Obst - Sleepless in Hollywood : tales from the new abnormal in the movie business

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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 its not her fault.

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 Id been steadily making movies for years. This wasnt just me or my studio, though we were certainly part of the storythere was something systemic going on that was changing what we could make. It seemed that whatever it was, it suddenly wasnt what I was selling and what Id 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 currentpeople I know well. I cant be as exhaustive as a reporter can be and speak to the multitudes of excellent sources whom I dont know, and might someday work with.

But my sources, some of the most important executives in townstudio heads, marketing heads and the likethe 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 Id gotten it, it was like Heraclituss 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.

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)

201013 Hot in Cleveland (TV series) (executive producer66 episodes)

2012 The Soul Man (TV series) (executive producer6 episodes)

2013 Helix (TV series) (executive producer13 episodes) (shooting August, airing November 2013)

No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life.

Samuel Goldwyn

I can trace the moment when I noticed that what seemed like normal was changingthat the ways wed 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, lets 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. Its 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 Its on her agents desk, and Three studios are bidding on this script means Everyones passed but one buyer who hasnt answered yet. The language has a sublanguage, and there is no libretto. Its just plain Abnormal, and always has been.

I saw that some key aspects of the abnormal Hollywood Id come to love, or at least enjoy heartily, were changing into something new, but of course I didnt 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 hasnt been mended since. Mentored by men and a mentor to women, she is that rare combination of a mans woman and a womans woman at the same time.

Dolgen and Lansing were a great duo: She was class, he was crass. While Dolgens screaming could be heard throughout the administration building, no one would ever get bad news in Sherrys office. (She had employees for that.) Dolgens belligerence was as famous as Sherrys graciousness. The whole thing worked for them for a long time.

Sherry had been a big supporter of my little romantic comedyshe loved the script Id developed with her team, and that helped me get it into production. But much to my surprise, it turned out that Paramount wasnt 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.