Perfect Timing 
Sleepless in Fredericksburg
To escape the fast pace and high pressure of Hollywood, Lynda Obst bought a place in the Hill Country and swaddled herself in all things Texan. But the veteran movie producer hasn’t slowed down. In fact, she’s moving faster than ever.
(Page 2 of 3)
Obst, says Forest Whitaker, “is more actively involved than most producers I’ve seen,” a fact she herself acknowledges. Though she’s always busy developing other projects and leaves a lot of the budget detail work to executive producer and unit production manager McLaglen, Obst loves to be on the set. Ideally, she’s a high-powered cheerleader, sitting quietly at the monitor watching the movie unfold. Other times, there are crises.
On this particular day, the biggest crisis involves a tray of sliced apples with nonfat caramel dip, a favorite snack of Bullock’s that Obst and nine-year-old actress Mae Whitman have also grown fond of. It is a problem that Whitaker can solve on his own: “Are we on caramel break?” he asks with good-natured exasperation, shaming everyone into lining up for another take. The scene being shot is “coverage”—close-ups, mostly—of Connick’s first scene, and it has been done enough times by now that Obst leaves off her wireless headphones; she already knows the dialogue by heart.
Between setups, Obst is back in her trailer with McLaglen, associate producer Elizabeth Hooper, three cellular phones, two regular phones, a pair of laptop computers, and a long list of things to do. She juggles calls, mulls over a not-yet-chosen location that was the subject of the day’s lunch meeting, and reviews some script notes from another project. She spends about five minutes on the latter task before flinging the pages to the floor resignedly. Needless to say, there will be rewrites.
As a producer, Obst’s real work began about a year ago. She and Bullock both fell in love with the script of Hope Floats on their own. Conveniently, it was a Twentieth Century Fox property, as Obst is a Fox producer and Bullock was about to get top billing in Fox’s sequel to Speed. What really got the project going was the interest from Bullock, who also came aboard as a producer (Obst has been impressed by the actress’s willingness to sit through long production meetings and fret over call times—the hour the cast and crew must arrive on the set for shoots). Obst says the role is Bullock’s greatest acting challenge to date, though it still makes use of her regular-girl charm. For her part, Bullock seems most concerned that her star status doesn’t compromise the integrity of a simple, well-made story. She knows Obst can prevent that from happening. “She’s a great protector of the creative process,” Bullock says. “The wonderful thing about her—and the frustrating thing about her—is she’s incredibly passionate and fearless to a fault. We get into a lot of battles, but that’s a good thing. We find different roads to get to the same place.”
On an untroubled shoot—as Hope Floats has been thus far—Obst considers herself a den mother, throwing private parties for the cast and crew every Friday and working closely with the crew, many of whom follow her from project to project. (She’s an honorary member of the Austin Teamsters local). In Hello, He Lied, she writes of the professional advantage of getting along with your crew: “[Y]ou find out everything. When the production designer says the sets will be ready in a week, and the carpenter tells you he hasn’t even gotten the wood yet, you know someone is lying.”
Hope Floats production designer Larry Fulton showed he must have read the book when Obst came out to visit the set one day during preproduction (or prep, to use the official lingo). The house was crammed with animals: stuffed owls, stuffed cats, stuffed birds, and the body of an eight-point buck, which Obst and Whitaker would eventually deem excessive. The actors had been rehearsing that morning at the house, which really did smell like a home, thanks to Fulton, who had baked a plate of cookies (a trick he picked up from reading about the making of The Godfather, whose director, Francis Ford Coppola, and production designer, Dean Tavoularis, always had a pasta sauce going).
Obst asked Fulton a question about how work was going.
“What would be the politically correct answer?” he ventured.
“The truth, sweetie,” Obst replied.
HOW DID YOU FEEL? HOW DID YOU FEEL?” That’s what Obst’s editor wrote all over the margins of her first draft of Hello, He Lied. “I refused to really study my personal life because that’s not what’s interesting about what I know,” Obst says. But her editor begged to differ. “She said, ‘You have to write about yourself inside these anecdotes. You have to tell us who you are.’” Obst begrudgingly did so, though no one will mistake the book for a confessional. One of her best friends, agent Bryan Lourd, told her, “I love this book. It’s so you: ‘Got married. Got divorced.’ Okay! Anything in between?”
Well, yes—and before and after too. Obst grew up Lynda Rosen in suburban Harrison, New York, where one of her high school classmates was, coincidentally, Peter Chernin, currently her ostensible employer as the president and chief operating officer of Twentieth Century Fox’s parent company, News Corporation. Dad was in the garment business—“We called him the Shoulder Pad King”—and Mom was a teacher. “My mother had this profound belief in education,” she says, “and my father had this profound belief that if you do, you accomplish.”
Accomplishment is often fueled by competition, and in Obst’s case it came in the form of her little brothers: Michael, who is the northeast bureau chief for ABC News, and Rick, who is a co-founder of the talent agency Endeavor (whose clients include Wesley Snipes and Adam Sandler). Obst is a die-hard Baltimore Orioles fan, mostly because Rick favored the New York Yankees. Last year’s playoff series still stings. “I was so mad at Ricky when that goddam kid caught that ball,” she says. “It was like I was eight years old again and Rick stole the goddam ball and I lost the World Series because of it!”
Obst attended Pomona College in California, where her roommate was New Age guru Marianne Williamson, before going on to graduate school in philosophy at Columbia University in New York. She met her future husband, David Obst, at a party given by journalist (and San Antonio native) Marie Brenner. David was a literary agent whose circle included the likes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and Lynda was tantalized. It was the post-Watergate era, after all, a time when journalism and Washington and the New York literary scene were still pretty tantalizing. “It was the most interesting world I’d ever been in in my life,” Obst recalls. “Then I’d go up to 119th Street and be tortured for nine hours with a bunch of Talmudic students who were so much more serious than I was.”
A career change was in order. David Obst and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner had just gotten into book publishing, so Lynda and Wenner’s wife, Jane, decided to pitch them on a history of the sixties. “We thought, ‘They can’t turn us down,’” Lynda says. They didn’t, especially since she had rounded up a list of contributors that included Bernstein, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, and civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy—though Wenner did try to bump her down to “research assistant.” Lynda promptly took the whole package to another friend of her husband’s, Simon and Schuster mogul Dick Snyder, and as she puts it, “Jann caved.”
One of the ironies of Obst’s career is that everything she has achieved has been very much her own doing, but the twists of fate that put her in that position can be traced back to David. It was through him that she met filmmaker Nora Ephron, who remains her best friend as well as an important collaborator. Because of David, she got to edit a book. And, best of all, she eventually ended up in Hollywood after David made a near-unilateral decision to move his family there so he could pursue Simon and Schuster’s interests in the movie business.
It was a decision that would prove far more fruitful for Lynda Obst than for her soon-to-be-ex husband. But she did not go easily, because in the wake of the sixties book she had landed a job as an editor at the New York Times Magazine. In some ways, it remains the credit she is most proud of. Sure, she can get exiled superagent Michael Ovitz on the phone, has been kissed by George Clooney (who starred in One Fine Day), and could put together a guest list for anyone’s idea of an ideal dinner party—but that’s nothing compared to editing I. F. Stone, concocting cover stories about philosophy and science, and simply being the “counterculture” gal at an establishment paper in transition during a stormy time in American history. Had it not been for David’s new job, she insists, “I never would have left—never.” Even today, years later, she talks seriously of publishing a newspaper in the Hill Country after she retires.
My Library
