and download. Background and creation Elaine Lee was an actor in the late 1970s New York City theatre and television scene. She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on the long-running NBC soap opera The Doctors; she portrayed the troubled Mildred Trumble, a character modeled after Sissy Spacek's character, Pinky Rose from Robert Altman's film 3 Women. Seeing a lack of range and depth in the roles being offered to female actors, she formed a Manhattan theatre company with her sister, Susan Norfleet Lee, and actor friends which they called Wild Hair Productions. The Lees wrote their own plays for the company to star in, starting with Brief Cases. During the writing of a second play, The Contamination of the Kokomo Lounge, Elaine began pulling together ideas for a science fiction play. The Lee sisters were at a Manhattan bar/cafe called The Library, discussing ideas over a pile of science fiction magazines when illustrator Michael Wm. Kaluta, a neighbor who often sketched there, approached them asking, "Are you science fiction fans?" Elaine kept his card for the future. Elaine Lee was subsequently impressed by seeing Kaluta's art in the West Side Comics store, on a poster showcasing The Studio, an art collective he shared with Barry Windsor Smith, Jeffrey Jones, and Berni Wrightson. Kaluta was impressed by the wit and range of their second play: he recalled thinking: "If they're going to do a science fiction play, they're going to do it very well". Elaine Lee's first draft was on a stack of 5x7 index cards. Lee wrote all the drafts of the script, with some dialogue suggestions from Susan Norfleet and Dale Place. The quality of the material persuaded Kaluta to create the show poster. He became the costume designer after asking what costumes the actors would wear in the poster, and the set designer when the regular one got sick. Kaluta told an interviewer backstage about the evolution of his role: "Should it be like a real 1930s movie poster? That's when I realized I wanted to do characterizations of the entire cast on the poster. But, I had to know what they looked like. So that's when I started designing the costumes. Because I designed them so intricately, I had to build them. And that's when my house started looking like the garment district". Starstruck was being created in the late 1970s period