Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst – review
David Thomson on the cynicism and gush of the hard-bitten Hollywood producer Lynda Obst
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'It's a rat race' … the Hollywood sign in the Santa Monica mountains. Photograph: Craig Aurness/Craig Aurness/Corbis
Lynda Obst is a 63-year-old movie producer who continues to pay
her dues as a writer and cockeyed optimist. She was a New York Times
journalist once; she published a novel, Dirty Dreams, in 1990;
and she came up with one of the supreme insolent titles of our time. In
1996, she wrote a wry memoir on making it in Hollywood called Hello, He Lied.
Uttered in the confines of Los Angeles that title was home-run funny,
hauntingly terse, and offering the brazen promise that cynicism trumps
philosophy. Lynda, you can hear her best friends telling her, that title
says it all. Another thing it whispered was: no need to read this book.
The title is the quickest coverage anyone could hope for, and generally
movie people avoid books as if they were used needles.
Hello, He Lied is a key to how Hollywood turns thought
into one-liners, and a warning that when Obst says – as she often does –
that she really loves so-and-so, or citizen X is the best human being
there ever was, these glib words are holding devices (options if you
like) that may quickly turn into a stiletto between the shoulder blades
– because love and friendship, trust and teamwork, are the rhetoric of
the slickest court Machiavelli ever foresaw. This is Corleone talk, as
in, Here, Fredo, let me hug and kiss you so I can feel the tender place
where the knife must go in. Hello, He Lied is among the neatest
definitions of self-destruct oblivion a culture could dream up, but
don't overlook its irony – that you can't trust anyone about anything.
Least of all Lynda Obst, who has the chutzpah to run a list of the films
she produced at the front of this book. She can certainly do titles: Adventures in Babysitting, Bad Girls, Hope Floats, The Invention of Lying (it is her territory) as well as the big hit, Sleepless in Seattle.
Alas for Lynda and many of us, it is late now for being 63, and she has pushed into television lately, the once despised land beyond the city walls, and site of the new golden age. But hurry up, because the golden ages come and go as fast as Christmas.
Obst is smart. She can look at a writers' strike in Hollywood and be clever about its tropes and tricks – the picket line was busy as a place where lonely writers could meet people who'd buy them a cup of coffee or a real meal at the Ivy. But smart doesn't count for much now, not when kids don't want to go to the movies any more, so that Hello, He Lied really is a cross between poetry and bitter piss from the age of Billy Wilder or Ben Hecht. That tag is waiting for her tombstone, though nowadays, that could be her best career move – in the way Julia Phillips is tied to You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Phillips ate out on that title too many times, until it was forgotten that she helped to produce Taxi Driver.
Are you horrified by this tone, or laughing? Oh, I get it, you're real Hollywood, you want to have your cake and eat it, even if the cake is where the cholesterol and the sugar are neighbours. So you want to know what this new book is. It's whatever trick Obst thought of playing each day when she sat down to dictate and before she got up to go to the gym (35 minutes a day and in three months you'll have a book as well as taut abs). The book drops names to see if they break like eggs on the azulejo tiling you just installed. It's a did-I-forget-anyone listing of all Lynda's best friends, not to mention the best bestest. (She never admits there are people in the town who don't know what they're doing, or don't know who Ben Hecht was, because she may get to work with them again and give them that calculating embrace.) The book sighs ejectedly over modern hits – Iron Man, The Hunger Games, The Avengers – but it's ready to jump on their bandwagon if it slows at a curve. Obst's vague optimism for the business grinding on ends by asking "Does the future have a future?" It sounds like a line from World War Z.
Another thing this book has is the quaint photo inset in which we can decide which faces have had the most sophisticated work done, and which ones were the creep most likely to succeed in the yearbook when they were double majoring in business and acting (if you could tell one from the other). I'm sure Obst is a nice person and a heap of fun (cross my fingers), and I can believe that for 20 minutes at a dinner party she'd have you in stitches. Arianna Huffington – that model of objective self-awareness – says that Obst "explains why the movies we all loved growing up don't get made any more". Now we all sort of know what Huff is getting at, but the worm in that apple is the sly "growing up". Arianna and Lynda, you and I, like to think that we're all educated, mature and adult and making our way in this improving world with so much to look forward to. Whereas movie happiness has spread the don't-grow-up policy. Keep having the face-work done, put Lynda on the coffee table and pay your writer more than you pay for the pilates, the shrink and the estate planner put together. Because if your rewrite man can do a Hello, He Lied just once every decade your rep is locked.
Why are there no more movies like those we loved growing up? Well, take your pick: most of them have dated; we didn't love them growing up, we loved them later when the real cancer, nostalgia, came in; or because the technology has accelerated past movies and into bites, so at last the old movie tyranny of having to attend is over and you can text and watch YouTube while the movie is playing; or because for decades the movies were left in the hands of lucky fools like you and me and Lynda Obst.
In the rugged way of a veteran, she wants to say Hollywood is a great place, and that its community is one big family of entertainers. That has always been a Hollywood fallacy. Louis B Mayer spoke of the family as he enforced the blacklist, because some family members had a brain and a conscience. Obst is afraid of the technology and the "new abnormal" (aka runaway change), but the most dysfunctional thing in her work is the attempt to reconcile her stressed comradeship with others and the plain import of her book's title – that it's a rat race, so stay sleepless.
- Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business
- by Lynda Obst
-
-
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
Alas for Lynda and many of us, it is late now for being 63, and she has pushed into television lately, the once despised land beyond the city walls, and site of the new golden age. But hurry up, because the golden ages come and go as fast as Christmas.
Obst is smart. She can look at a writers' strike in Hollywood and be clever about its tropes and tricks – the picket line was busy as a place where lonely writers could meet people who'd buy them a cup of coffee or a real meal at the Ivy. But smart doesn't count for much now, not when kids don't want to go to the movies any more, so that Hello, He Lied really is a cross between poetry and bitter piss from the age of Billy Wilder or Ben Hecht. That tag is waiting for her tombstone, though nowadays, that could be her best career move – in the way Julia Phillips is tied to You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Phillips ate out on that title too many times, until it was forgotten that she helped to produce Taxi Driver.
Are you horrified by this tone, or laughing? Oh, I get it, you're real Hollywood, you want to have your cake and eat it, even if the cake is where the cholesterol and the sugar are neighbours. So you want to know what this new book is. It's whatever trick Obst thought of playing each day when she sat down to dictate and before she got up to go to the gym (35 minutes a day and in three months you'll have a book as well as taut abs). The book drops names to see if they break like eggs on the azulejo tiling you just installed. It's a did-I-forget-anyone listing of all Lynda's best friends, not to mention the best bestest. (She never admits there are people in the town who don't know what they're doing, or don't know who Ben Hecht was, because she may get to work with them again and give them that calculating embrace.) The book sighs ejectedly over modern hits – Iron Man, The Hunger Games, The Avengers – but it's ready to jump on their bandwagon if it slows at a curve. Obst's vague optimism for the business grinding on ends by asking "Does the future have a future?" It sounds like a line from World War Z.
Another thing this book has is the quaint photo inset in which we can decide which faces have had the most sophisticated work done, and which ones were the creep most likely to succeed in the yearbook when they were double majoring in business and acting (if you could tell one from the other). I'm sure Obst is a nice person and a heap of fun (cross my fingers), and I can believe that for 20 minutes at a dinner party she'd have you in stitches. Arianna Huffington – that model of objective self-awareness – says that Obst "explains why the movies we all loved growing up don't get made any more". Now we all sort of know what Huff is getting at, but the worm in that apple is the sly "growing up". Arianna and Lynda, you and I, like to think that we're all educated, mature and adult and making our way in this improving world with so much to look forward to. Whereas movie happiness has spread the don't-grow-up policy. Keep having the face-work done, put Lynda on the coffee table and pay your writer more than you pay for the pilates, the shrink and the estate planner put together. Because if your rewrite man can do a Hello, He Lied just once every decade your rep is locked.
Why are there no more movies like those we loved growing up? Well, take your pick: most of them have dated; we didn't love them growing up, we loved them later when the real cancer, nostalgia, came in; or because the technology has accelerated past movies and into bites, so at last the old movie tyranny of having to attend is over and you can text and watch YouTube while the movie is playing; or because for decades the movies were left in the hands of lucky fools like you and me and Lynda Obst.
In the rugged way of a veteran, she wants to say Hollywood is a great place, and that its community is one big family of entertainers. That has always been a Hollywood fallacy. Louis B Mayer spoke of the family as he enforced the blacklist, because some family members had a brain and a conscience. Obst is afraid of the technology and the "new abnormal" (aka runaway change), but the most dysfunctional thing in her work is the attempt to reconcile her stressed comradeship with others and the plain import of her book's title – that it's a rat race, so stay sleepless.
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