“When anybody dies, it’s like a library burning,” said Sam Wentworth, an Ada Comstock Scholar who ventured out to Hollywood when she was 16 years old. She considers history to be fundamental to storytelling. For Wentworth, a history and English double major, the past is a fountain of precious and irreplaceable stories. “When you’re writing about something, it’s about more than just you, and about more than just now,” Wentworth said. One of her main goals as a storyteller is to make movies more historically accurate without being indigestible to the mainstream audience. “I’m trying to sneak the vegetable into the dessert,” she said. Wentworth is aspiring to put more stories about older generations onto the silver screen.
Growing up, Wentworth participated in singing and dancing competitions. After a rough middle school experience, she left her hometown. She worked as an actress, assistant casting director and assistant producer.
After sitting on what she described as the “periphery of filmmaking” and having no agency over the story, she was motivated to study storytelling, but didn’t feel confident to engage in this art form. Now at forty years old, she not only wants to be a screenwriter but to write scripts that are uniquely enthralling to her– stories about the past.
Studying history at Smith, particularly with Professor Ernest Benz, allowed Wentworth to see the importance of our society reflecting on its past. She said, “[the class] teaches respect — respecting what happened before you, and respecting what’s going to come after you.” She witnessed Hollywood’s gradual shift to on-screen representation of minority groups. The shift gives her hope that people are starting to tell more nuanced and interesting stories, and the culture, too, is moving in a better direction.
Wentworth learned her first lesson from working in Hollywood while shooting a Volkswagen commercial. “I was so intimidated and out of my element,” Wentworth said. “The makeup lady was very kind to me. In the trailer, she could see I was nervous, and she just went, ‘Honey, you just fake it till you make it.’” She tells this story to Smithies retrospectively. She encourages Smithies to take more risks, assert themselves, and to not be afraid of getting embarrassed. Wentworth thinks that a historically women’s college provides an especially great opportunity to make mistakes. She said, “So raise your hand in class, say the thing that you think is stupid. Even if your thought is half-formed? Go for it. This is the place to do it.”
When she went to Hollywood, Wentworth didn’t expect it to teach her to be kind, but now she is a big believer in treating people with kindness and generosity. Being kind does not only help a person to be more successful professionally, it also allows a team to create real art, which to Wentworth, comes down to devotion and hard work. She said, “kindness and generosity look good all the time, and everywhere — it ages well.”
Wentworth is observant about Hollywood’s impact on how people think about what makes a life interesting. She believes stories come down to an individual’s authentic self, instead of the overblown and dramatic plotlines, with background music and good cinematography. “The meaning is in the small things and in the mundane, it was in the heroic acts that don’t come with music in the background,” Wentworth said, “as sparkly and exciting as Hollywood is, real life is way more exciting. You should treat your own life as just as important. You should be looking at your life as a story.”
Wentworth asked not to include the titles of movies she’s worked on because, “I want people to meet me and evaluate who I am without unrealistic ideas based on flashy locations and Hollywood nonsense. Real life is way more exciting, truly.”
Sam is seriously one of the coolest people on this campus. <3