an unusual move, they also sought out those women to finance their work: Much of their budget was raised from 25 female investors, including current and former Wall Streeters, who also shared their own war stories of working in a male-dominated industry. While there are more female financiers now on Wall Street than in generations past, their numbers drop precipitously in the upper reaches of the business, and there has never been a female chief executive of a major investment bank.

“For women, you always had to prove you could to do the job before they give you the job, and for men, they would give them that opportunity before they proved themselves,” said Barbara Byrne, an investment banker. Covering the energy industry at Lehman Brothers in 1980, she contended with outright sexism. “There was always this view that ‘she would run off and marry one of the Goldman partners’ and be gone,” Ms. Byrne said. Her compensation, too, was unequal. “People are paying you for your potential, but if they think you’re going to leave, they can justify giving that 10 percent to someone else they think of as a long-term player,” she said. “And yet, I’ve outlasted all those long-term players. I’ve now been doing this career for 36 years.”

Ms. Byrne is now a vice chairwoman of banking at Barclays and a producer of “Equity.” With an all-female creative team — including the director, Meera Menon, and the screenwriter, Amy Fox — the film is positioned to counter the narrative of I-banker bros and Hollywood glass ceilings. In recent hit finance films, like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” professional women are secondary players — at best — or eye candy. Indies like “Margin Call” fare slightly better in representing women with power, but “Working Girl,” in the big hair ’80s, might be the last time a woman was ascendant on Wall Street onscreen. Minorities hardly figure; in the 1996 comedy “The Associate,” Whoopi Goldberg has to, “Tootsie”-like, invent a white male partner to succeed.

Ms. Thomas came up with the idea for “Equity” and developed it with Ms. Reiner, whose acting credits include Fig on “Orange Is the New Black,” as the first film for their independent production company, Broad Street Pictures. Their goal was a diverse cast, even within a male-centric universe, so Ms. Reiner’s character is married to a black woman. “We don’t have to talk about that, because it just is,” Ms. Reiner said. With female backers, they also weren’t subject to the normal demands of studio filmmaking: no gratuitous nudity or foregrounded love stories. “Nobody said, ‘The women are talking to each other too much,’” Ms. Reiner said.

“Equity” had its premiere at Sundance, where Sony Pictures Classics bought distribution rights for $3.5 million. Ms. Thomas and Ms. Reiner declined to reveal the budget, except to say that it was small. Investments came in at different amounts, starting at $25,000, said Candy Straight, an investor and the executive producer. “If the question is, will we make money on this movie, the answer is yes,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and Ms. Reiner were also clear on one other point: “The women in this movie made more money than the men, as a whole,” Ms. Thomas said.

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Some investors of the film “Equity.” Standing, from left, Deborah Carstens, Candy Straight, Salima Habib, Janice Reals Ellig, Christine Toretti, Linda Zwack Munger, Audrey McNiff, Susan Bevan, Suzanne Ordas Curry and Anne Erni. Seated, from left, Linnea Roberts, Monica Mandelli and Barbara Byrne.Credit...Robin Holland

“Equity” follows Ms. Gunn’s Naomi Bishop, a high-flying investment banker with one recent stumble, as she jockeys for a tech firm’s big initial offering. “I like that we meet her when she has her first sort of epic failure,” Ms. Gunn said. Ms. Thomas plays the vice president helping her score the deal, and Ms. Reiner is investigating hedge funders for the Justice Department. Motherhood and its place in career-building is a notable part of the story — there’s a hidden pregnancy, a detail the investors vouched for as authentic. But Naomi is single and childless, a departure from Ms. Gunn’s “Breaking Bad” character, Skyler, whose fate was bound up with her family’s. “Equity” is Ms. Gunn’s first leading feature role, and she wanted it to be a leap, so the workplace focus “felt like a real gift,” she said.

Part of her research involved speaking to the investors, like Ms. Byrne. “She talked a lot about the balance, and the hours that are put in, and the dedication it takes, and the fact that you have to be twice as prepared, and twice as sharp, and twice as strong,” Ms. Gunn said, all while making sure not to seem either too tough or too pliable. “It’s a real dance that women have to do.”

Ms. Byrne said among her favorite moments in the film was one in which Naomi was told she was perceived as being difficult. “That has certainly been said about me,” Ms. Byrne said. “What was I told a couple of weeks ago? ‘You were overbearing.’ That’s mostly because I’m expressing an opinion.”

For the investors, the appeal of the film was, in some ways, that spark of recognition, of seeing aspects of their professional lives onscreen. Linnea Roberts, who recently retired as a partner at Goldman Sachs, said her decision to invest came when “I read the first page of the script — that moment where she’s watching a competitor take a company that she covered public. That happens all the time.”

Pregnancy and maternity leave also loomed large. When Ms. Roberts entered the business, in the 1990s, she said, “no one overtly told you this, but it was understood that you didn’t have a child until you were managing director.” Now, younger female associates have children, she said, but the timing is “still, sadly, in the dialogue” when bosses decide who to promote, as a character in “Equity” fears.

Though the status of women in the field has improved, “it still has a long way to go,” said Ms. Straight, who started her career in 1969, at Bankers Trust, and is now an independent director of Neuberger Berman mutual funds.

For all the programs and mentorships that promote diversity in banking, “there is a kind of hypermasculinity that still exists, and is emphasized,” said Melissa S. Fisher, a cultural anthropologist and academic who has studied and written about Wall Street. “It’s an institution that’s based on the assumption that it’s a male who is working 24/7.”

That is a reality that “Equity” does not shy away from. “This film might not necessarily be the marketing piece to get women onto Wall Street,” said Ms. Roberts, who spent the last few years of her career spearheading initiatives to get women up the ladder. “But I do think it raises a lot of the right questions. You have to own the problems and the questions first, before we can do anything about them.”

A lot of the investors were brought together by Ms. Straight, a corporate veteran, who held meet-and-greets with Ms. Thomas and Ms. Reiner for groups of high-ranking Wall Street women, many of whom already knew and supported one another.

“What resonates the most is the title, ‘Equity,’” Ms. Byrne said. “When do we get our fair share, when do we get a seat at the table? There’s a lot of great stories that aren’t being told, because the women can’t get a stake. I backed them because I could.”

“Those who can, do,” she added. “My mother always told me that. So we could, and we did.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Women Run Wall Street. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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