Nicole Perlman was tired of hearing she couldn’t write “masculine” movies, and now she’s the first female writer credited on a Marvel Studios film.
Nicole Perlman
Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images
The Guardians of the Galaxy
Marvel
When Nicole Perlman was an imaginative, nerdy kid growing up in Boulder, Colo., in the 1990s, her childhood hero was Ray Bradbury. She even met the science-fiction legend once, as a special present for her 12th birthday; he signed her copy of Dandelion Wine. With Bradbury's inspiration and her father's encouragement, Perlman entered some writing contests for aspiring sci-fi authors. "I think when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I won," she told BuzzFeed earlier this month at the bustling Los Angeles coffee shop Shaky Alibi. "The prize was going to Space Camp. I didn't get to because I had to have jaw surgery that summer." Laughing to herself, she shook her fist to the sky: "Still, to this day, I'm like, 'Spaaaaace Caaaaaamp!'"
Last summer, Perlman finally got to go to outer space — or, at least, pretend to — when she visited the set of Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy, which opens in theaters on Friday. She was instantly transported to a sci-fi world in a far-flung corner of the cosmos. "There was 600 people on set, making alien prosthetics, and … the alien swords and the ray guns and all that," she said. "That was pretty cool."
What made it even cooler: Before James Gunn (Slither, Super) signed on to direct and co-write the movie, and certainly before Chris Pratt (Zero Dark Thirty), Zoe Saldana (Avatar), and WWE fighter Dave Bautista signed up to be its live-action stars, Perlman was toiling away for two and a half years, trying to figure out how to assemble the Guardians onto the big screen.
If it weren't for her, the movie may not have existed at all.
