Who the F Is … Visual Effects Producer Jenny Fulle?

Who she is: A film-industry veteran who’s done special effects for a ton of blockbuster movies — and gained fame in another venue for an accomplishment in her youth.

What she’s accomplished: If you’ve enjoyed the visual effects in the Charlie's Angels and Matrix films, The Aviator, I Am Legend, Ted, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and any number of others, you can thank Jenny Fulle. If you or any woman you know has played on a Little League baseball team, you can thank her for that too.

Fulle, now CEO of the Creative-Cartel, a visual effects production company, has been working in film with a variety of companies since the 1980s. She broke in 1980, at age 18, as a janitor at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, but soon became a production assistant there, then held positions at DreamWorks, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and other companies before founding the Creative-Cartel a few years ago. She has amassed scads of credits and has become “one of the most powerful lesbians in Hollywood,” as our sibling publication The Advocate wrote in 2007. Her boss at Imageworks, Tim Sarnoff, told The Advocate, “Jenny is everything this industry should stand for. She’s gotten to where she is today with hard work, determination, and a sense of humor.”

Her determination was evident at an early age, when she was a talented young baseball player who didn’t think it was fair that girls couldn’t play in Little League. She wrote a letter protesting the situation to no less than President Richard Nixon. She recalled to The Advocate that she quickly forgot about writing him, but a few months later she received a letter from the cabinet department then known as Health, Education, and Welfare, advising her on how to fight discrimination. She and her mother appealed to city officials in their hometown of Mill Valley, Calif., and encountered nothing but resistance. Then, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, they sued and won, thus forcing Little League to admit girls beginning in 1974. (There were other suits around the nation as well.) Fulle became the first girl to officially play in Little League, and she led her local league in home runs her first year.

Creative-Cartel’s credits include After Earth, Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance, and, most notably, the raunchy talking-bear comedy Ted, Seth MacFarlane’s directorial debut and a box-office triumph. More of the company’s handiwork will be showcased in MacFarlane’s comic western A Million Ways to Die in the West, starring Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson, Neil Patrick Harris, and Amanda Seyfried, hitting theaters May 30. 

Choice quote: “After a couple of years in production, it was, ‘Oh, little Jenny — she used to be a janitor and now she’s a coordinator. Isn’t that cute?’” Fulle says. “People were putting me in a box, and it wasn’t because of my sexuality or my gender but the fact that a few years earlier I was emptying their trash.” — Fulle on her experience at Industrial Light and Magic, to The Advocate in 2007

For more information: Read The Advocate’s profile here and an Outsports article here, and learn about Creative-Cartel as its website.