Wendy Finerman

Unlike most of her Wharton classmates who headed to Wall Street after graduation, Finerman started her career in entertainment at The Movie Channel in New York. She later went west to become a business affairs executive for Universal Television. Finerman joined Steve Tisch Productions as vice president of production and development in 1985, where she came across the galleys for Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump. Today Finerman runs Wendy Finerman Productions and has produced such popular films as The Fan, Stepmom, Drumline, and the British-Academy-award-winning Fairy Tale: A True Story. She put her determination into the 2006 hit, The Devil Wears Prada. She optioned the treatment by Lauren Weisberger inexpensively before it became a surprise bestseller, shepherded the script through numerous writers, championed the hiring of first-time film director David Frankel, and lured star Meryl Streep into a project with a modest $35 million production budget. The resulting film earned more than $330 million in worldwide box office and nabbed a Golden Globe win and Oscar nomination for Streep’s devilish comic turn.