Shainee Gabel

With her first feature film getting released in time to qualify for the Academy Awards, 35-year-old Shainee Gabel may be on the fast track in the film world now, but her journey has been long and slow.

Gabel wrote the script for A Love Song for Bobby Long six years ago, after she made a splash with a documentary called Anthem, about traveling across America.

Scarlett Johansson signed up immediately to play the high-school-dropout lead, but that wasn't enough to get the film off the ground back in 1998, because she was only 15 and hadn't done anything big yet. By the time Gabel was ready to start shooting two years ago, however, Johansson was plenty popular ‑- piping hot, by Hollywood standards ‑- which helped get John Travolta and a group of high-powered New York producers to jump in.

All of that still didn't speed things up as much as Gabel wanted, and she suspects her gender is to blame. "It's a tough thing to articulate," she says. "You just know that there are hesitations. It's the way people treat you or talk to you."