How Debra Martin Chase Rebooted Her Career After Three Decades in Hollywood

variety.com:

Angelique Jackson Seven years ago, pioneering film and TV producer Debra Martin Chase was thinking about leaving Hollywood.

The first Black woman to ink an overall deal at any studio, she’d produced such genre-defining hits as “The Princess Diaries,” “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” While getting projects about women and people of color off the ground was never easy, suddenly prospects were stagnant. “It was at a point where Hollywood just wasn’t interested,” she tells Variety, reflecting on the career crossroads from the living room of her apartment in New York, where she lives while her popular CBS series “The Equalizer” is in production. “You’d talk to people — particularly white men — and their eyes would just glaze over.” As Martin Chase approached 30 years in the business, her passion was slipping away.

She thought, “Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me: ‘You’ve had a good career. It’s time to do something else.’” So she turned to her friend Vernon Jordan, the late civil rights attorney, for wisdom. “He let me pour my heart out, then looked at me and, in Vernon’s way, said, ‘You are too old to change careers.

You have invested too much. You have great experience. You have a great reputation. You have relationships. You need to figure out how to make this work,’” she recalls with a knowing chuckle. “It was that slap in the face of reality that you need, and it really was a turning point.” Martin Chase spent the next year reflecting on the way she was doing business and working to find inspiration again. “I needed to reboot myself and my career,” she says.