Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  Back in the Old Abnormal, the Sherry-Sumner relationship was a wholly personal thing. They were friends. They still are. But then again, the whole town has a personal relationship with Sherry, as do I.

  Whenever we have lunch, I have to spend twenty minutes diddling on my iPhone while every single person in the restaurant, male and female, young and ancient, comes to the table to greet Sherry as the most important person in his or her life. She holds court, like an eighteenth-century French regent (she is actually a twenty-first-century regent of the UC system), with every person in Beverly Hills. It’s not noblesse oblige—she is too down-to-earth for that—but it is definitely regal, as she knows something about everyone’s family. It thrills each of them.

  She is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and it has deeply affected her character; she is utterly unostentatious and thrifty. She taught high school math and English right after college, before she began an acting career that she quickly quit because she decided she wasn’t good enough. So she started reading scripts. I first met Sherry when I was an editor at the New York Times, doing an article on the new female executives in Hollywood. She was then VP at Fox and clearly the one to watch. A few years later, after a stint at MGM, Fox named her its first female head of production.

  Not long after, she left Fox and partnered up with Stanley Jaffe. When Jaffe retired, Paramount recruited Sherry to be the first female studio head, to great hoopla and cover stories everywhere. She made fabulous copy, and was more than ready to do the job.

  In 1987, my best friend, Dawn Steel, a charismatic, superalpha kind of female exec—hard-driving, instinctive, hilarious, controversial (she yelled)—was named head of Columbia, so then there were two. It was a heady, thrilling era for women.

  I’d gotten close to Sherry when Dawn fell ill with brain cancer in 1996. Sherry is a person you want in your corner when you are sick. Her strength, courage and generosity are like those of no one else I’ve ever known. Though they had only recently become close, Sherry was immediately by Dawn’s side. We took little weekend trips to Palm Springs and went out to dinner. When Dawn eventually died a grueling year and a half later, Sherry and I ended up as part of an all-female pallbearer group, further bonding us.

  Ultimately, when I considered leaving Fox after six very productive years, having Sherry as a mentor/friend at Paramount was even more important than the great deal she was offering. Everyone needs a real friend at the top.

  But the big pitch came when I dined with John Goldwyn, the president and head of production at Paramount, at Sherry’s urging to both of us. His industry savvy, honed by his DNA (he was the grandson of Samuel Goldwyn, the “G” in MGM) and his gut instincts and learned experience, made him one of the keenest minds I’d met up with in Hollywood. At our first lunch, he taught me the Paramount philosophy as he had come to understand it. John believed deeply in what he was saying, and I sat there listening earnestly, as my life was about to undergo a sea change, and I am a land-loving kind of gal.

  GOING UNDER

  John Goldwyn:

  President of Production 1991–97

  President of Paramount Pictures 1997–2003

  Vice Chairman of the Motion Picture Group 2002–3

  My Paramount saga began at lunch with John Goldwyn the day The Siege opened, November 6, 1998. We were dining at a restaurant called Ca’ Brea, a midlevel agent haunt with midlevel pasta. We sat there chatting away as Muslim antidiscrimination groups were boycotting my movie and demonstrating at the theaters where it was opening. As we lunched, Fox was surrounded by barricades because of a bomb threat, and the director, Ed Zwick, and I were being accused of a Zionist plot. John asked me what the movie was about.

  He was handsome and lean and fiercely intelligent, and I use the word “fiercely” advisedly. His eyes engage and observe, strategize and charm, and it’s always clear that at any second he can come in for the kill like a bird of prey.

  I thought carefully about what to say to him, as things were kind of dicey at that moment. John later said he found me very cool and collected, rare the opening day of any $80 million movie, let alone such a controversial one. I was actually a nervous wreck.

  Three years before 9/11, I was making one of the biggest movies I had ever made, with a budget of $70 million. We closed the Brooklyn Bridge and blew up a bus (which made my father incredibly happy—finally, some action in one of my movies!), but astonishingly we ended up with what you’d have to call a fatwah on both the director of the movie and me. The Siege starred Denzel Washington, Annette Bening and Bruce Willis, and was about a terrorist siege of New York City and the sweeping restrictions of civil rights it brought about. Suddenly, I found myself in production in New York under an alias. The only thing I liked about being undercover was my new name: Rebecca Austin. I liked it because it sounded so completely fake, like the pen name of a Silhouette novelist.

  It was more the director, Ed Zwick, the protesters were targeting; they saw him as the boss and chief Zionist. For months we had been campaigning to win the cooperation of the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee by hosting representatives at teas and halal meals in our trailer during production and sharing the script, trying to get all the cultural nuances of the Brooklyn Muslim community exactly right. My efforts were met with sneering contempt—“I won’t eat this food; it’s probably pork!”—but eventually there was some successful rapprochement, during which Ed and I happily made script changes. But we couldn’t make the one they wanted most: to change the terrorist cell that bombed New York and held it hostage in the movie to domestic terrorists, à la the Oklahoma City bombing.

  We explained that our script was based on a series of articles from the New York Times about the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which was executed by members of cells in Brooklyn run by Sheik Rahman, who was now in a Brooklyn jail. Further research had been done about these still-existing cells by our screenwriter, Lawrence Wright. Our story began in Afghanistan, from our CIA blowback. So, you see, we said, we can change anything but that. We did point out that we had a sympathetic Arab-American Muslim FBI agent at the center of the drama, whose son was swept up in the overzealous profiling of Arabs that followed the crisis. It was a cautionary tale, we tried to explain; we wanted to prevent the loss of a minority’s civil rights in the wake of a terrorist attack.

  They stormed out of our final meeting. Toward the end of the shoot, hostile graffiti about the movie appeared in Brooklyn. After we finished principal photography, we had an ending problem to resolve and had to go back to New York for reshoots, at which time Ed and I began to get death threats in our email and at our offices. Everyone involved with the reshoots worked under an assumed name, and the name of the movie was changed on all location records.

  The AntiDiscrimination League couldn’t have been more off-base with their accusations of Zionist conspiracy. If we were Mossad, as they alleged, we were the dumbest Mossad agents who ever lived. We had shared the script and movie release dates with our enemy, and had first gone to writer Larry Wright because he was an Arabist who had lived and studied in Egypt. (He later wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower, about Al Qaeda.) As for the chief Zionist conspirator, Ed hadn’t ever even been to Israel, as far as I knew. At that point, I hadn’t. Annette Bening, whom we had to fight the studio to hire over multiple bimbos, was extremely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and that affinity drew her to the character and the script in the first place. We explained over and over that the part played by Tony Shalhoub—that of the Muslim FBI agent whose son is caught up in mass arrests and is defended by a civil-rights-championing Denzel Washington—was the whole point of the movie, but no matter how hard we jawboned, no understanding was created. We tried to create a conversation, but got a battle.

  The press didn’t help. They were wholeheartedly buying the then politically correct argument that we were “demonizing the Muslim/Arab community” with this movie. The sympathetic coverage was feeding the frenzy of the indi
gnant antidiscrimination groups, even before anyone had seen the movie. By the time it opened, there was a bomb threat at Fox, our studio, which was under highest security. And worse, the theaters showing the movie were under bomb threats too. That can really inhibit business, and drastically did on opening weekend ($13.9 million), though the movie managed to rack up $116 million worldwide.2

  I thought it was probably better not to mention to the then president of Paramount, John Goldwyn, that my studio was under a bomb threat. That might have made him a bit less eager to invite me over.

  So I just smiled and said, “It’s a cautionary tale about an imagined terrorist takedown of New York. Tell me about Paramount.”

  He started to explain why Paramount was a producer’s studio. He quoted Stanley Jaffe, its influential ex-chairman. “Stanley had a philosophy,” Goldwyn said. “He was looking for Paramount to be the place for people who are really good at what they do—directors, writers, producers—to feel supported, as long as they worked within the rules. They would be given the opportunity to pursue their vision, but that opportunity would be provided within a very specific set of financial boundaries. He was very clear about that. And even if a picture didn’t work, they shouldn’t worry, because in a year or five, they would still be there.”

  It got me. Ultimately, it got both of us, in different ways.

  I had been successful, prolific and happy at Fox (now known to me as “Paradise Lost”) under the consistent leadership of Peter Chernin. Peter ran Fox in a way that made it possible for producers to figure out how and why their movie could get made. It was easy to determine how to get a green light based on Fox’s business model because it was a vertically integrated studio, which means that Fox owned all the ancillaries: DVD domestic and international, foreign distribution and U.S. television via Fox and cable TV. It even owned Sky TV, an international station. Fox is a self-feeding content provider.

  A studio is as rational as its business model plus its leadership. I later discovered that at Paramount, each picture was a brand-new business venture, a one-off that Sherry talked Jon Dolgen into green-lighting—hence the constant tension. But who knew? A lot of agents, that’s who.

  As I sat there with John Goldwyn at Ca’ Brea, I thought, I can work with this guy. He was very intense, very sincere and very smart. And I could make a profit at Paramount. If I could make a movie.

  Paramount gave me a wonderful little bungalow that used to be the security guard’s station and that was also a piece of a stage, and I proceeded to transform it into a two-story fantasy office that felt like my house in Texas. Texas had always been my respite from work; I bought my limestone farmhouse in the hill country west of Austin with Sleepless money, and it’s where I went to write and relax. I found New York to have the same dominance hierarchy as L.A., but Texas was a whole other country. And for some unfathomable reason, it was a country where this New York Jewish girl was 100 percent relaxed and at home. So, I thought, maybe if I brought some of those comfy vibes to my Paramount office, I could be relaxed there too. What could go wrong? Then, during my first week, I ran into a good friend on the lot whom I’d known for years, producer Sean Daniel, who’d made The Mummy and green-lit the classic National Lampoon’s Animal House when he was head of production at Universal. “Welcome to Paramount!” he said to me heartily. We hugged.

  “Do you like your new deal?” Sean asked. He had been on the lot for a while already. He was referring to my newly enhanced fee and first-dollar gross on the back end (as we say here).

  “Yes!” I answered, beaming like a moron.

  “Then kiss it good-bye!” he said, laughing a laugh I would come to hear often—the Paramount gallows laugh.

  “But what do you mean?” I called after Sean.

  “You’ll never see it!” he called back.

  Oh my God, I thought, my mind racing. They can reduce the budget by cutting the producer’s fee right before they green-light the picture. I went ashen. Bingo. I’d heard about this at Paramount. They do this in the eleventh hour to bring the budget down. The producer never stops the movie after having worked so hard and long to get the thing going. With an entire crew hired and waiting, as well as actors getting measured for their costumes in the wardrobe department, we producers are much too responsible to everyone to stop the movie just to collect our full fee. Mainly we are way too excited to leave the studio and go to the set, where everyone we’ve hired is already waiting. So we say yes to our newly reduced fee and start picking a caterer.

  THE FLOP

  One of the most famous reasons a movie doesn’t work is that it gets rushed into production before the script is ready. Usually this happens because a studio is trying to make a critical date, so they throw a series of writers at a tentpole and piece a script together like a patchwork quilt. When there are constant rewrites, actors get involved, the studio must approve the rewrites while you’re shooting, the schedule must be rearranged to allow for the changes and often you must shut down. It’s a mess.

  This situation is to be avoided at all costs. The script should be locked so everyone knows what they are shooting each day. These days, the pace of normal (non-tentpole) development—such as it is—approaches glacial speeds, and every line and scene is investigated by unbusy execs like conspiracy theorists.

  But back in the day, a hustling producer, a motivated exec and a hot element could push a small movie into existence—sometimes before it was ready. That’s what I did in brewing my flop.

  I made a crucial error on Sherry’s watch. Early in my tenure at Paramount, I bought a book about a murder at Harvard called Abandon. I attached my Siege director, Ed Zwick, who’d gone to Harvard, and he attached Traffic writer Steve Gaghan, who had just been nominated for an Oscar. When the script came in, Ed wanted to make the film in Cambridge.

  We scouted Cambridge and discovered it was too expensive to shoot there. The budget came to $60 million. The studio said $40 million. Impasse. So Ed passed the baton to Steve Gaghan to direct, even though Steve had never directed before, and Ed became a producer with me. We needed Gaghan to continue writing since he was hot as a firecracker after the Oscar nomination. First-time directors were difficult to get approved at Paramount, but the studio was willing to consider Gaghan, depending on how the script turned out.

  Steve’s script was full of delicious, smart dialogue. It was edgy, cool and mysterious. It was attracting actors and lots of buzz, all because of Gaghan’s Oscar nomination for Traffic. The momentum was heating up the picture. I was stoked.

  But the script had some key conceptual problems on which Sherry zeroed in, Sherry not being much affected by buzz:

  Was it a teen Fatal Attraction, as she saw it? About a psychotic ghost ex-boyfriend? Or brilliant, overworked grinds gone awry?

  The production exec on the movie—whom we will call the Hipster—was old friends with Steve (selling factor), so there wasn’t much objectivity there. I had lost mine with overconfidence about past successes with writers turned first-time directors (Chris Columbus and Nora Ephron). I understood the plot issues Sherry pointed out, but was convinced that Steve could and would solve them during prep. Steve’s considerable charm, intelligence, faux self-deprecating humor and indie credibility in an atmosphere starving for it made us all push harder without being sufficiently concerned about the questions being raised.

  We all unconsciously borrowed the arrogance of the Harvard setting and decided we were an indie–art-movie–teen-horror flick—and that was so great! But none of us properly made a priority of fixing the glaring script issues. When we tried to resolve them and couldn’t, we didn’t stop everything else to resolve them. Instead, the exec and I pushed the movie into production, elbow to elbow, like offensive linemen protecting the quarterback—even though Sherry had well-founded fears about the movie and its must-see director. What was it about at its core? Was Gaghan ready to direct? I was recklessly insistent on both fronts.

  • • •

  I remember a dinne
r party I threw on the eve of the Abandon screen test, with all my best New York friends at this wonderful West Village Japanese restaurant called Omen where they serve tiny exotic tofu dishes for something like $36 each. When I got there and greeted my twenty or so guests, my cell phone rang. It was John Goldwyn telling me the movie was dead and the screen test must be canceled. I spent the next two hours on the phone, pacing outside the restaurant on Prince Street, until I could get the studio to provisionally reinstate the test, in lieu of my speaking to Sherry on her vacation in the morning. By the time I went back inside and returned to my table, the check had arrived, my guests were weary and ready to go home and they all thought I was cuckoo. In the morning I resumed pacing, but this time in my hotel room at the Mercer. I caught Sherry on a boat rounding some Caribbean island with her husband and the Dolgens.

  “If you can’t trust me to control the set of a twenty-two-million-dollar teen horror movie, what can I do?” I argued in order to allay her fears of a first-timer going out of control. Paramount was famous for not backing first-timers, and I was conscious of the responsibility in my hands. I feared that Sherry would rather choose a mediocre guy who knew where to put the camera and how to get through the day over an inspired artiste who couldn’t tell a story or was completely disorganized. It was a preference she was often criticized for, and one that had become part of the conservative Paramount culture. My exec and I were proud to buck it, reckless though that may have been. Coming through for Sherry would depend on my developing trust with the newbie director. I knew how to do that, I assured myself. It was easy.

  The studio wanted to shoot in Toronto. We wanted Montreal, the better to double for Cambridge and the Northeast, with its old-world charm. Plus the crews were artier. We got Montreal. Prep went well. Gaghan learned how to rehearse. He scouted. Any dicey signs were ignored.