Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst

Author:Lynda Obst [Obst, Lynda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781476727745
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-06-11T07:00:00+00:00

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.

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