When two performers who spent half a century turning women’s inner lives into stagecraft put their names on a documentary, it reads less like a financing footnote than an act of canon-building. Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner — partners in work and life since 1971, co-authors of the stage landmark ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’ — have signed on to executive produce ‘Acting Like Women,’ Cheri Gaulke’s history of the feminist performance art that detonated in 1970s Los Angeles. Their imprimatur is leverage a small archival film almost never gets: a way to push a half-buried chapter of art history toward viewers who were never told it existed.

At the center of Gaulke’s film is the Woman’s Building, the Los Angeles space that became an incubator for some of the most fearless performance work of its era. Gaulke, who packed a rusting Volvo and left the Midwest at 21 to join it, tells the story from the inside — not as retrospective but as testimony. As Deadline first reported, Tomlin and Wagner boarded after the film began its festival run, framing it as a portrait of ‘the struggle and the camaraderie of feminist artists’ at a moment when the country was lurching forward on women’s, LGBT and civil rights at once.

The roster the documentary resurfaces — Suzanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, the contemporary trans artist Cassils — is a lineage most museum and film histories quietly skipped, even as its tactics (the body as medium, the personal staged as political) became the grammar of everything from performance art to the modern protest image. Gaulke’s argument is that this was not a fringe but a foundation, and that its omission from the canon was a choice rather than an oversight.

The film refuses to treat that history as settled. It tracks the backlash too — Senator Jesse Helms’s war on the National Endowment for the Arts and on artists like Robert Mapplethorpe — a fight over who deserves public money to make difficult work that rhymes loudly with 2026. A soundtrack that threads Billie Eilish and The Linda Lindas back through Fanny, Phranc and Holly Near makes the generational case explicit: the same nerve, struck again by a younger chorus.

The 90-minute documentary, produced by IAMBE Films, held its world premiere this month at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas and has since screened at Frameline in San Francisco, with a free showing set for July 26 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Tomlin and Wagner have spent careers proving that a woman alone on a stage can hold a country’s contradictions; lending that authority to Gaulke’s film is a bet that the women who first made that argument, in lofts and storefronts fifty years ago, are finally about to be introduced to the audience they were building all along.

Tags: documentary, Acting Like Women, Cheri Gaulke, feminist art, Jane Wagner, Lily Tomlin