Hello, He Lied - And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches

Informationen zum Autor Lynda Obst is the head of Lynda Obst Productions.  She has produced some of today's biggest movies,  including The Fisher King, Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day, and Contact.   She lives in Los Angeles and Texas. Klappentext "Never go to a meeting without a strategy." "Ride the horse in the direction it's going." These are just two of the gems unearthed from the trenches of Hollywood by Lynda Obst, one of the most successful producers in the movie business today. In Hello, He Lied, Obst offers real, practical advice to would-be professionals in any field: "Thou shalt not cry at work," "thou shalt not appear tough," "thou shalt return all thy phone calls," and more. She takes us inside high-pressure meetings with David Geffen, onto the set of Sleepless in Seattle, and into the heated negotiations for The Hot Zone and reveals what she's learned in more than twenty years in the business: how to swim with the sharks--and not get eaten. Leseprobe A friend of mine once described me as a Polish producer, because I was the only producer she knew who wrote for extra money.  Over the course of writing this book I discovered that I also write for extra career options, extra outlets for my frustrations, and extra work: What would I otherwise do on Sundays or on planes?  Relax?  But it was only after it was completed, over the course of three years of excruciatingly frustrating work, that I realized why I had felt so compelled to write it: Through it I refound the joy of producing, and remembered the reasons I had started producing at all. I have a kind of hybrid world view: I ended up in Hollywood accidentally, so I arrived with a reporter's eye and an anthropologist's distance.  Slowly, inevitably, I've gone native.  Fifteen years of day-to-day exposure turns anthropology into sociology.  My perspective swells and shrinks in the daily drama.  Often I lose it entirely.  Writing is my tool for getting it back.  Sometimes it even works. What on earth is this thing variously called producer, executive producer, coproducer, associate producer, scrolling before the film begins?  What is this endlessly qualified job that seems to be done by so many and yet is actually done by so few?  The Oxford English Dictionary defines produce well: "To lead or bring forward, bring forth into view or notice; to offer for inspection, consideration, exhibit."  This is what we do.  We lead and bring forth: our work, our worth, our products to be exhibited.  We start movies and then we finish them.  We bring them forth to you, the viewer, our audience.  How we actually bring something forth--out of the daily mayhem that annihilates the best of our intentions--is the subject of this book. I've watched Hollywood change radically over my tenure, the "baby boomers take Hollywood" years.  It has undergone systemic changes, personality changes, changes in opportunity for gender and race, changes in technology.  Yet in many ways it never fundamentally changes: Its unwritten rules have stayed the same as they were during its founding-mogul golden era.  But interestingly, in the past few baby-boomer years, the inner workings of Hollywood, not just the glamorous goings-on of its movie stars, have become news, worthy of reportage.  Why?  Somehow it is intuitively clear that what goes on in the deep, dark recesses of the movie business tells us something (scary) about the process of work mixed with power in the latter days of this millennium, in every venue.  Success is sudden; defeat is swift.  Reinvention remains an option. Over the course of my education in the movie business, I've seen my peers crash and soar; I've seen the system create and destroy; and somehow, despite the drama and the sideshows, I've learned how to get movies I love made.  There is, I've discovered, a peculiar logic that underlies the seemingly arbitrary customs and traditions that ha...

Product details

• Authors: Linda Obst, Lynda Obst
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.09.1997
• EAN: 9780767900416
• ISBN: 978-0-7679-0041-6
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 13 mm
• Series: Crown
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet