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

by Lynda Obst

  I started a project on the Dover “Scopes”-type trial, in which intelligent design was put on trial in a Pennsylvania courtroom. Cookie said I could do it if I landed Oscar-winning writer Sir Ronald Harwood (The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and much to her shock, he agreed. Then the three of us proceeded to have the most horrid pitch meeting in history, after which Sir Ronald determined he would never pitch at a studio again. I then hired Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) who wrote a terrific script, which I sent to Tom Hanks. But soon movies like this were not going to be made at Paramount anymore.

  In the midst of this creative bliss, our option on Can You Keep a Secret? was quickly running out, so Oly was on a crazy deadline. Within two months, the script came in, and I loved it. I sent it to Weston. He said, “Get it to Kate ASAP, and we can figure out what to do about the option.” So off it went. We made the option cutoff within days, and then … Kate was too busy to read it. I called. I emailed. She sent back love and smiley faces. But she was too busy to read. When she finally did, she passed, much to my shock. And after all that huffing and puffing, Kate said no, and the author didn’t renew our option. Development hell—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But my little failure was nothing compared to the cataclysm about to occur at the very top of Paramount.

  THE END OF THE SHORTEST MOMENTOUS ERA

  Tom Freston’s firing couldn’t have been more unexpected.

  This part we all heard: One bad weekend, Tom Cruise (who’d had a long-standing and very lucrative deal with Paramount, which included the Mission: Impossible franchise) jumped the shark on Oprah’s couch, on national TV. This not only appalled the nation, it appalled the Redstones, and Sumner went public and fired Tom Cruise by press release. Firing a star asset by press release is something the chairman rarely does, particularly without consulting his top execs—in this case, Brad Grey and Tom Freston—who run the studio day to day and have movies with this star, and many more movies with his powerful agency, CAA.

  Freston, thinking he was family, is said to have visited the Redstones over the weekend to protect his executives and object to his boss. According to insiders, whatever conversation followed this confrontation led to Freston’s firing. Some say Redstone objected to being confronted on his actions, that he felt he was the boss and able to act unilaterally when he chose to, vis-à-vis his studio and its actors under contract. CAA was said to have been up in arms and screaming and yelling at Grey and Freston about the public firing. “Who cares about CAA?” was Redstone’s position in this version of the story.

  Freston tried to explain to his boss the importance of the Mission franchise and that he should work with his team. Redstone reportedly said that Cruise was “over,” “that was that” and “the conversation is over.” This conversation may not have happened; it is industry scuttlebutt. Redstone stated publicly that he fired Freston because he had not made a timely bid on MySpace, the non-Facebook social networking site that was up for grabs, but that Freston considered to be in precipitous decline and not worth Viacom buying. But no one believed that story, as Freston and Sumner were too close to end their relationship over a deal. The Tom Cruise story is what we all heard, and it is thought by most to be true.

  This could be another part of the story:

  Sumner, it was said by many in his office, could often be heard shouting, “Where’s Freston?” Freston, the former Afghani rug dealer who loved to jet around the world with rock stars, apparently, even as co-COO of Viacom Entertainment, didn’t change his lifestyle all that much. Why did anyone think he would? That’s what everyone loved about him. Tom Freston’s work ethic was not Sumner Redstone’s work ethic, which could kindly be described as 24/7; Freston’s might be described as unconventional/out of the office/hard to reach in St. Barts with Mick.

  Whenever someone gets fired, it’s the culmination of a number of issues. In this case, it was likely Freston’s lifestyle. The very thing that made Tom Freston so special and interesting and enabled him to found MTV—going to concerts all over the world, hanging out with creative types, brainstorming with rock stars—drove Sumner nuts because Freston wasn’t a “sit in your office and do Dolgen-type financial projections” kind of guy.

  But the heir apparent—the new surrogate son—Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, was that kind of guy. In his most public discussion of Freston’s firing, reported in the New York Times,11 Redstone said he fired Freston for Dauman. “It was a crying session for both of us when I said, ‘Tom, look, you’ve been great, but the board and I have decided that Philippe is the best man to lead the company.’ ” And presto chango, the Times article went on to report, Freston’s hemp chairs, dark blinds and Jamaican music were replaced with Dauman’s spare office of taupe, white and heavy wood.

  Underlining this thinking is something I once heard from an assistant, the best of sources. Sumner called Sherry once, screaming about Freston, “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me he’s never around?”

  She answered, “Why the fuck didn’t I tell you? It’s not my responsibility to tell you.”

  Freston had been offered the top job at Viacom in the past and had turned it down. His ambivalence had been good intuition. In any case, Freston was gone the Monday after the Tom Cruise weekend. All of MTV wept. Again, the town was stunned. Brad Grey and his new deputy, Rob Moore, went on. Rob Moore could eat a lot of real estate on Melrose. And there were rumors he wasn’t happy with someone else.

  MEETING WITH VAMPIRES

  I was getting the feeling that Brad didn’t like Gail so much anymore. First of all, it was the way they looked when they walked across the lot together: It wasn’t just that she looked like Big Bird looming over his Ernie, but he looked trapped, like he was trying to escape. I heard from excellent sources that at some point early in Gail’s tenure—maybe when she was forming her producers into color groups—Rob Moore, who had been crowned president of distribution, marketing, business affairs and home entertainment in 2006, had already essentially usurped her green-lighting position. In addition, the whole film industry was complaining about her phone list—as in, they weren’t on it. She was dining with television people! If you could hear the utter disdain with which this was whispered, you would think she was meeting with vampires in the dark of night. I could imagine that Brad was hearing this and not liking the fact that Important Movie People were grumbling. This is somewhat ironic, particularly now, knowing that TV darling J. J. Abrams, of Felicity, Alias, Lost and Fringe fame, is now among the lot’s biggest filmmaker attractions, and most of the movie people who were so disdainful then are now doing TV.12 I assumed Gail’s preeminence in TV was one of the reasons she was recruited.

  My last encounter with Gail at Paramount took place at what turned out to be one of the more surreal meetings I had ever attended. It was supposed to be a green-light meeting on a movie that Gail had tried to give me, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. It was an adorable script by the gutsy and talented English writer-director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), based on a well-known British young adult book called Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging. I was thrilled to go to England to do it. (Read: I loved the script, and would have done anything to leave the lot.)

  Gurinder wouldn’t hire Emma Roberts to star, as Nickelodeon wanted (because she had a hit Nickelodeon series at the time), which probably cost us a U.S. release. I supported her decision in an effort to bond with her, which eventually failed. But Gurinder and I were getting along swimmingly at the time, and we were waiting for Gail and Cookie in the huge main conference room at the administration building. There had been financing problems we had overcome with the help of Paramount International, and we looked like we were there on budget with an all-English cast of unknowns, as Gurinder wanted due to the excellent numbers in the UK from her hit Bend It Like Beckham. We were waiting excitedly for the go-ahead.

  Cookie arrived; the two execs from the Khaki team were there; but no Gail. A half hour passed; the assistant called and said it would be an
other few minutes. Forty-five minutes of gossip, small talk, chitchat about Gurinder’s pregnancy and scheduling passed, but still no Gail. At the hour mark it became weird, and Cookie left the meeting, never to return. At an hour and a half, Cookie called me into her office. With a look I can only describe as abject horror mixed with manic delirium, she told me that Gail had been fired. I was in shock.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I loved Gail. I had helped heal her relationship with Cookie. I thought her instincts were really great, and growing by the hour. I couldn’t handle this.

  I went to Gail’s office. I hugged and kissed her. She was upset but relieved; a pro. In shock, but not. But still we talked for a while and commiserated about Paramount. I returned to my meeting and said, “All bets are off for now. I will check in with everyone tomorrow.” I went home, took a Xanax and watched three nights’ worth of 48 Hours Mystery (I hoard them for insomniac nights like these).

  Within hours, the red-hot rumors were that Cookie and Brad would be copresidents. They were both to be promoted to Gail’s job. The copresidency situation could be really bad or really good, but it certainly didn’t feel stable. I was going to lie low until it all washed out.

  Which was unbelievably fast, even for Paramount. You could say it happened at lightning speed. Within what seemed like minutes, Cookie too, despite her plans to run the studio with her best friend in the whole world, was gone. There was a sense that she and Gail were let go together, like a two-for-one sale, and this infuriated me.

  From my vantage point, this was entirely sexist and unfair. Gail was apparently fired for political reasons not really of her own making. She had gotten tangled up in Cookie’s complicated political imbroglio without her knowledge. Gail was terribly naïve, really. The fix was in for both of them, though neither of them knew it. A catfight could be blamed, but in fact they were both expendable to the powers that be. They were noisy, they were women, they were in somebody’s way. So on the day of my strange Angus Thongs meeting, January 10, 2001, both were summarily fired, in a cold un-Nike-like whoosh.

  Brad Weston looked like a seasoned corporate survivor, hanging tough in the top spot. For a moment he became the sole president of production, and spent his time both infighting and literally fighting for the movie The Fighter—the Oscar-nominated story of fighter Micky Ward, starring Mark Wahlberg—like he was in one corner.13 But who was in the other?

  As I sort out the chronology in my mind, I realize I’ve left out a whole president who suddenly turned up. This was Paramount, after all. This seems negligent, I know, but there were so many. There were copresidents and presidents of divisions and presidents of MTV and a lovely senior vice president of Nickelodeon Movies. But this was a real president: John Lesher, whom I’d known earlier in his career as an Endeavor agent. Brad Grey had recruited Lesher in 2005 to run Paramount Vantage, its then to-be-reinvented (there’s that word again!) classics division. Lesher had streaked out of the gate with his ex-clients’ prepackaged pictures, and seemed for a time to have more movies in production than Paramount itself.14 In one impressive year, he had two movies, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, competing against each other for the Best Picture Oscar. (No Country won.) When Lesher ran Vantage, he seemed, for good reason—from many on the studio lot’s point of view—to be Grey’s and Freston’s favorite acolyte.

  Apparently, Freston’s demise spelled the eventual demise of Vantage, his baby. And “suddenly” (like everything at Paramount in those days), Lesher was a president of big Paramount too, and my new friend, Brad Weston, who liked romantic comedies and let me play alone on my passion project, was suddenly in danger. Grey had given Lesher the top job at Paramount, now that Vantage was effectively closing, perhaps as a kind of trade-off for his tenure at Vantage. Would he know how to make regular movies? And would Weston work as a subpresident under Lesher?

  But even bigger things were brewing. As the Moore-Grey team refined its formula (Super-Moore was now vice chairman), the huge deal it had made with Spielberg’s DreamWorks in 2006 fell apart after only two years. It had been acrimonious almost from the start. It didn’t take long for Spielberg and Grey to get into battles over autonomy, and DreamWorks left bitterly in 2008. Paramount took custody of many scripts and a shared hit in its divorce from DreamWorks, Transformers. Each studio got custody of forty of their shared scripts, with the right to cofinance. Eventually, parts of this divorce settlement, including a new head of production who moved from DreamWorks to Paramount to oversee their shared inventory, would complete Paramount’s transformation into the New Abnormal paradigm.

  Adam Goodman, the former president of DreamWorks, became president of production after Lesher was fired, and remains there to this day. Brad Weston, at lunch with me recently, credited Goodman with finding a new kind of inexpensive franchise for Paramount, Paranormal Activity, which, he pointed out, brings the sensibility of reality TV to movies. A handheld horror franchise on its fourth incarnation (at the time of writing), its “you are there as this is really happening to real people” conceit is as cheap to make as it is scary and fresh. (Or was.) Goodman was a nice good-bye present from the departing DreamWorks.

  But an intervention was about to take place on a scale much grander than anything we moaned and groaned about when we smoked and gossiped on the quad. It would ultimately entail sweeping cuts to the studio’s overheads and practices that the most ambitious deficit-hawk type would never have dreamed of suggesting. None of it was really planned. None of us saw it coming. When we heard the foreboding sound of tom-toms in the air, we never suspected that would be the onset of an ill-timed war that would interrupt and then change business as usual forever.

  *

  1. Sumner M. Redstone, owner of the fifth-largest chain of movie theaters in the nation, says his greatest achievement was living through the Copley Plaza Hotel fire that burned 80 percent of his body. At age fifty-eight he was holding on to his third-floor windowsill, his right hand burning in the flames, counting to ten, as he watched the single ladder rising toward him from a fire truck late on the night of March 29, 1979 (Robert Lenzer, “True Grit,” Boston Globe, March 17, 1981).

  2. On September 12, 2001, it became the number-one DVD. My Orthodox rabbi friend woke me up on September 11, saying, “Turn on the TV, your movie is on.”

  3. Though he later left for Sirius Radio in 2004.

  4. George Clooney, Jennifer Connelly, Kelly Ripa, Mike Nichols, Scarlett Johansson, Todd Field, Tom Ford, Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Robert Downey, Jr., Reese Witherspoon, etc.

  5. Since the 1940s, the trades have referred to wives (or husbands) who don’t work in the business as “nonpros” in wedding announcements, and the term has grown to apply to any situation.

  6. Now at Sony.

  7. He is now the immensely successful franchise producer of Transformers and G.I. Joe.

  8. Friedman went on to found Summit Entertainment, of the Twilight franchise, and is now cochairman of Lionsgate Studios.

  9. He went on to cochair Lionsgate, which produced Twilight and The Hunger Games, after it was bought by Summit.

  10. She is now president of worldwide marketing at Lionsgate under Rob Friedman.

  11. September 22, 2012.

  12. Abrams was recently hired by Disney to reboot Star Wars.

  13. Eventually his administration would lose the movie; he was forced to abandon it in what we call “turnaround.” But Paramount later picked it up for distribution after Relativity Media financed it.

  14. In the same year Vantage also released Year of the Dog, Black Snake Moan, A Mighty Heart, Into the Wild and Margot at the Wedding.

  SCENE SIX

  THE CATASTROPHE

  The Writers’ Strike of 2007–8

  I recall Halloween 2007 very clearly. My lunch date had to cancel because he had to evacuate his parents from their burning gated community in San Diego. The crazy Santa Ana winds were kicking carbon dust into my face
from the thirteen fires that were raging out of control up and down the coast, and that’s not counting the one that was about to consume the entire town: the writers’ strike.

  The 1988 strike was Vesuvian, lasting six months and costing the industry half a billion dollars. It is remembered as “the Bloodbath.” The financial consequences had been so dire that neither side had fought again until now. But the sides were redrawn as a new revenue frontier was opening up—the virtual one—and if the past was prelude to the future, the future was grim. The trace memory of that strike had the town shivering in the ninety-eight-degree heat nineteen years later. Both camps were entrenched as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) contract was expiring that night.

  The ghetto was hyperventilating. In Hollywood at times of industry-wide stress, everyone is a ghetto Jew. The tens of thousands of Irish, blacks and WASPs were all running around like the pogrom was coming down from the hills into the hood. The prospect of future work ceasing if the writers went out on strike was terrifying.

  For weeks before the strike deadline, the two sides had barely spoken, each viewing the other as something akin to aliens. The writers were still reeling from the battle of 1988, when they fought mightily for a fraction of DVD profits and lost. The writers still wanted a piece of that pie, but it was gone, baby, gone. At least the writers wanted some payback for the slice of DVD revenue they missed in ’88 by taking an aggressive posture toward “new media”—i.e., the Internet, in the form of online streaming. In truth, the value of the revenue stream had not been definitively evaluated by either TV or films at that point. There were guesses, estimates, based on models pulled out of models. It was 2008, and deals of consequence are just now, in 2012, being made—and they are still not predictable enough to be projected onto any profit-and-loss statement. But who believed this then? Not the writers.

  The AMPTP, or Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers—by which we mean the studios’ and networks’ negotiating body, also known as the Moguls—was hostile to these fundamental incursions into barely existing profit streams. They saw one on the way out—DVDs—and one just barely on the way in—the Internet. So they began the negotiations with “rollbacks,” a common and (in my humble opinion) repugnant management negotiating strategy. To me, Malcolm in the Middle, it seemed like a gigantic pissing contest: Whose industry phallus, if you will, was bigger—the Moguls’ or the Writers’? This may sound like a Polish joke, but this is the only season when the Writers, usually at the bottom of the industry totem pole, can take on the Moguls and slap them silly. Potential work stoppages are deadly.