In 1906, a 33-year-old French woman named Alice Guy-Blache directed a production with 300 extras and massive painted backdrops, one of the most ambitious films ever attempted at that point. A few years earlier she had been a secretary typing letters to pay her family's rent. This episode traces how a childhood of instability, a fierce boarding school mother superior, and a string of family deaths pushed her to master the new technology of the typewriter and land a job at a photography supply company run by Leon Gaumont, with Gustave Eiffel as president.

The conversation follows her to the Lumiere brothers' March 1895 projection demonstration, where the engineers saw a mechanical triumph and she saw a blank canvas, and to her 1896 film about a fairy pulling babies from a cabbage patch, widely considered the first narrative fiction film. It c ...