Profile: Changing the Story

Writer and producer Mimi Munson ’92 focuses on overlooked history and overlooked people, increasing her value in an industry trying to move beyond its default white-American-male narratives.

Ian Aldrich

Over her more than two-decade career in television and film, Mimi Munson ’92 has carved out a fascinating niche for herself. You won’t find her on screen, but as a writer, historian, and researcher she’s made the stories brought to audiences richer, more historically accurate – and surprising.

“The work I do is to keep writers and directors focused on staying connected to the emotional realities of people in different times,” says Munson, whose credits include films such as Master and Commander (researcher), Bonnie and Clyde (researcher), and The Post (researcher) as well as television projects such as Chernobyl (researcher), Roe v. Wade (researcher/story consultant), and The Queen’s Gambit (researcher). “That means keeping things in the right lane in terms of language, costumes, sets, and props, even the actor’s coaching.”

Munson, who studied the Medieval Renaissance and creative writing at Columbia University, is selective about her projects. As a young writer, she had ambitions of becoming an investigative journalist and, in her work today, she leans hard into stories that reveal something new about our past and where we’ve come from. Libraries, historical societies, and forgotten documents become her friends as she unearths small details and fleshes out broader historical themes. Writer and director Scott Frank, with whom Munson has worked on several projects, credits her for developing the key storylines that formed Godless, his highly lauded 2017 Netflix miniseries about the 19th century American West.

“She gave me about 20 of what she felt were the best Western novels to read,” he told Terri Gross in a 2018 Fresh Air interview. “She’d been doing a little research about mining towns in the Southwest…[and] all throughout there were several towns…where all the men would die in a single day in an accident. And the women would be left behind, stranded. And they would either leave, or they would try and make a go of it….And so suddenly I had this place that I could write about that was very clear.”

Munson’s attunement to overlooked history and overlooked people has only increased her value in an industry that has tried to move beyond its default white-American-male narratives. In the 2020 National Geographic series Barkskins, which is based on the Annie Proulx novel of the same name, Munson worked closely with Frank on interpreting the book for the screen. Set in what is now Quebec in the mid-to-late 1600s, the show tracks the tale of two European immigrants as they navigate the New World. But it also tells, with some depth, the stories of the Wendat and Mohawk tribes.

Munson, who worked on a production team that included native consultants and writers, would have preferred to see even more focus placed on the Native American characters, but she also says the development of Barkskins still represents progress.

“Ten or 15 years ago, they wouldn’t have even hired me,” says Munson, who’s worked on projects that have earned five Oscars and 19 Emmys. “Back then, if you tried to include stories about the Black community, or Latinos, or older people, or gay people, you’d be looked at as really fringe or eccentric for trying to tell those stories. It was too off topic. That’s changed.”

As such, Munson, who resides in Maine with her teenage daughter, sees an opportunity for her work to blossom further. Recently, she and friend Dr. Tiffany Gill ’92, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, have begun exploring ways they can collaborate. Munson sees a chance to “bridge the gap between academia and Hollywood” so that mainstream films better reflect the people who are consuming them.

“What I’m hopeful about in my work is that people will get a real sense of history that can inform them as human beings, and also help people be more empathetic to people of other cultures,” says Munson, who recently wrapped up work on an historical drama for the Obama Foundation and is in the early stages of a possible production on Gloria Steinem and the early years of Ms. Magazine. “Getting people to transcend their differences with one another is so important right now, and I think really good dramatic fiction and historical fiction can help people accomplish that.”