If working with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Tom Hanks won’t make you successful in the entertainment industry, nothing will. It worked for Emily Gerson Saines, an ’86 NU graduate and manager for actors like Heroes’ Hayden Panettiere and Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon.

Success in the entertainment comes by doing, according to Saines, who spoke to about 30 predominantly film and theater students in Louis Hall on Monday about success, failure and the new age of media.

“I had a laundry list of failures while I was here and there’s no better place to have them,” Saines said. Those failures include doing poorly in a Shakespeare class and getting a song cut from the Waa-Mu Show.

Her accomplishments, however, were considerable. One of the founders of Niteskool (the group responsible for the Girl Talk show), she won a student Emmy for a music video. She also figured out how to write a book (which she did) and interned with Garry Marshall, another NU alum, and Chuck Norris.

“[NU] gives you a tremendous amount of preparation… it forces you to reach inside yourself and create,” Saines said. She emphasized the importance of self-generated opportunities: “You got to just do it and there’s nothing better than that… success and failure are just things you have to experience.”

The Northwestern Women Filmmakers Alliance brought Saines to show a different area of the entertainment industry, said President Jen O’Leary, a Communication junior.

She said, “We are always looking for strong women role models in the film industry to show us that it can be done.”