Roots in Chicago

ACT NOW! is an outgrowth of MOVIExperience™, David Shepherd's method of creating improvisational movies. Shepherd, whose role in producing professional improvisational theater in Chicago in the 1950's earned him the nickname "father of improv," is credited with launching the careers of Alan Alda, Elaine May, Mike Nichols and others.

Shepherd, 76, developed MOVIExperience™ in the 90's as a means of exposing non-professionals to the art of improvisational filmmaking. Fletcher first met Shepherd in 1998, when he led a MOVIExprience™ at her bungalow-style home in Belchertown.

Shepherd lives in New York, but he paid a visit to the Pioneer Valley after a friend moved here. According to Fletcher, Shepherd liked the area and thought the people here would be receptive to his MOVIexperience™ format. When Shepherd asked his friend about potential collaborators, Fletcher's name came up. "I was doing PR at the time, and he thought maybe I had a client that would work somehow," Fletcher recalls. "When he called me I didn't have an appropriate client, but my birthday was coming up so I said, 'Would you do it in a house?'"

Shepherd agreed, and the rest is history. "When I was exposed to MOVIExperience™, I said, 'Aha! This is perfect!'" Fletcher says. "You don't have to talk about self-esteem... You just give these girls the tools to express themselves in a very popular medium which has such influence in their lives."

Fletcher apprenticed with Shepherd for the next two years. She helped him conduct about a dozen MOVIExperiences™ across the country, and she came to consider him a mentor. "One of the things that I've found about improvising and working with David is that I have become eminently more flexible," she says. "It is amazing. I can see alternative ways of doing almost anything - and I grew up thinking there was one way to do something."

Fletcher figured that if MOVIExperience™ could have such a significant impact on the way she lived, then it would probably be healthy for other people as well, particularly young girls with fragile senses of self. This was, she says, "an epiphany career-wise."

Before she discovered MOVIExperience™ and founded ACT NOW!, Fletcher, who is not married and has no children, did everything from start her own PR company (Fletcher Associates, which has subsidized ACT NOW! thus far) to establish a video-production business (the Amherst-based Equinox Documentary and Promotional Video). In between, she headed up Mount Holyoke's PR department and acted with an improv-comedy group called Shtick and Stones.

But she became convinced that Shepherd's format would appeal to preteens. Children, she says, "grow up improvising when they play, when they play house. They just don't say that it's improvising; they say, 'I'm playing. You be the mom, I'll be the dad.' It's not foreign to them, really."

In particular, Fletcher became convinced that the format was suited to 11- to 14-year-old girls - "because that's where their self-esteem starts to dip." If she could boost girls' self-confidence while simultaneously introducing them to the movie industry, all the better.

"Our diet is violence -we're fed on that - and that's got to have an impact," she says. "the people that are making the decisions are mostly men. And I think that if women get themselves into those decision-making positions, we will see other images."