Jill Soloway

Soloway’s TV writing career began on shows such as The Oblongs, Nikki and The Steve Harvey Show. Soloway followed those shows by writing for four seasons on the HBO original series Six Feet Under, ultimately serving as co-executive producer. Six Feet Under ran for five seasons from 2001 to 2005.[25] Soloway received 3 Emmy nominations in 2002, 2003 and 2005 for Outstanding Drama Series.[26] Soloway's short story, Courteney Cox's Asshole, caught the attention of Alan Ball and led to the job.[11]

Soloway later wrote episodes of Dirty Sexy Money, Grey's Anatomy, and Tell Me You Love Me and was executive producer/showrunner for the second season of Showtime's United States of Tara, created by Diablo Cody, as well as HBO's How to Make it in America, created by Ian Edelman.

In August 2016, Amazon premiered a Soloway-directed pilot of I Love Dick, based on the novel by the same name by Chris Kraus.[27] It was later picked up for a full season,[28] which premiered on May 12, 2017.[29]

Soloway created the pilot Transparent for Amazon.com, which became available for streaming and download on February 6, 2014, and was part of Amazon's second pilot season.[30][31] Faith Soloway and her sibling Jill collaborate, including serving as co-writers on Transparent.[32] They were inspired by their parent who came out as transgender.[15] The show stars Gaby Hoffmann, Jay Duplass, and Amy Landecker as siblings whose parent (played by Jeffrey Tambor) reveals she is going through a significant life transition.[33] The pilot for Transparent was picked up by Amazon Studios.[13][34]

As part of the making of the show, Soloway enacted a "transfirmative action program", whereby transgender applicants were hired in preference to nontransgender ones.[13] As of August 2014, over eighty transgender people have worked on the show, including two transgender consultants.[13] All the bathrooms on set are gender-neutral.[35]

Soloway wrote Hoffmann's role on Transparent especially for Hoffmann after seeing her performance on Louie.[36] Transparent premiered all ten episodes simultaneously in late September 2014.[37] The show wrapped its fourth season in 2017, and Amazon has renewed it for a fifth and final season to be released in 2019.[38]

Soloway received two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series in 2014 and 2016 for Transparent and the show has received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series.[26]

Soloway's first film was a 13-minute short titled Una Hora Por Favora, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The film stars Michaela Watkins and Wilmer Valderrama. The film tells the story of a woman (Watkins) who hires a day laborer (Valderrama) to do some handy work at her home, but her relationship soon goes beyond professional.[39][40][41]

Soloway’s debut at Sundance Afternoon Delight (2013) won the Directing Award.[42] The film follows Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a thirty-something woman who is struggling to rekindle her relationship with her husband (Josh Radnor), and ultimately befriends an exotic dancer (Juno Temple).[43] In an interview by IndieWire, Soloway described their personal connection to the film's central character saying, "There’s a lot of me in Rachel’s journey. I’ve never brought a stripper home, but I’ve always loved reading the memoirs of strippers and sex workers. I feel like they’re the war reporters for women. They go to the front lines of a very particular kind of extreme conflict and live there, then write about it so we can experience it with them."[44]

Afternoon Delight played at national and international film festivals and was nominated for multiple awards, including a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Performance for Kathryn Hahn, and a Spirit Award for First Feature.[45]

In June 2019, Soloway signed on to write, direct and produce the Red Sonja remake.[46][47]

Soloway wrote the novella Jodi K., which was published in the collection Three Kinds of Asking For It: Erotic Novellas, edited by Susie Bright. Soloway's memoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story, was released in hardcover in 2005, and then in paperback in 2006. In 2018, Soloway published another book, She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy, with Ebury Press, a division of Penguin Random House.

Jewish religion and culture, queer sexuality, and gender are recurring themes in Soloway's show, Transparent.[32] According to Soloway, "The Transparent narrative is not, then, just or even mostly about transition and transgender. It’s about big themes like familial secrets and transformation, revelation and change, all of which are rendered through the specificity and magic of television images and sounds, which create imaginative worlds."[32]

Besides exploring the themes around transitioning and having a transgender parent, Soloway incorporates the female gaze often. In an interview with the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, Soloway says “I'm always trying to bring the concept of play into the female gaze.” [48] In September 2016, Jill Soloway delivered a speech at the Toronto International Film Festival [49] and discussed the concept of the female gaze. Soloway divided the female gaze into three parts: reclaiming the female body, engaging the gaze, and returning the gaze. Wanting to be a different director and revolutionize the television arts and film industry, Soloway used this platform to include the female gaze, in an attempt to show the viewers what women would feel, see, and experience when they were being watched by the opposite sex. It was mainly to show the women’s perspective through the use of artistic camera techniques. Soloway explained that storytelling about the female gaze was a “conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool.”[49] For example, in the television show titled I Love Dick, Soloway said that this show was really about “the female voice...and creating protagonism for women.”[50]. According to an article by Madeline Berg, the show portrays the male character as the object and “used for a sexual end.”[51]

Soloway has said that they have always been writing similar themes, calling it "The Heroine's Journey," which is about "repairing the divided feminine: the wife and the other woman confronting each other--mom, stripper. That I think women's journeys are really about repairing these sort of divided parts of ourselves. And this divide in our culture that I think is responsible for so much that is a problem in our culture."[52]

Soloway is a strong supporter of feminism[63] and co-founded the website Wifey.tv[64] which is described as, "a curated video network for women"[65] that includes content created by and for women. In an interview by Forbes, Soloway discusses the site saying, "I really like when our content appears to contradict itself at first glance. One day we might post something about sexism or the male gaze, then the next day post something that might be seen as precisely too sexy or raunchy, but it comes from a female creator or artist so it’s relevant. We love the conversation and don’t feel as dependent on insisting on a particular point of view."[66]

Soloway also co-founded the East Side Jews collective,[67] which is funded by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.[68] The collective "brings together 20- and 30-something Jews in Silver Lake and the surrounding neighborhoods of Los Angeles for offbeat, too-cool-for-shul events that tend to be heavy on comedy and light on Jewish ritual."[67]

Soloway co-wrote The Thanksgiving Paris Manifesto with Eileen Myles in 2016,[69] which is a feminist manifesto about the pornography industry. The manifesto was posted on topplethepatriarchy.com, a domain purchased by Myles and Soloway.[69] The manifesto opens with, "We shouldn’t be starting with porn but we must. We support the idea of a porn industry and the idea of people making a living photographing and sharing images of sex but we don’t support an industry that exclusively distributes portrayals of almost exclusively male pleasure and climax."[70]