Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst Read Free Book Online

Since I was reliably churning out pictures then, I didn’t take his gloomy talk about piracy seriously. I just went around saying, “The landlord has the blues,” and blithely fell into the future.
    Peter wasn’t exactly having a hard time making the transition. Once he decided in 2009 to leave the number-two job overseeing the News Corp. media empire, he became the biggest producer at Fox (one of the biggest anywhere), with guaranteed pictures and huge potential profit participation. His first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air. More recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman.
    The long drive got me thinking about the contrast between thestruggling Old Abnormal producers (and writers) and the soaring New ones like Peter. It was discussed at a fancy-pants dinner party I went to a week before.
    “They’re completely broke,” said a studio head, when asked by me (of course) about how different things were these days. He spoke about famous players who regularly came to him begging for favors—a picture, a handout, anything.
    “Why?” his very East Coast guest asked incredulously.
    I recalled his exact words as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “They have extremely high overheads,” he said to his guest with me listening in. “They have multiple houses, wives, and families to support. They’ve made movies for years, they were on top of the world and had no reason to think it would end. And then suddenly it did. They’ve gone through whatever savings they had. They can’t sell their real estate. Their overhead is as astronomical as their fees used to be. They’ve taken out loans, so they’re highly leveraged. It’s a tragedy.”
    His natty guest looked unsympathetic, so I tried to bridge the worlds between us. “Okay,” I said, “the Sudan is a tragedy. This is just sad.”
    I understood that it was hard to sympathize with broke producers when so many families were being tossed onto their lawns by bailed-out banks that had bullied them into bullshit mortgages. Meanwhile, New Abnormal producers like Peter were thriving, easily finding supersized tentpoles with the “preawareness” that was so craved by the New Abnormal, like his hit film Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
    That is because those films were so well suited to their sensibilities and ambitions. But Peter was more than just a successful model of a New Abnormal producer. He had green-lit the two biggest movies of all time when he was head of Fox during the Old Abnormal.
    Peter had earned his top-down as well as bottom-up perspectiveon the business by working his way up through publishing, then TV, to eventually run both Fox Broadcasting Company and Twentieth Century Fox Film. He became Rupert Murdoch’s number two, overseeing the whole Fox empire, and shareholders clamored for the board to name him Murdoch’s successor. But this was a job designated by Murdoch to go to an actual heir, 1 so Peter left to become a producer. He knew the business, as Joni Mitchell’s great old tune said it, “from both sides now.” More important, he was gifted with a brain both creative and financial in equal measure.
    Peter’s offices are as close to the water as you can get without falling in. He came into the lobby to greet me, always personable, never grandiose, but still a bit larger than life. He is the humblest of moguls, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a strong ego—just not a damaged one.
    We sat in his Santa Monica office with huge plate-glass windows overlooking the Pacific, where he happily relayed that he rarely crossed the 405 East-West divide. When I asked for his help in getting to the bottom of all this, I was reminded of how tough-minded he is. Even though we are old friends (we went to high school together), he had no problem challenging my buried premises. Maybe they weren’t very buried.
    “So how did we