Sleepless in Hollywood : tales from the new abnormal in the movie business

253 Pages·2013·3.03 MB·English

by  Obst

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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LYNDA OBST—FILMOGRAPHY
EPIGRAPH
SCENE 1
THE NEW ABNORMAL
SCENE 2
THE GREAT CONTRACTION
SCENE 3
HAVE YOUR POPCORN WITH SOME CHOPSTICKS
SCENE 4
CREATING PREAWARENESS
SCENE 5
FROM PARAMOUNT TO PARANOIA
SCENE 6
THE CATASTROPHE: THE WRITERS’ STRIKE OF 2007–8
SCENE 7
THE DIASPORA: THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION
SCENE 8
DOES THE FUTURE HAVE A FUTURE?
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT LYNDA OBST
SOURCES
PHOTO CREDITS
INDEX
To Oly, who keeps me in the game with his wisdom, humor and tenacity, and is still the
best trench-mate around.
To Sunny, Marlowe and Julie, who make Thursday night my favorite night, so I
remember what all the tenacity is for.
And to Nora, who died the day I finished. Now I have to plod on without her. I still try to
imagine her telling me what to do and hear her fixing my sentences. Though, as ever,
when I get it wrong it’s not her fault.
INTRODUCTION
I first arrived in L.A. from New York in the early 1980s, a trained reporter,
unhappily untethered from the New York Times. All my friends were still in New
York City, along with everything else familiar to me. Hollywood was a strange new
habitat where people appeared to lie for a living, thus the title of my memoir of
surviving that shock, Hello, He Lied. By the time I started this book, all that was old
hat.
By the mid-2000s, after sixteen movies and a nice share of hits and (luckily)
fewer flops, my colleagues and I were undergoing something much weirder than
lying. We found it harder and harder to get movies made, and I’d been steadily
making movies for years. This wasn’t just me or my studio, though we were
certainly part of the story—there was something systemic going on that was
changing what we could make. It seemed that whatever it was, it suddenly wasn’t
what I was selling and what I’d been successfully making. It was more than
frustrating. It was catastrophic, and for many more people than just me. I had to
figure it out.
My life and my work became part of the book. I started asking questions of
every smart person I knew. Unlike a reporter, because I work and dine and live
here (and intend to continue both eating and working here), my sources are my
colleagues and friends, past and current—people I know well. I can’t be as
exhaustive as a reporter can be and speak to the multitudes of excellent sources
whom I don’t know, and might someday work with.
But my sources, some of the most important executives in town—studio heads,
marketing heads and the like—the players who turn the levers of this business and
set its course, are relaxed, intimate and funny in their interviews for the same
reason, and in these pages, you can get to know these people as I do. You can see
them at this moment of transition, trying to create and open the movies they came
into the business to make as the economic model of the industry shifts beneath
them.
• • •
It took me a long time to write this book, mostly because it took me a long time to
figure it out. At many moments when I thought I’d “gotten it,” it was like
Heraclitus’s river: Just as I came to understand something, it changed, or as I wrote
about it, it changed, or I captured the change, and then it changed again. And of
course, living and working through “the most interesting of times,” the Chinese
curse warns you, slows you down. I tell the story as I suffered through it, survived it
(hopefully), thought I cracked it and then began to see the light at the end of the
tunnel.
LYNDA OBST—FILMOGRAPHY
1983 Flashdance (associate producer, as Lynda Rosen Obst) 1987 Adventures in
Babysitting (producer) 1988 Heartbreak Hotel (producer) 1991 The Fisher King
(producer) 1992 This Is My Life (producer) 1993 Sleepless in Seattle (executive
producer) 1994 Bad Girls (executive producer) 1996 One Fine Day (producer)
1997 Contact (executive producer) 1998 Hope Floats (producer)
1998 The Siege (producer)
1999 The ’60s (TV miniseries) (executive producer) 2001 Someone Like You . . .
(producer) 2002 Abandon (producer)
2003 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (producer) 2009 The Invention of Lying
(producer) 2010–13 Hot in Cleveland (TV series) (executive producer—66
episodes) 2012 The Soul Man (TV series) (executive producer—6 episodes)
2013 Helix (TV series) (executive producer—13 episodes) (shooting August,
airing November 2013)