by Lynda Obst
On the first day of shooting I was having lunch in my trailer as usual, when the line producer, Dick Vane, walked in. Dick, an unflappable guy, is in charge of keeping to the budget and handling the day-to-day crises with crew and equipment. I’d never seen him stunned before, but he was that day. “He’s still shooting,” he said.
“But we called lunch,” I said.
“He’s doing shots that aren’t on the call sheet.” The call sheet is the list of shots that we have to complete for the day in order to make our schedule.
“Really?” I said. “What kind of shots?”
“Dutch shots.”
“Dutch shots?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, from the ceiling and corners of the ceiling. And the floor. All the actors and the crew are into meal penalty. And we’re still trying to get the shots.”
Meal penalties are what production pays the shooting crew and cast members for encroaching on their legal lunch hour. The rate varies from city to city, but to give you an idea, in L.A., the first meal penalty—for anything up to thirty minutes—is $7.50 per person, and it goes up from there. With a 250-person crew, that’s a lot of Tootsie Rolls—or what we call “hot costs”: unanticipated, unbudgeted costs.
“What happens when you ask him to finish the shots and then break for lunch?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
We looked at each other for a second with growing comprehension.
Then Dick said, “It’s going to cost us some nice coin on the first day, all these meal penalties.” And we both knew that was the least of it. In all my years of producing, I’d never seen anyone shooting so far off the call sheet on the first day.
Buckle your seat belt, I thought. Sorry, Sherry. Bumpy ride time.
The murder at the center of the plot (the mechanics of which were unclear because the script was still being rewritten) took place in a dirty, dank tunnel beneath the city. We began to shoot on location in the underground tunnel system in Montreal. But when we found ourselves three days over schedule and nowhere near through the material we were supposed to have shot, I began to worry for the crew. We all knew there were unhealthy levels of asbestos in the tunnels, and the crew foreman—who is the head of the union on the set—looked grumpy.
I talked to the art director about recreating a portion of the tunnels on the soundstage and finishing the scene at the end of the schedule, when we would know exactly what we were doing. I wanted the crew aboveground. I was afraid we’d shoot down there indefinitely. We didn’t yet have script pages for the climactic murders that also took place in the tunnels, so we couldn’t prepare the crew or the actors. If we moved on to other material now, our writer-director would have time to figure out the murder and then explain it to the actors and prepare the crew.
There was some dissension about my decision. For some it was macho to just go for it, but it wasn’t healthy or wise or economically feasible. I was the studio; they were the filmmakers. As late, great producer Laura Ziskin said, “The producer is the traffic cop between art and commerce.” I had lost my badge on this shoot.
I had given special screenings of Bertolucci films during preproduction. I had catered them throughout with great food. I made sure everyone had wonderful places to live, held parties. But no family was born. The show was sliding into a cliché of us vs. them. From there, it could fall into a hole of incoherence. We all tried to help it pull together—every actor, the director, me, the cinematographer (the brilliant Matthew Libatique, nominated for an Oscar for Black Swan), the talented production designer Gideon Ponte, the exuberant and steady-handed line producer, the crew, the crew foreman, the sound guy; but with the director and the producer unable to fundamentally trust each other, there was only so much the picture could do to right itself.
It was my job to make the director trust me. He did not. That was the key task I’d had to accomplish, and I hadn’t done it. We were oil and water. He did not feel that I was sufficiently on his side, a feeling that probably stemmed from my closeness with Sherry. But at this point I had to march onward and do what I felt was right for the production.
Having forced the argument, with the help of the crew, we moved the completion of the tunnel sequence to the end of the schedule, and the three gorgeous leads—Katie Holmes, Charlie Hunnam and Benjamin Bratt (recently broken up with Julia Roberts and gaming along like a pro)—all went mad, per the directions of the freshly rewritten pages. The cast and crew were by now exhausted, the actors and director feeling their way around the material, the stage, the characters. When we wrapped, I skipped the party for the first time in my career and left that night for New York City with a cute crew guy. It was movie number thirteen for me, and felt that way. Ultimately, it went a week over schedule and grossed $12 million worldwide, half of its production budget. As I tell myself at times like these, you learn as much from the flops as you do from the hits—sometimes more.
THE HIT
Sherry and John were great to me, each in their own way. Sherry wanted me to get rich and John wanted me to make pictures, and that is all you can ask from a studio head and her head of production. Both of them believed in me as a producer. I found out about How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days from mega-agency CAA because its client Gwyneth Paltrow had shown interest in a very early draft at Paramount. So I called Goldwyn about it.
John had Michael Hoffman in mind to direct it. Michael had been my director on One Fine Day, a movie I’d made at Fox with Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney about two single parents who meet and fall in love while traipsing around New York City with their children. So Goldwyn thought my developing the script with its current junior producer, Christine Peters—who had found the stick-figure book it was based on—was a great idea, and so we developed a draft, first with the brilliant Ellen Simon (Neil’s daughter), then with Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down). The development process went smoothly all the way through, except for one thing: We couldn’t find a guy.
Gwyneth dropped out during development, I forget why (I really do), and along the way Sherry and I fell in love with Kate Hudson, up and coming from her Golden Globe–nominated performance in Cameron Crowe’s wonderful Almost Famous. We attached her to an intermediate draft, which wouldn’t have happened at any other studio, as she hadn’t yet been in a hit. Sherry had the freedom to pursue her gut casting instincts on a mid-range movie like this. We believed in Kate. But we still had no guy.
We tested and read a bunch of funny guys, some who are now stars, some not. But there was no chemistry. Kate liked Luke Wilson, but the studio was not so sure. When the script was finished, there was a showdown meeting with Kate and Sherry because Kate had not approved any of the guys we had tested. She was looking for a quality no one had shown in the tests. Sherry couldn’t believe that she’d even given Kate a say in the process. Right before the meeting, I got on the phone and talked to all the agencies, trying to find a guy to lose. When I reached ICM, they threw out the name Matthew McConaughey.
I thought, Brilliant! Is he available? Why hasn’t he come up before? Somewhere along the line, he may have been dismissed as not New York enough or too old for Kate. But Kate is much more sophisticated than her age would suggest, and it was a new name, a good name, and I went to the meeting with his name in my pocket. Kate was twenty minutes late, and her CAA agent was sweating, Goldwyn was fuming and I was trying to entertain Sherry. Kate flounced in wearing a fabulous new skirt, and Sherry put on one of her very rare stern looks. “Kate,” she said, “if we can’t agree on a costar, this movie is over.”
Silence. Someone, I think it was me, quietly said, “What about Matthew McConaughey?”
Sherry said, “I love Matthew.”
Kate said, “I love Matthew.”
John Goldwyn breathed a deep sigh of relief, and said, “Is Matthew available? If he is, I love him too.”
I said, “Yes,” and everyone laughed. Then legendary ICM agent Ed Limato got us by the balls and squeezed to close the deal, as there was no movie wi
thout his client, a situation agents live for.
We hired Donald Petrie—who had helmed Mystic Pizza, Julia Roberts’s breakout coming-of-age movie—to direct. Donald knows what is funny, though he hadn’t made a hit in a while. But Sherry felt safe with him. At that point, that was enough for me. Once, during prep, my occasional partner, the equally fun, missing and mythic Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture), who’d made The Godfather and Love Story, called me with an emergency casting issue. I was in the middle of a script meeting but I picked up the phone right away.
“What’s up, Bob?”
“No thin lips.”
“Explain, Bob?” I asked. “I don’t think I heard you.”
“The actors, Lyn. No thin lips.”
“I got it, Bob,” I answered, and proceeded to cast Matthew and Kate with the lips they were born with. I saw Bob three more times during the making of the movie: on the first day of shooting, when he took pictures with the cast; on the last, when he again took pictures with the cast; and one fun time when he came to visit the set on Staten Island and regaled me in my trailer with wonderful tales that may or may not have been true about the making of The Godfather. Who really cared? The stories were so delicious. How to Lose was always fun, and from the first dailies, we knew the chemistry between Kate and Matthew—thin lips or not—was crackling on set, on the monitor and in the rushes. The energy between them created heat, and that makes a hit. Sherry called. She was coming to visit, on day five, just for fun. This was good news. We all had the best time; production was easy-breezy, and so was postproduction. Sometimes, as my first book would say, you “ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” Sherry visited the first week, she declared the movie a hit and she was right. She had no notes at the preview. It scored a 95, and opened number one at $24.5 million. And kept playing. But Paramount had sold off all of their domestic and international rights in order to pay for the cost of production, only keeping the DVD rights. This was one of their few hits that year, and they had sold away most of their revenues. This was the Dolgen way.
In the weekly box office derby, Paramount pictures started to look like a series of flops, despite the fact that the studio had protected its losses by preselling rights. But Dolgen was oddly copacetic, even as forces stewed elsewhere against him.
Jon Dolgen, a Bob Dylan–loving lawyer who thrives on conflict, likes to play tough guy. He looks like a giant sloth with a full head of thick black hair. You could tell that he relished his scary image, which worked for him strategically, as did his famously dry sense of humor.
In 2000, right before my little hit went into production, Mel Karmazin, formerly of CBS Radio and Sumner’s number two at the time, began squeezing Dolgen’s resources (if that’s what you want to call them) even tighter, perhaps to please the Viacom board, perhaps to throw off his competition for Sumner’s admiration. Karmazin’s move didn’t unbalance Dolgen at all. Instead, Dolgen made tighter financial projections to the board, compressing the studio’s budgets even further downward to impress the people upstairs.
Paramount was becoming an issue of contention in the boardrooms of Viacom. A fight was brewing for the number-two slot under Sumner at Viacom, and there were three hopefuls. Dolgen was one. His competition was with his immediate boss, Karmazin, who had no intention of going anywhere,3 and CBS chief Les Moonves, with his great track record at the network—the perennial number one—who was also a rising corporate star. That placed Dolgen in a competitive mindset that locked him even more solidly into his penurious financial strategy.
The strategy the Dolgen-Lansing team pursued for Paramount had looked good for years: Protect your downside, minimize losses by selling off every ancillary market, maximize short-term profits—basically, profitize every picture as an independent business venture.
This strategy guaranteed that few pictures lost money in the green-light game that was the upshot of the intimate wrangling between Sherry and Dolgen. They were equals and partners. He believed in her gut to pick pictures; she knew he could squeeze every dime out of every territory and ancillary market to pay for each film. She would tell him what she wanted to make, he would give her an impossible budget number, she would cast the top players and pass on the impossible number (a bit lower now) to the production team. It was designed to work financially, but it didn’t always benefit the picture creatively. But Sherry could often “save it in post.” It was the most conservative model possible, and it successfully minimized losses.
As long as he could report profits to his board, Dolgen didn’t care what the outside world thought. Critically, however, this conservative philosophy did not allow them to be competitive for the best new material or remain in tune with the market as it began to drastically change.
Perhaps Dolgen could have competed in the studio box office derby and made it to the New Abnormal if he had been strong enough to buck financial pressures and make the bigger special-effects-driven movies that were coming into vogue. But he wasn’t competing against the other studios. He was competing inside Viacom.
As Goldwyn and others saw it, Dolgen took pleasure in making his anemic financial projections work. He was brilliant at selling off rights, and had been doing it throughout his career. As a former business affairs executive, it was one of the things he knew how to do best. He was comfortable with the formula, and to be fair, it was still bringing in profits, if not market share; but the latter is what almost everyone considers to be the true measure of studio success.
THE BATTLESHIP IS MISSING THE DOCK
But if you remember, 2001 was the year of the first big new special-effects movies, those using next-generation CGI like Harry Potter, the first Shrek and the first Fast and the Furious. Moviegoers were falling in love with the amazing animation and special effects that the new technology was providing, and they wanted more. This was the moment when everything was coming up tentpole. The audience was saying yes, please, we want more and bigger. Paramount couldn’t afford it, comprehend its importance or accommodate it.
The vaunted philosophy of fiscal restraint at Paramount was becoming obsolete. The one-off business struggle for each picture was keeping Paramount unable to compete with the rising costs of production, of actors and their entourages, of big special effects or of the blockbuster/sequel/marketing–driven sensibility that was now ruling Hollywood. The studio was unwilling or unable to play the game. It did not have the mindset, and Dolgen’s eyes were elsewhere.
Goldwyn described the transition that took place when Paramount’s old model ran up against the tidal wave of change:
“When Viacom bought the company in 1993, it was right before the period when there was a shift in what movies Hollywood was making. We went from pictures that were crafted to pictures that were marketing juggernauts. The craftsmanship of the pictures was secondary to the marketability of the intellectual property, the ‘idea.’ And that was not what Stanley Jaffe and the Paramount tradition dictated.”
In using the word “crafted,” Goldwyn is describing pictures that were made during the Old Abnormal, when Paramount and much of the rest of the industry made movies “because they were good” (not to say that Nolan’s, Spielberg’s and Cameron’s movies aren’t crafted, but plenty of tentpoles put craft after marketability). These movies were not made because they were based on a big intellectual property like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games or Twilight or a Marvel property—a big identifiable idea that could be promoted all around the world at once.
Sherry Lansing made movies she loved and believed in, and at the lowest possible cost. But no one who watched the transition to the New Abnormal at the time knew what on earth was going on. We only knew that technology now allowed for some very cool new effects that the audience wanted to see. The boundaries of what was technologically possible were expanding every day. And it was expensive.
Goldwyn said, “If Stanley Jaffe had stayed at the company, I’m sure there would have been a serious discussion about where this was going.”
But there was not, apparently, any such conversation under Dolgen. Paramount couldn’t compete in the marketplace for the hot scripts that utilized this new technology, for which all the other studios were clamoring. All this was garnering Paramount terrible press. They were under relentless pressure, from inside and out.
Goldwyn concluded, “I just think after a while the financial pressures became absolutely terrible. And the creative community at large was intensely aware of that. The big material started to go elsewhere.”
Paramount was not keeping up with the Joneses. A change was gonna come, as the bluesman sings. And someone was going to pay the piper.
THE HIPSTER AND THE BLOCKER
Of course, there are many more people I had to work with other than Sherry and Goldwyn. There were the execs. At first for me, there were the Hipster and the Blocker. The Blocker didn’t look like a blocker. She was always helping me, sending me writers lists to develop my new ideas, sharing her incredibly up-to-the-minute inside info with me, sending me anywhere I wanted to go to visit fancy writers. She was a seductress of development, with the coziest office full of candy and pillows.
• • •
I bought a book called Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella (Confessions of a Shopaholic), attached Kate Hudson and sent it to Nora Ephron. She loved it. I called the Blocker ecstatically, and she said something like, “I’m not sure we will hire Nora to write this.” I almost fell off my chair. Then I started to boil. I began breathing exercises. “May I come over and discuss this with you in person?” I asked.
I had given this to Nora, the best writer I knew and also my dearest friend, and hadn’t cleared it with the studio. I hadn’t cleared it because never in a thousand years would it have occurred to me that the studio would be anything but overjoyed. The weirdness factor I’d been warned about at Paramount was rearing its head. I would go to John. I would go to Sherry. I would use up my discretionary fund to get Nora. I walked across the lot to hear what the Blocker had to say.