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

by Lynda Obst

  Freston reached out to some industry players to fill the top job, notably Stacey Snider, Steven Spielberg’s partner at DreamWorks. Behind the scenes, however, it was a bit weird. In a very collegial way, Freston said to Sherry one day, “Let’s start a new team. You and me. You fire everybody.”

  Sherry answered, “Why?”

  Firing people is not Sherry’s style.

  She said to Freston: “But don’t you understand? Next summer is going to be the biggest one in the history of our company. And that summer was created by Donald De Line and Sherry Lansing and Rob Friedman and everybody. What are you talking about?”

  She was referring to 2005, the summer that was to see Paramount release War of the Worlds, which did $245 million worldwide. Sherry remembered what were to be her last days at Paramount. “And in fact, that was the single biggest summer we’d had in years. But he wanted to fire everybody. And I thought, Huh? I’ll tell them I’m not going to renew and I’ll stay until they find my replacement. If you remember, that’s when I kept pushing for Donald and Robbie [Friedman] to be copresidents.” While Freston was reaching out to big industry players like Stacey Snider, others lobbied for the job. “And then,” Sherry added, “they ended up with Brad Grey.”

  Freston took everyone by surprise and chose mega–talent manager Brad Grey (notably Brad Pitt’s manager and an exec producer on The Sopranos), whose name had never been in active contention. Grey managed many big clients and needed months to get out of his contract at his company, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. During the long transition, from January through March, Donald and Sherry continued to try to put movies together, but none of them happened. She remembers it as a very nice time in which she was perfectly happy and felt no pressure. She and Freston “coexisted,” she said. “You know—you decide! Tra-la tra-la! I was perfectly happy. And soon after, I left for a lot of reasons. You know: Been there, done that. Wanting a new life.”

  All I remember about Sherry leaving is two things:

  1. She resigned. She didn’t get fired. Period. End of sentence. End of thought.

  2. Who didn’t come to her good-bye party? I made a list. The place was packed. The gate guards cried. The people she honored every year at the Christmas party for forty years of service cried. Richard Fowkes, head of business affairs, who had been there for three decades, cried. The Blocker and I embraced and cried together.

  To her credit, the Blocker was a fantastic person to have work for you; all of her bosses adored her and her up-to-the-second inside information that I too would often be privy to. In moments like these, we were on the same team—the sad team. Sherry’s key players would be gone once Brad Grey came in and got to remaking things in his image.

  The Old Abnormal was dead, along with its unforgettable queen and her unmatchable leadership skills. No one was ever fired right before Christmas vacation under her tenure, as Richard Fowkes was that year. But times were a-changing. And henceforth they would change very, very quickly.

  HIP “R” US GOES TO SUNDANCE

  The first picture chosen by Freston and his choice of studio head, Brad Grey, was Hustle & Flow, an urban picture they picked up for distribution at Sundance and embraced with a splashy “Here comes the All-New Coke” for the New Paramount branding debut. Starring Terrence Howard and directed by Craig Brewer, the movie was an elegy to a “dope” pimp. Though it had won Sundance, it was too cool for the rest of America. With the power of the MTV brand, a huge marketing campaign and a hit, Oscar-winning song, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” the first test of the team’s instincts brought in $23 million worldwide. They followed it up by hiring the very Irish Jim Sheridan to direct rapper 50 Cent’s life story, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, still pursuing the hip-hop music tie-in. With a $40 million budget, exclusive of prints and ads, the movie grossed $46 million worldwide.

  Despite the fact that War of the Worlds, which Sherry and Donald put together, did as well at the box office that summer as she had predicted, soon after Brad Grey arrived, many of the people on Sherry’s team were starting to pack. In July, Rob Friedman9 was gone, and Rob Moore was running his marketing and distribution divisions as well as business affairs.

  I was still not getting my movies made. I had a terrific, action-packed, true-life, high-seas adventure by a great screenwriter that everyone loved, but it had no traction; I had a drama with an Oscar-winning screenwriter about an intelligent-design case in Pennsylvania that was the equivalent of Inherit the Wind; I had a comedy with two hot writers, but nothing was going anywhere. Was it the internal drama here? Or the Blocker? I wasn’t sure, but I needed a do-over. I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to make a dinner date with Donald.

  “Donald,” I said over Dover sole at the restaurant Il Sole days later, “I love the Blocker. She’s sent me on many great wild-goose chases to visit unavailable writers. She is adorable and hilarious. But she is killing me.”

  “Great!” said Donald, in his loving, enthusiastic, totally supportive way. “No more. We will take her off your account tomorrow.”

  That night I went to bed without tension for the first time in five years, as Donald jetted off to London to check on a picture, Watchmen, a movie being produced by veteran producer Larry Gordon and his partner, Lloyd, and directed by Paul Greengrass (Green Zone, The Bourne Ultimatum, United 93), based on the DC Comics limited series. Donald thought the script had gone awry.

  And then I learned a fatal law of Paramount: Never, ever jet off to London when there are politics in the air. For it seems (to me) that as soon as someone upstairs gets the travel voucher, your hours are numbered. That was Donald’s final flight for Paramount. As he flew east, his contract was terminated, his office was shut down and mind-blowingly serious hardball was being played. Who knew what when? I was so horrified by what was going on that I actually took notes, like a reporter at an assassination who can rely only on her training in an emergency.

  Donald flew to London with Cookie, and they met with the director and the production team. It was a tough meeting. Basically, the studio didn’t like the script Greengrass wanted to make, and they had to shut down the movie. When Donald returned to the lobby of his hotel, the Dorchester, he got a message from his office that Gregg Kilday of the Hollywood Reporter had called him six times. That is never good. He called the reporter back, and Kilday asked, “How do you feel about Gail Berman coming in to run movies?”

  Donald said, “What are you talking about?”

  “They’ve hired Gail Berman,” said Kilday.

  “No, Gail Berman is in television; you obviously have it wrong. This is why you’re the Hollywood Reporter and not Variety. That she’s possibly coming to run television sounds right.”

  Donald hung up the phone and called Nancy Kirkpatrick, then the head of Paramount publicity and a smart, plugged-in, fabulous woman who was a great pal of all of ours.10

  “Nancy, why has this guy called me from the Hollywood Reporter with this story about Gail Berman?”

  “I got the same call. I know nothing, and I’m not kidding.”

  Donald hung up the phone, and a minute later, the Hollywood Reporter was calling again. “I’m really sorry. This is all so weird that I’m telling you this, but I got it confirmed by Fox.”

  At that point I found out, because Donald called me from London. My heart was beating hard. I knew that my brother, Rick, knew Gail (they did Malcolm in the Middle together—he was packaging agent, she was head of Fox TV) and Peter Chernin well (Gail was then working for Chernin at Fox), and would know the skinny. I offered to call Rick; in a millisecond he confirmed it. Gail’s deal to run motion pictures was done, closed. I was in shock. Rick told me not to worry. Worry? My heart was palpitating. It was way beyond worry. Execs were starting to pour into my office like it was a suicide prevention center. Candyland was over.

  I called Donald. By then he’d already had it confirmed. He said to me, “Okay, Houston, we have a problem.” He hung up the phone and called Brad’s office.


  “Brad’s not here,” he was told.

  “Well, it’s really important. I need to speak to him.”

  “He’s at the dentist.”

  Phone calls were streaming into Donald’s hotel room—press, other studios, everybody. I was talking to him and his sister and the Blocker—who was hysterical—constantly. Donald’s head was spinning. And why not? He’d been fired, without really having an opportunity to get to work with Brad and be rejected for a good, sound reason! They’d barely had any meetings at all. And he was told by the press, not by his company!

  When Donald finally reached Brad hours later, Donald said, “I got this call from the Hollywood Reporter telling me you’ve hired Gail Berman.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

  “Oh, okay. Well, so what does that mean for me?”

  “Well, that’s what we need to talk about.”

  “So you’ve fired me.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “But you gave her my job. If you gave her my job, then I’m fired.”

  “Well, we want you to be here. We want to talk about opportunities.”

  “Okay. None of this makes any sense to me, but I’m getting on the next plane out of London, which unfortunately is not till tomorrow morning. I will come off the plane and go straight to your office at Paramount.”

  I remember Donald telling me that Freston sat in the room with Brad the next morning, after a sleepless night—a terrible night—saying that he was a big fan. I was such a big fan of Freston’s at the time that it meant a great deal to me, who knows why.

  In the meeting, the team explained they had wanted to make Donald a producer, and he said, “Thank you, but no.” He didn’t want to stay at Paramount. It would be incredibly uncomfortable for him, as they can imagine. And that was that.

  At dinner with Cookie that night, he got a call from Watchmen producer Larry Gordon. “Oh, kids! Welcome to Hollywood!”

  Donald told him, “Yeah, well, we just shut your movie down. Go get your friend to fix it. Not my problem anymore.”

  Donald went on to become a very successful producer at Warner Bros., producing Green Lantern, Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, the bawdy Observe and Report and the buddy comedy I Love You, Man. So one studio’s attitude at a given time doesn’t necessarily affect your fortunes elsewhere. But these guys were in a hurry to create the new Paramount. One, two, three, no time for thee.

  I asked Sherry about that moment. What struck her the most, she said, was how content she had been the very second before she heard. She had planned Chapter Three of her life so carefully, leaving her “people” in place, determining the nature of her philanthropy—everything perfectly laid out by careful design. But as my mother always said, the best-laid plans of mice, men and women went awry. This is how Sherry remembers hearing that Donald had gotten fired.

  “I had been gone for three months, or something like that,” she said. “I remember so clearly that I had gone to a meeting at the United Nations. I was so excited they were asking me to do something. My first meeting was with President Carter, whom I happen to love. We were talking about global-this and global-that and guinea worm, and I was so happy.”

  I could see that “guinea worm” delighted Sherry: The very thought of it being a parasite she could do something about and not a movie in crisis overjoyed her.

  “I was in New York,” Sherry continued. “Amy Pascal [cochair of Sony and one of Donald’s best friends] called and said, ‘How is it?’ and I said, ‘It’s everything I thought it would be. I found salvation, you know. I just left the center; it’s everything I wanted for the third chapter.’ She was so happy for me. Then I said, ‘What I really feel good about is that all of the people I love are fine.’ You know, I thought they were. And then I went back to the hotel and there were seven messages from the trades—some from this person, some from that person—and then one from Donald, saying that they had fired him.”

  It still amazed her to think of.

  At the time of Donald’s firing, I was in my office, surrounded by my suffering executives. They could smoke in my bungalow, so it was a popular hangout. Plus, they knew they could get the dish from Donald’s camp at my place. A big bear of an exec was actually crying—“Woe is me! What am I going to do?” Nobody knew what horrors would come next.

  Cookie called me, sounding devastated. She asked how Donald was handling this.

  “Bad,” I said. “Not good; but okay,” I added, carefully.

  COLOR WAR

  The guys upstairs would have to be smarter than Hip “R” Us and other assorted “MTV meets pimp” movies. They needed to insulate themselves from the front line of decision-making. That’s where Gail Berman, the brilliant Fox programmer, came in. She was responsible for the long-running, critically acclaimed hit Malcolm in the Middle, about a gifted middle child; House; 24; American Idol; and the general rise of the Fox network. Her job there was to find America’s taste, and she was Brad Grey’s choice to replace Donald. I knew her a bit via my brother, Rick Rosen. They were great friends. I would live to see another pitch.

  In the meantime, on a critical metalevel, the Freston-Grey-Moore team saw into the future. They determined that the Dolgen-Lansing regime was very domestically oriented, selling off their foreign rights to pay for making a picture. Remember, in the Old Abnormal, international only counted for 20 percent; their thinking hadn’t really changed with the times, even though they held foreign rights on some of their early franchise efforts like the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, based on the video game of the same name about a fearless, tomb-raiding archeologist, played in the film by Angelina Jolie, who, needless to say, is quite a babe.

  The new team quickly decided to retain their foreign rights and set their sights on the international market. That was a key move in the turning of the battleship Paramount. They began to concentrate on their in-house franchises, generating another Mission: Impossible in 2006 and pushing the Star Trek franchise into gear, a task the old regime had struggled with. But there were many growing pains and strains to come before the turn was complete.

  One day early in the Gail Berman regime, we were told that we would have all-new executives. I guess it was just too cozy the way it was. Gail got this idea that we should all break up into teams of new executives, and she would reassign our projects to these new teams. Each team would handle all our ongoing projects plus any new pitches or ideas. And each would have a color, like red, yellow, blue or green. Really! No more pitching to the executive who would most take to your idea, who loved comedy or drama or sports, as it was done at every other studio for the last fifty years.

  We were all starting from scratch, repitching our one-to six-year-old projects, picking new writers, creating new treatments, leaving our allies—it was a total disaster. Cookie called to explain. “This is so great!” she said. “You will love your new exec! This is an exciting new direction.”

  I just couldn’t believe I was pitching Can You Keep a Secret? all over again to the exec on the Yellow team, whom I’d never met. We rebelled and named ourselves the Khaki team. This was early in the soon-to-be-troubled relationship between Gail and Cookie. But that was in another country and alas, now they are friends, to screw up a great expression.

  At one point, when we were working on the Khaki team, Cookie called me again with great news: She was bringing in her best friend in all the world to run the studio with her. (I had been thinking that Gail was running the studio.)

  “Really?” I said. “Who?”

  “Brad Weston,” she said. “It’s a secret. But you will love him. I’ve known him all my life.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder whether this meant I would have to pitch Can You Keep a Secret? to yet another person that month. I was distraught, so I called my brilliant agent and key ally, Kevin Huvane, of CAA, who knows everything, always.

  “Kev, who is Brad Weston? Is he coming here? Will I like him? And is he a good guy?�
��

  “Yes, yes, yes. I will set up a meeting with you two. This is good. He’s sane.”

  So there I was, a week later, in this incredibly calm Zen office, with a bald (the shaved-head variety), hot guy who ran ten miles every morning and claimed to love romantic comedies.

  “So she meets this great-looking guy on a plane,” I told him, “and because she has horrible plane anxiety, she gets totally wasted and ends up telling him every tiny secret about her life—completely embarrassing, gross things. In the morning she goes to work, and he’s her boss.” I’d never gotten so much of the story out before.

  “What if she sleeps with him?” suggests Weston.

  “Interesting,” I say.

  “Pick the writer you like, and I’ll hire him.”

  I was going to like this guy!

  Brad immediately commissioned a talented British writer, Ol Parker (later the writer of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and we got to work meeting with book author Sophie Kinsella, which involved fun trips to London, where the Shopaholic writer, our new screenwriter/director and I had exciting story meetings, where we reinvented the script, and went on many fun shopping trips, where we undermined my bank account. Brad even inquired, without prompting, about long-languishing projects that I’d been working on in creative solitude. He was going to be the first creative ally I had here since Goldwyn had left. It was beginning to feel like Christmas.