On Tuesday night, Hollywood heavyweights and their future colleagues gathered together for cocktails and meaningful conversation in Hancock Park to celebrate 15 years of The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Mentorship Program. The program, put on in partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and the Entertainment Industry Foundation, works to pair young women from under-resourced high schools across Los Angeles with powerful female executives in entertainment.
The backyard of a private L.A. home buzzed with laughter and chatter as mentors and former mentees caught up on both their professional and personal lives. “I think it’s so special to see people wanting to pay it forward, to see people so invested in it,” said 2013-14 mentee Paola Franco, now an executive on Netflix’s drama development original series team. “I spoke to so many people tonight who were like, ‘I was 16 and had no idea where life was going to take me.’ I wish that I had somebody who really steered me in the right direction.”
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For Franco, that person was former Amazon Studio head Jennifer Salke, who was then president of entertainment at NBC. Salke mentored Franco when she was a 16-year-old student at City Honors Preparatory High School, who dreamed of being an intelligence agent. But her dreams changed once she saw Salke (who later officiated Franco’s wedding) in action. “I had very loving and supportive parents, but I didn’t know anybody in the industry,” Franco recalled. “And Jen really was that person who came into my life and lifted the veil and was like, this is a world that you can be part of, this is a career. Seeing her in her element was really life changing for me.”
Advertising professional Katherine Haro, a mentee from the 2018-19 cohort, credits her mentor Dee Dee Myers, then the executive vp worldwide corporate communications at Warner Bros., for giving her the confidence to be her own advocate. “Just always trust yourself,” Haro said of what she learned. “Do right by you. And I think that I’ve always been able to implement that into my day to day. Every decision that I make, I truly do have my back.”
WIE — which celebrated both the 2025 graduating class and its new crop of mentees at THR‘s Women in Entertainment event on Wednesday — doesn’t just offer young women an entrée into Hollywood, it also shows them the plethora of career paths available in the entertainment industry. “Often young women come into the program that don’t know what they want to do, or maybe they want to go into medicine or law or something else, and they see all of these really cool careers and learn how you can do anything in the entertainment industry,” said Lauren Plichta, president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles. “Once they identify, ‘Ooh, I really like this and I want to look into that,’ then their mentors have that pathway to connect them and network and make sure that they get that interview, which is so hard right now to even secure.”
The hands-on approach mentors take with mentees is also the reason for the program’s lasting success. “Biweekly, I would go to Warner Brothers to see Dee Dee. We got to tour Netflix, we got to tour Universal, it was so fun,” Haro says. “I remember when we went to the Universal lot, I got to hang out with the E.T.! I was like, oh my God! E.T. was like my favorite movie as a kid.”
Mentees also get to observe the nitty-gritty of life in the Hollywood fast lane. “I was basically a fly on the wall,” Franco said of her year with Salke. “If she was going to a table read, I was at a table read with her. If she was going to a set visit, I would be there. If she was in an internal meeting with her team, I would be sitting in there. If she was on the phone with an agent, I’d be in the room hearing her navigate and greenlighting a show. Seeing her doing very exciting things and having that front row seat was really life changing. And I think it allowed me to really understand, wow, this is a career.”
The program is equally rewarding for the mentors. “We went through the entire college application process together,” Project Runway producer and BBBSLA board member Jane Cha Cutler said of her mentee. “My little Angelica got a full ride scholarship to Berkeley. I’m going to brag a little! We went to museums, we went to eat, we went to the office. It’s just about spending time together, giving somebody your attention. It is really one of the most valuable things you can do. That experience gave me as much or more than I think it gave to Angelica.”
And as the close-knit crowd last night suggested, the bonds made between mentor and mentee often last far beyond their year-long paring. “We are determined to stay very connected to our kids and to our community by making sure that everyone knows that this is going be a family that’s going to keep loving you and supporting you and being with you for the rest of your life,” Row K Entertainment president, mentor and outgoing BBBSLA Board Chair Megan Colligan told the gathering. “Because we have the power and the energy to do just that.”
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