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.
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As a producer, Obst is still immersed in the world of journalism, viewing the development process as similar to the editorial process. Flashdance, her first triumph as a junior production executive working for Peter Guber—one half of a successful eighties producing team with Jon Peters—was based on an idea by an Esquire magazine writer. More recently, she has optioned Marie Brenner’s February 1997 Vanity Fair article about Richard Jewell, the security guard wrongly accused in the Olympic Park bombing case.
Even in the middle of Hope Floats, the Jewell project is on her mind. One afternoon, on the way home from the set, the cell phone rings: It’s the agent for director Douglas McGrath (Emma), calling from Paris. Obst’s tone becomes heated as she launches into an impassioned spiel. References are made to “Harvey” (Miramax Films co-chairman Weinstein, presumably). She explains that she likes McGrath for this project because he is a onetime New Republic writer who grew up in Midland; he is “part of the media that called Jewell the UnaBubba,” she says, “but he grew up with Bubba.” She tells the agent that another project McGrath is interested in “has been around for fifteen years and will be for another fifteen years,” whereas the Jewell story is an important vehicle about the media, the South, and the culture of contemporary politics.
It’s hard to imagine a bombastic producer of action �icks—say, Joel Silver (Die Hard) or Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air)—delivering this kind of pitch. Yet undeniably, Obst occupies the same world as those guys. She even made Buzz magazine’s list of Hollywood’s ten biggest bullies a few years back. Some producers might have such a feature framed for the office; Obst lost sleep over it, until her son pointed out that in some fundamental way, making the list meant she was good at her job. She is a creature of Hollywood; quality and class are important to her, but she still makes “movie movies” rather than art films, and they are meant to play at the mall rather than at Sundance. “I believe ‘endangered species’ movies work,” she says, “and it’s my job to keep making them inside the studio system. There are tons of people who can make them outside the studio system, but if we let the studio system turn into a tent pole assembly line, there will be only two ways of making movies: starving and gluttony.”
Harry Connick, Jr., remembers remarking to Obst that she makes a certain kind of movie. Her reply was telling: “I’m a girl. What do you expect?” But on top of so-called women’s pictures, Obst has a taste for highbrow hits: fanciful, intellectual films like The Fisher King, and soon, Contact. “Part of my job is to make blockbusters,” she admits, “but I’m not just attracted to your standard blockbuster. I would go to Contact if I hadn’t made it. It’s a movie about philosophy.”
It is also a highly personal project for her, though in the end, she left the fine points of its production to Zemeckis, a director who also produces. But Obst first began working on Contact in 1980—she commissioned the treatment that Sagan eventually turned into his novel—and Sagan was a dear friend. In fact, scientists are her weakness; her close pals include Sagan’s widow, Annie Druyan, writer-professor Timothy Ferris, and Nobel prize—winning University of Texas physicist Steven Weinberg. Obst also dated an astronomer for several years. “It’s the most interesting subject in the world to me,” she says. “Scientists are so unrewarded for doing the most exciting work there is. They’re purists; they’re like the poets of the twentieth century. People always write movies about them winning the Nobel prize. They can’t imagine the notion of actually working for truth itself as opposed to some reward. I respect that so much.”
The timing of Contact is bittersweet: Sagan was able to spend a lot of time working with Zemeckis and was present during production, but he died last December. The subject makes Obst teary; she and Druyan are looking forward to the film’s opening with a mixture of excitement and dread. Sagan looms large in her thinking every day. His illness coincided with a major project falling apart on her and the final deadline looming for Hello, He Lied. Every time she thought she had an ending for the book, the story changed. Obst’s friend Ingrid Sischy, the editor in chief of Interview, observed that that was sort of the point: There is no ending. Finally, Obst allowed that not everything can be controlled or predicted. “It ended up really clarifying that kind of wishful thinking for me,” she says. “We project our need for resolution onto the world. We write stories and then we create narratives and pretend that they resolve themselves, as though they’re three-act dramas. But there is no ending, except when you die.”
THE FIRST IMPORTANT FILM IN OBST’S career was not This Is My Life, though that was the first movie she produced on her own. It was not The Fisher King, which she considers her greatest artistic success to date. And it wasn’t Sleepless in Seattle, her biggest hit. It was Heartbreak Hotel, a perfectly amiable little �ick that is not likely to go down in cinema history (except as part of the early oeuvre of Home Alone director Chris Columbus). “For a �op, I talk about that movie so much,” Obst says.
That’s because it was pivotal, in both her professional and personal life. In 1987 Obst and her friend Debra Hill ran a production company, and their roles were clearly defined: Obst was the script ace, the literature lover with an eye for good material and a �air for navigating what’s commonly known as development hell, the process that generally involves multiple rewrites and multiple writers before (if!) the picture gets made; then Hill would go make it. Obst had spent her early years in Hollywood doing development for both Peter Guber and David Geffen, and she teamed up with Hill specifically to learn about physical production. Their first project together was another Columbus film, Adventures in Babysitting, but Heartbreak Hotel was the first time Obst was on location by herself. She liked it, and after making The Fisher King with Hill, she struck out on her own.
More important, Heartbreak Hotel was filmed in Austin. Obst met people she wanted to be around, including Sharon Ely, masseuse Marilyn Prengler, and Mary O’Boyle, who owns half of the old LBJ Ranch. Bluebonnets and peaches in the Hill Country, bonfires and music and art at the Ely house: Suddenly Obst was living the life she didn’t know she wanted. She moved out of her hotel, rented a house in Austin, and spent all of her time away from the set on horseback or at Whole Foods. “I just thought, these are the most perfect days I’ve ever had,” she says. “And then they said, ‘It’s time to wrap and go home.’ And I said, ‘I can’t. I am home.’ I wept when I left. I said, ‘I’m coming back.’ And I’m here!”
“Here” is an isolated spot several miles out of Fred where her neighbors include a �ock of sheep and a whole lot of birds: From dozens of trees, Obst has hung feeders, including a Texas-shaped one. Her binoculars and several guidebooks are always near the porch; one recent morning, within the space of half an hour, she spotted a cardinal and three nearly �uorescent goldfinches. Inside the house there’s a room where she does yoga and gymnastics and a bathroom adorned with Joe Ely’s photographs. The only movie memento is a shot of the marquee of Fredericksburg’s Palace Theater when One Fine Day was playing. It meant a lot to her to have her moment in Fred, where everyone knows her by name—especially the retailers. “When I walk into the stores, they applaud,” she jokes.
What Texas has become to Obst is the place where she is most herself, a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by her friends and family. “It brings her so much happiness that I love seeing her down there,” says her brother Rick. “She can be by herself and write, and she has a whole different group of friends down there who broaden her interests.” True enough, Texas combined with science, literature, politics, journalism, and whatever else strikes her fancy is what gives form to Obst’s sensibility and makes her more than just a typical movie producer whose face is glued to her cell phone.
Just don’t expect her to slow down totally. “I always wanted to go to the East Coast and learn how to talk fast and think on my feet and stuff like that,” Jo Carol Pierce says. “But now I have a living example.” 
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