by Lynda 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)
No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life.
—Samuel Goldwyn
SCENE ONE
THE NEW ABNORMAL
I can trace the moment when I noticed that what seemed like normal was changing—that the ways we’d always done things since time immemorial (at least in the three decades since I came to Hollywood) were beginning to become obsolete. It was the death of what I now call the “Old Abnormal” and the birth of the “New.”
I call them the Old Abnormal and the New Abnormal because Hollywood, let’s face it, is never actually normal. Think of how bizarre the people are, for starters. Famous hairdressers, notable Israeli gunrunners, Russian gangsters, mothers who score on their daughters’ successfully leaked sex-tape escapades, and Harvard grads who chase hip-hop stars and Laker Girls make a unique kind of melting pot. It boasts smart people galore with and without prestigious diplomas, and loves a craven con man with a new angle, a new pot of gold or a new look. It’s an equal-opportunity exploiter of talent.
No wonder it draws such dysfunction: Lying is a critical job skill; poker is as good a starter course as film school. How else would you know that the line “Sandra Bullock wants to do this” really means “It’s on her agent’s desk,” and “Three studios are bidding on this script” means “Everyone’s passed but one buyer who hasn’t answered yet.” The language has a sublanguage, and there is no libretto. It’s just plain Abnormal, and always has been.
I saw that some key aspects of the abnormal Hollywood I’d come to love, or at least enjoy heartily, were changing into something new, but of course I didn’t know what. It was when the long-stable Sherry Lansing/Jon Dolgen administration of Paramount, where I was working in 2001, began to teeter a bit as I was making How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey about two players playing each other and losing the game but unwittingly winning love.
Forty-eight at the time, Sherry Lansing was tall and effortlessly glamorous, one of the few women in Hollywood whose face and body had never seen a needle or a knife. The first chairwoman of a major studio, she shattered a glass ceiling in 1992 that hasn’t been mended since. Mentored by men and a mentor to women, she is that rare combination of a man’s woman and a woman’s woman at the same time.
Dolgen and Lansing were a great duo: She was class, he was crass. While Dolgen’s
screaming could be heard throughout the administration building, no one would ever get bad news in Sherry’s office. (She had employees for that.) Dolgen’s belligerence was as famous as Sherry’s graciousness. The whole thing worked for them for a long time.
Sherry had been a big supporter of my little romantic comedy—she loved the script I’d developed with her team, and that helped me get it into production. But much to my surprise, it turned out that Paramount wasn’t even paying for the movie. My real financier was a lovely guy named Winnie, who ran a German tax shelter. I found this out on the set when Winnie introduced himself to me and told me that Paramount had sold off their domestic and international box office rights to him to fund the relatively low cost of the movie ($40 million). Paramount kept only the DVD rights. But that, I understood, was how they often put together their movies, selling off the ancillary rights to keep their production costs down. This is called risk aversion. It either meant they thought the movie had no upside other than its DVD value, or that it was the only way Sherry could get the movie made at the time.
As the rest of the country veered from red alerts to orange alerts in the aftermath of 9/11—Variety headline: “Showbiz Rocked by Reel Life!”—I was absorbed in simpler problems, like casting a guy for Kate Hudson to lose in ten days. As rocked as we may have been—and we were rocked—the show must go on. I was going into production. But in the boardrooms and executive suites of Viacom, which owns Paramount, everything was getting very unsettled in a consequential way.
The year 2001, as we began the movie, turned out to be a profoundly transitional one, not just for America (and the world, in the wake of 9/11), but for the movie business as well. Looking back, it would seem that Paramount had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope, in keeping only the DVD rights in its sights and ignoring the world. It was the year of the first Harry Potter and the first Shrek, and the audiences were getting their first exposure to the brave new world of breakthrough special effects in CGI and animation. But the historical fiscal conservatism of Paramount meant they were ignoring most of the new special-effects-oriented scripts, created for this startling technology, starting to hit the town.
Paramount had a philosophy under Sherry Lansing and Jon Dolgen, and for a long time it had worked: Sherry chose pictures by following her gut, and then would make them for the lowest possible budget (and lower). She’d made Forrest Gump (giving Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis a big piece of the profits in success, but little in upfront fees). She green-lighted Mel Gibson’s Scottish epic and Oscar winner Braveheart. When Fox went way over budget on Titanic and needed a partner to finish the film, Sherry was able to say yes by buying domestic rights (U.S. and Canada) based on an overnight read. But it wasn’t working anymore.
I felt plenty of tension on the studio lot from a string of recent flops1 and bad word on the street. Paramount’s not buying anything! They’re underbidding! Not bidding! Who’s getting fired? What the hell are they making? How to Lose a what? Everyone was smoking and speculating on the quad as always, but the joy of putting How To Lose a Guy together inured me to any drama behind the scenes.
But as our team made How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the fate of Paramount and Hollywood was beginning to undergo—I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say—cataclysmic change. The studio that I had joined after six comfy, productive years at Fox was about to experience an enormous realignment due to both interior and exterior convulsions. Some studios had an easier time during the transition, because they were more prepared for the transformed landscape that lay ahead. Disney, for example, had revenue from its theme parks and cable and broadcast networks like ESPN and ABC, so it was variegated as a conglomerate and not dependent on its movie income. Fox was reaping profits from its wide international presence. As a global media company, it was aware early of the power of the global market and made the most of its international penetration in movies and in TV via its satellite network Star TV and its broadcast networks. Warner Bros. had its moneymaker, HBO, but had problems at the time as a result of its takeover by AOL (the squid eating the whale). The more a studio depended on the domestic movie business for its income, the harder the turn would be.
I think none had a hairpinier turn to make than Paramount, as they lost many and hustled many more overboard. Yet the New Abnormal that followed the convulsions has no better representative than the Paramount that emerged: Pictures are now chosen for reasons, we will see, based not on gut as in Sherry’s day—or David O. Selznick’s, for that matter—but on whether they are properties that can be marketed into international franchises. With Iron Man, Mission: Impossible, Transformers, and Star Trek all among its key international franchises, Paramount emerged from this long fray as a key player in the New Abnormal. And it all began to happen soon after Mr. Dolgen, the board at Viacom, and the rest of us were swept up in gale forces that weren’t unlike the tornado that took Dorothy into Munchkinland. For us in the movie business, we landed not in little Munchkinland, for sure, but in giant Franchise-land. The New Abnormal.
In the past ten years or so, the studios have tried to patent a formula for surefire hits, and their product is filling your multiplex. They are what the industry calls “tentpoles”: sequels, prequels, reboots. Origin stories with a brand-new cast like The Amazing Spider-Man, with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, and X-Men: First Class, in which James McAvoy plays the young Charles Xavier from the original X-Men; or brand-name multimillion-dollar megashots built on familiar properties like comic books (The Avengers, the Dark Knight trilogy, Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern), or bestselling novels (à la The Hunger Games, Harry Potter or Twilight, and now Fifty Shades of Grey); remakes (Planet of the Apes, The Thing); fairy tales (Alice in Wonderland and its spawn, Snow White and the Huntsman and the failed twin Mirror Mirror); and video games (Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft). Handheld games born as iPhone apps like Angry Birds are now becoming properties-cum-movies, as are board games based on books (like Jumanji), or just plain games (like Hasbro’s Battleship); and, of course, toys (Transformers, G.I. Joe). (Hasbro is a movie company as well as a toy company now.) These properties are meant to work with or without a star and have a built-in audience in the United States and overseas. They are developed inside the studios’ development factories, designed by committee for surefire success.
A tentpole movie was once merely the stanchion that held the yearly studio circus calendar together: Big Christmas Movie. Big Easter Holiday Break Movie. Big Summer Movie. Each studio built what it called its “slate”—its compilation of yearly pictures—around these seasons because the greatest attendance was garnered during these distribution periods: Kids were out of school; families went to movies together; teens went in gaggles to malls. Business drove business drove business. If one theater was full, you would go to another, then return the next day for the movie you’d planned to see. Blockbusters and family movies were designed to position each studio to win each of these seasonal races like a studio Olympiad, and, like the Missile Defense System under Reagan, they had no cost-containment quotient. Win at all costs.
Around ten years ago, there was only one, at most two, tentpole from each studio each distribution season. But then things started to change. Inexorably, in the transition to the business model of the New Abnormal, the studios have grown their slates into a diet of pure tentpoles, with almost nothing in between. We producers fight for the precious diminishing space you could justifiably call the “in-between.”
So the question is, with all these tentpoles, franchises, reboots and sequels, is there still room for movies in the movie business?
As we noticed in Oscar Season 2013, it is still the Old Abnormal for some: That is, movie stars like Ben Affleck and George Clooney, who made Argo—an original—and super-AAA directors like Steven Spielberg (with Lincoln) and Ang Lee (with Life of Pi) still get to make real movies, and thank heaven for it. Though the money is still tighter than before, the studios don’t
like to say no to these people. When they can’t get them to make tentpoles, which they always try to get them to do—remember George Clooney in Batman? Or Ang Lee directing The Hulk, and of course Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy—the studios will work with the stars’ agendas and help finance their best projects. After Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for The Hurt Locker (which made practically no money even after it won the Oscar), Sony financed her Zero Dark Thirty, and it is a commercial and critical success.
So James Cameron can make anything he wants; ditto Christopher Nolan and now Ben Affleck and George Clooney. The same is true of many others, whose mere participation in a movie makes it a marketable tentpole. Some studios will beg, borrow, or whittle down a budget to make these movies—and the audience is the better for it, so starved are they for fresh material. We need more movie stars who can produce and direct, and directors whose movies become Oscar-winning blockbusters. Can we live on this fancified diet alone? And will the trend thrive, or is it a temporary reaction to a starved domestic audience? And what of the rest of us, living off of Mt. Olympus?
This is one of the most significant differences between two eras—the Old Abnormal, roughly the 1980s through the early start of the decade, and the New Abnormal, from roughly 2008 on—though some forces began to congeal earlier. I have come to see these two eras as almost two different movie businesses. The differences are various, from what movies are produced to how we make them and for whom. The proliferation of giant franchises nearly year-round is both a sign of the end of the Old Abnormal and the imprimatur of the New Abnormal. The dearth of movies that used to fill the time between them is part of the collateral damage from the transition.
These huge tentpoles, $200-million-fueled missiles, are lined up on the studio distribution pads with their “must-have” famous names and launched like international thermonuclear devices toward foreign capitals where 3D is candy. International has come to be 70 percent of our total revenues in the New Abnormal. When I began in the Old Abnormal it was 20 percent.