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

by Lynda Obst

  “Hi, Lyn. Don’t be upset. You know we love you. Let’s talk this out.” I started laying out my argument, as though there were rational underpinnings for her decision. When I finished, she said, “Yes, you know we have great faith in you, and we love Nora, of course, but she just made Lucky Numbers for us, and it didn’t work.”

  Lucky Numbers was a very uncharacteristic Nora movie based on an Adam Resnick script she loved about scamming the lottery, starring two of her favorite actors, John Travolta (from her hit Michael) and Lisa Kudrow, who she thought was (and in fact is) a genius.

  “This has nothing whatsoever to do with Lucky Numbers,” I said. “This is a horse of a different color,” or some such idiotic thing. I added, “I’m going to talk to Sherry.”

  Sherry lived not to get smoked out at times like this.

  “If you like,” the Blocker said in a cold voice.

  I walked out of the office knowing that this was going to get complicated and I’d better call Nora ASAP. But if I wanted to fly to London, that would be no problem for the Blocker—just as long as I wasn’t getting any work done. I called Nora and told her the story. She was furious with me, and rightly so. She withdrew.

  What would have been a slam dunk at Fox was punched out of the basket by my own teammate at Paramount. And there was no referee to call goaltending.

  • • •

  The Hipster was another proposition altogether. We had the same taste. We had the same frustrations. We got along great, until we didn’t, which was essentially a factor of the crazy politics of Paramount. Nothing was moving forward in the bad winds that were beginning to poison the studio, and one tough day I blamed the Hipster for my frustration. She responded by writing a scathing email about me to the big brass, which got her in trouble with the administration and got leaked to the trades and made us both look bad. Bryan Lourd—one of the controlling partners at CAA—got us to make up. Bryan is thought of by many as “the Lourd in town” because he represents so many of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood4 that a good movie is hard to put together without him. Moreover, his personality is all Zen strategy and common sense. Fights are not Zen-like and follow no common sense, he made clear to both of us.

  The tension was growing severe in the halls of the administration building; it was as though the pressure that Dolgen was feeling from New York were landing on Goldwyn, who was distributing it evenly among his execs, who were passing it down to their producers. Call it trickle-down hostility. All teamwork vanished. Craziness multiplied. Paranoia prevailed.

  The execs were gathering in clusters outside the administration building, smoking and fuming. John was not getting along with his underlings. Something was brewing in his life and in the careers of his execs (as in, nobody knew who was going to get fired), and Sherry’s reign was being questioned for the first time, as the numbers weren’t good. She was eventually going to have to make a change. The flops of 2002 were numbing.

  FILM

  BUDGET

  BOX OFFICE (domestic)

  The Core

  $60 million

  $31 million

  Narc

  $7.5 million

  $10.5 million

  Marci X

  $2 million

  $1.65 million

  Dickie Roberts

  $17 million

  $22.7 million

  Timeline

  $80 million

  $19 million

  Paycheck

  $60 million

  $53.8 million

  Source data from BoxOfficeMojo.com.

  The above are the worst, admittedly, but there were few hits to offset them.

  • • •

  Goldwyn and Lansing were intertwined. Good cop, bad cop. He knew how she thought; she knew how he executed what she wanted done. He loved to say no; she hated it. It would be hard to sever them. But inevitably, after twelve years, Goldwyn’s sometimes acrimonious though wildly successful run of protecting Sherry and bringing her “the fish on a platter from which to choose” (movies to make) was coming to an end.

  The job of head of production, Goldwyn’s position at the time, is to put potential pictures together for his boss by directing the development of the scripts the studio buys and shepherds through rewrites. He picks writers from the lists the execs assemble, approves the “take” the writer will attempt on the material, attaches (or tries to attach) “elements” along the way like directors or stars that make the script more of a movie. Then these “potential movies” become “fish on the platter” for his boss, the chairman, who green-lights the movies. Because half of the scripts will “tank” (come in under par), a third will fall apart as they try to become movies by losing their “elements” and the rest his boss will hate, he needs to assemble double the number of movies that the studio needs to release. That’s a lotta sushi.

  He does all that while the whole town is either at his feet or at his throat. There is no protection from a constant barrage of selling and yelling. It’s a melee where deals, projects, and executives’ mistakes are constantly blowing up in his face. If the slate of releases he puts together doesn’t work, he goes down.

  Goldwyn could be as charming as he chose to be, but he had a temper that occasionally flared. Once he stormed out of his office and drove due north for 350 miles without stopping or answering calls because someone on his staff had made him very angry.

  The kitchen got very hot for Goldwyn as the town turned against Paramount and the pictures weren’t working. The pressure got to him. This is how he related that moment to me a few years later:

  “The culture I came into was very different than the culture that I left. It was not a fear-based culture at the beginning. It was ‘this is what we stand for, this is what we are going to do, now let’s make it work.’ And then it became very much ‘How the fuck do we do that? How the fuck did that happen? How can we not do this?’

  “It went from being proactive and accountable to being at the expense of that accountability,” John recalled. “As much as you want to be accountable, the last thing you want is to be accountable for decisions you feel unsure about. And that’s what happened. That’s when I knew I had to get out. I knew that I would die in that culture, I knew it, I knew it. I knew I was failing, I knew the pictures were failing and I knew that I did not have the stamina or emotional reserves to turn it around. I felt very guilty about the quality of the pictures. Maybe I was feeling a little too much personal responsibility for them. It was much more about the mindset of the place. Because when you are in that job and you’re the head of production, you feel responsible for it. You can’t help it. At some point, you’re saying that it’s your fault.”

  On top of it all, or underneath it all, Goldwyn was having a personal crisis that may have exacerbated the discord. You would have noticed early signs if you had looked closely. He was looking snappier. He had been married to the wildly popular hostess–actress/producer and town doyenne Colleen Camp for years. They had been a team, like one professional unit, throughout his corporate rise—but he took a lover. To complicate matters, his paramour was a man, and Colleen, in her shock and dismay, looked for solace in her friends. John knew he had to tell Sherry first, before she found out somewhere else. This terrified him, as the studio was teetering on the brink of radical instability. (The Goldwyns commenced a divorce amid swirling rumors and fought a grueling custody battle over a daughter they both adored. They are all now good friends, though there was great hysteria at the time.)

  John, in something akin to panic, called Sherry to meet privately. Sherry remembers it with great compassion, as John was and is one of her best friends. She had no idea why he was in such a state when he came to see her.

  “That’s it?” she said, after he spoke.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You’re gay?! This is what the problem is? You were being so dramatic, I thought you had embezzled!” She was incredulous. “We don’t care.”

  John remembers the moment like
it was yesterday. Sherry got up off of her seat and walked over to sit down next to him on the couch. She took his hands in hers. “I am so happy for you,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Now you can have authentic relationships.” He was moved and utterly relieved.

  “But I also saw that he was distracted,” Sherry said, as we sat in her elegant office at the Sherry Lansing Foundation on Century Park East. “He was going through an identity crisis and a painful divorce. I couldn’t care less that he was gay,” she added. “But there were problems. It was a seismic shift in John’s identity and what he wanted to do with his life. He was going through this terrible time. I think his ability to concentrate on his work was compromised, as it would be with anybody. Whatever it was, it all was a perfect storm.”

  BAD 2003

  I adored John Goldwyn. I remember the day he called me while I was having lunch with a “nonpro”5 girlfriend (who was extremely annoyed by the interruption) at the Peninsula Hotel over Christmas and told me he was leaving. I knew at that moment that things would never, ever be the same at Paramount for me. Half my team was gone. The conversation, connected by his trusty assistant Eben Davidson (now a VP), who was rolling calls all day (phone calls are rolled, not placed, in Hollywood), however, was designed to assure me of the opposite. “I will be there for you and your movies,” John said over the phone. “Sherry has no one in mind. This could even take ’til spring. I will be working with you. It will be a smooth transition, I promise; you will still have me.”

  But even as I was talking with John, agents were calling Sherry to discuss his imminent replacement. Would it be my good friend on the lot, producer and former Disney president Donald De Line? He was happy as a producer, and wasn’t angling for the job. But Paramount megaproducer Scott Rudin6 wanted him, and Sherry had made a recent hit with him and was interested. Jim Wiatt, longtime head of the ICM agency, was publicly throwing his hat in the ring. CAA, mostly via Bryan Lourd, was making a case for newly minted Paramount producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Bryan—whom Sherry (and everyone) took very seriously—was a friend and ally of Lorenzo’s, and had made his producer’s deal at Paramount after his controversial departure from Warner Bros.

  A year before, di Bonaventura, a charismatic mountain-climbing guys’ guy, was the high-flying exec at Warner Bros. who’d brought in The Matrix, among other cutting-edge hits. Then it was widely reported that di Bonaventura had quietly jetted off to New York to make a play for his boss’s job to the Time Warner corporate brass. He landed at Paramount as a producer.7 CAA, understandably, saw him as a studio head.

  This was all well and good, but who would I be for? I needed a horse in the race. I went home and cried. Then I called Sherry.

  My horse would be my buddy, the charming, funny, popular and talented Donald De Line. I’d rooted for his underdog hit at Paramount, The Italian Job—a gold-heist movie remake starring Mark Wahlberg, Ed Norton, Charlize Theron and Mini Coopers—during that crazy summer of 2003 when all the big tentpoles (like Ang Lee’s Hulk) collapsed and the one movie that had the legs and the least tracking (it would be Paramount, which wasn’t making tentpoles) had cleaned up. I called it “My Big Fat Italian Job.” Sherry was hoping to find someone who would eventually succeed her as cochairman with Rob Friedman, then president of marketing and distribution.8

  Sherry loved Donald—hell, everyone loved him (except Brad Grey, as it later turned out)—but there was serious competition out there. Though CAA was lobbying for Lorenzo, they liked Donald too, as he also had a very commercial track record. I think in the end it was Sherry’s “throw off her shoes” comfort with Donald that won him the job, after weeks of frenzied speculation, gossip and wrangling. After over a decade with John, that intimacy would be hard to replace, and I know she struggled with the decision. Goldwyn was in agony, but in the end, he is happy and more successful as a producer, as it suits his temperament and creativity.

  CANDYLAND

  The rainbow coalition of Sherry and Donald began in 2003. The producers were happy, the execs who had whined on my couch were happy; nobody would get fired, Donald’s would be the era of kindness and all would be well on the lot again. Sherry could still reign over the happy Christmas party, and there would be less smoking and moaning on the quad. The Blocker was going to stay, Donald told me, but she was going to be a new, gentler, happier Blocker, reinvented in Donald’s image. She had promised.

  Really? I asked.

  Really. Everyone on the lot was saying so. She’d gotten a promotion. It was like Candyland.

  Then Donald hired a new senior exec, whom we’ll call “Cookie.” She was a tiny ball of fire who brought no small anxiety to the women of Candyland. Donald was crazy about her and thought her wildly commercial, though the stories that preceded her from her prior studio were just wild. Sherry didn’t get that “throw off her shoes” feeling from her. The Blocker sensed the possibility of herself being blocked. I was open to Cookie, as she was even shorter than I am. Perhaps she would help me get Can You Keep a Secret? going. The option on the book was coming up.

  Cookie cultivated long lines of people outside of her office. A meeting would go like this:

  YOU: It’s about a girl who’s terrified of flying.

  COOKIE: I’m terrified of flying!

  YOU: So many people are! So she gets totally wasted, and sits next to this gorgeous guy on the plane …

  COOKIE: Good.

  YOU: And tells him everything about herself.

  COOKIE: Can you get Hugh Grant?

  YOU: I didn’t tell you that the guy ends up being her boss!

  COOKIE: If you get Hugh Grant, I can get it made.

  You leave exhilarated. All you have to do is get Hugh Grant. Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant want to work together! Perfect! And then you realize you don’t have a script. And you need Cookie to sign off on a writer. And there are thirty people waiting outside her door, and you can’t get back in for two weeks. And of course you can’t get Hugh Grant before the option runs out.

  • • •

  Sometime around mid-Candyland, Donald called to offer me a movie he wanted to make, with a director already lined up. He knew it wasn’t perfect for me, he said, but it would round out his slate. Great, I said, what is it? I was jazzed.

  It was called Step-Dude.

  Okay, it didn’t have a great name.

  It was about a cougar who falls in love with a guy her son’s age.

  Okay, it had a dicey, creepy, uncomfortable premise.

  But it was really funny.

  Okay, funny enough. And I hadn’t had a picture in a year now. Too much turmoil. The director was having a hard time getting a cast. Could I help?

  My son, Oly, in his twenties at the time, was aghast when I told him the premise. But he played poker regularly with the director. So that was one thing. What thing? I don’t know. I thought it would be fun to location scout New Orleans in a van, such was my frustration with my efforts to get Can You Keep a Secret? made. Made? Hell, even to hire a writer! Now Kate Hudson was pregnant! Nine more months.

  So we went scouting for locations in New Orleans. While in the van, we heard that Owen Wilson—the director’s best friend—had passed on the script. Then we heard that Seann William Scott—my friend—passed. Then my line producer quit for an Adam Shankman movie. Was this a present, or a trick? I spent months trying to put together a movie I didn’t love. I stopped. This was not my job. Making movies I love is my job. Why wasn’t it happening? In the meantime, I started to invent some more movies that Donald and I could both like and that I could get around the Blocker. But then, of course, someone got fired and there was a hot new boss, so I got a little distracted.

  HIP “R” US

  When I think back on the glory days of Tom Freston’s reign—all eighteen months of it—it seemed then like he would be at Paramount forever. And why not? He was so cool! He founded MTV! He was a homegrown Viacom star! We were all proud and excited. He came in as the beloved son, waving the MTV banner hi
gh, this network he’d founded for proud papa Redstone. He led with his chin, superconfident and New Age, an entrepreneur who could run a conglomerate! Handsome and edgy, he dressed like a rock star and jetted around with Bono or Mick or whomever, wherever. Freston’s loyal longtime staff at Viacom’s starlet division, MTV, saw him as their Steve Jobs. Out with the stodgy old, in with the new, and he was the cutting-edge face of it. He had Sumner’s personal mandate to recreate the brand, and he came in branding away, naming MTV and Nickelodeon the lead faces of the New, Cool Paramount. He seemed to have a bemused contempt for everything Old Paramount, both in style and substance. Apparently the old administration had treated the film division of MTV shabbily, and that would be rectified both by MTV’s independence and the wholesale reinvention of the sensibility of the studio: Hip “R” Us. There were a lot of unhip holdovers around, and they were looking nervous.

  DOLGEN GETS THE SQUEEZE PLAY

  What happened to Dolgen is that he suddenly had no real job. One morning he woke up to find Viacom divided into two divisions. Tom Freston was running the movie division and Les Moonves was running the television and cable division, and it wasn’t clear what was left for Dolgen to run. He resigned days later. Sherry was bereft.

  It took Tom Freston a while to figure out what he wanted in a new team. In the meantime, he promoted Sherry into Dolgen’s job. Suddenly she was going to Walmart to discuss DVDs, running P&Ls, basically doing the financials. She hated Dolgen’s job, it was taking her away from the movies, taking her away from getting her hands inside the celluloid, the scripts, the packaging, fixing it in post—everything she loved and was good at. But she figured that she might be able to wait it out until Tom got to know the team she had put in place—Rob Friedman and Donald De Line—and appreciate them as she did. She hoped to convince Tom to promote them to her job. So she stayed in Dolgen’s job for eight months, despite the fact she would have preferred to retire sooner, start her foundation and spend more time with her husband, director Billy Friedkin, where she could relax and throw off those wicked work shoes—and not read another financial projection for Paramount ever again. She wanted more than anything to leave gracefully. But as she dutifully performed what was expected of her, Tom Freston knew she was unhappy doing Dolgen’s job, so he began scoping out his future options, as is the prerogative of any new CEO. Meanwhile, all of us producers on the lot experienced more debilitating confusion.