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.
PEOPLE CLOSE TO LYNDA OBST REMAIN skeptical about the Texas thing. The Manhattanites are still waiting for her inevitable return to the world of literature, politics, and journalism that she occupied before becoming a big-time movie producer. Obst’s eighteen-year-old son, Oly, is mortified by his mom’s sudden interest in the Houston Rockets after a lifetime of Los Angeles Lakers games. In Hollywood the hard-core show biz types can’t figure out why anyone would choose Texas over Aspen or Martha’s Vineyard, while Obst’s friends, accustomed to her unbridled energy and unparalleled efficiency, can’t quite reconcile those qualities with the notion of little Lynda, happy at last, in the peaceful, isolated Texas Hill Country.
Then they come to Obst’s Fredericksburg home, a four-bedroom, 124-year-old stone-and-wood retreat. They note the near absence of anything related to the movie business inside. They marvel at the birds and the wildflowers and Obst’s elaborate, lovingly maintained green-and-brown cowboy boots, the ones with the hearts over each toe. And they finally concede the point: When Obst raves about the quiet, the friendliness, and the unhurried, pressure-free pace, she means it.
Or so it seems. One leisurely afternoon not long ago, 47-year-old Obst was taking her friend and producing colleague Mary McLaglen on a shopping tour of Fred (as some Fredericksburg residents call their town). McLaglen and Obst—both compulsive, type-A personalities—routinely spar about which one of them is more capable of chilling out; as a part-time Texan, Obst figured she’d finally won. But when they arrived at the Fredericksburg Herb Farm, the sales staff snapped to attention. “Take care of that right away,” one of the clerks said to another, anticipating how fast Obst is always moving. Obst was busted: You can put the woman in Texas, but she can never entirely be of it.
She’s hardly a carpetbagger, however. Obst’s love for the state is boundless, and she has been warmly accepted by a wide circle of natives, including lifelong Fred people, Austin literati, and through her friendship with musician Joe Ely, the vast Lubbock singer-songwriter-artist-bohemian crowd. “Lynda really is a Texas girl,” says playwright Jo Carol Pierce, one of the Lubbockites. “She really is the spirit of Texas, though I’ve had to transfer ownership of one of my ex-husbands to her ’cause she didn’t feel that she had enough.”
What Obst may be lacking in divorce experience is dwarfed by the credits on her professional résumé. Part of a generation of women that includes Paramount Pictures chairman Sherry Lansing and former Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steel, Obst is one of filmdom’s best-known producers, famous for her good taste, sharp mind, and fearless temperament. She plays the standard Hollywood game, from her attention to the bottom line to her occasional cutthroat moment, but her primary allegiance is to the creative side, which means that actors, writers, and directors love her. “She’s either more passionate or smarter than anybody else, usually both,” says William Broyles, a former Texas Monthly editor in chief and the Oscar-nominated co-screenwriter of Apollo 13, who has worked with Obst on an script about the Religious Right.
“Endangered species” is how Obst lovingly refers to her type of project—the most famous example of which is 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle, a film credited with reviving the “date movie” when it grossed $130 million in a summer filled with bloated action fare. (The traditional benchmark for a decent summer hit is $100 million, though now that The Lost World made that much in five days and many movies cost that much to make, the bar is rising). Since Sleepless, studios commonly counterprogram romantic comedies against the big sequels and the action pics. Obst’s other films—there have been nine in all—include The Fisher King and last year’s One Fine Day. “I come from the simple world, where if you love the script and you can cast it and make it well and responsibly, that’s moviemaking,” Obst says. Then, mocking herself and all of Hollywood, she adds with a melodramatic flourish: “I know that sounds naive.”
If Obst has had a run of good years lately, 1997 may well be one of her best. First of all, there’s lingering positive press for Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths From the Hollywood Trenches (Little, Brown), the memoir she finished writing in Fredericksburg two years ago. Released last fall (the paperback is due out in September), it is neither an autobiography nor an ax-grinding film-and-tell. Rather, it’s a subjective but clear-eyed anthropology of the peculiar culture that is Hollywood, part nuts-and-bolts career advice and part rallying cry, especially for female readers who aspire to join Obst in the ever-growing circle of what she calls “chix in flix.” Reviewers and readers agreed that the book elevated Obst’s professional profile and also pegged her as a credibly objective show biz observer.
On the cinematic side of things, there’s Contact, a story Obst has been trying to turn into a movie for the better part of seventeen years; it opens in theaters nationwide on July 11 with a star cast (Jodie Foster and Texan Matthew McConaughey) and a megastar director (Robert Zemeckis). Contact is a prototypical Obst project: Based on the Carl Sagan novel about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, it is a work of obvious intellectual and artistic seriousness that, like Sleepless or Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, could still be a big summer hit.
But what most excites Obst personally are her new Texas projects. She has several in the works, including The Liar’s Club, based on Mary Karr’s best-selling Texas memoir, and Above the Fold, a film bio about former Atlanta Journal and Constitution editor Bill Kovach (the screenplay is being revised by former Texas Monthly contributing editor Lawrence Wright). She is also developing a script with Jo Carol Pierce and Sharon Ely, Joe’s wife, for Tornado Jam, a film that might well be her directorial debut. Finally, though she has made movies here before (including 1994’s Bad Girls, which was shot in Bracketville), Obst is producing her first film as a Texas resident. Hope Floats, a modest, quirky drama-comedy that focuses on three generations of women, began filming in Smithville, an hour east of Austin, in May. It is being directed by Longview native Forest Whitaker and stars Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick, Jr.
“This is my perfect life,” Obst insists. “A little house in Austin”—where she spends the workweek—“with weekends in Fredericksburg. And, of course, a movie to make. And income! That works too!”
lynda obst drives a golf cart like the new yorker she once was, which is to say you feel as if a trip to the pavement is imminent even as you’re impressed by the pinpoint recklessness with which she squeezes between a telephone pole and a line of police tape. We are in Smithville, on the set of Hope Floats; carts are the chosen form of transportation between three locations (a house, a nursing home, and a one-hour photo shop) and base camp (the familiar rows of trailers, trucks, and mobile food units, called honeywagons, that sit in the front yard of an old school building).
Smithville has never been captured on film before, which is what made it preferable to Bastrop, just a few miles away but as familiar as the Universal Studios back lot, or the Hill Country, which these days is to the medium-sized Southern drama what Monument Valley, Utah, is to the western. And Smithville proved serendipitous in other ways: In Steven Rogers’ original script, most of the action takes place in a picturesque gothic house that backstops a dead-end street, its backyard garden overlooking a river. A three-story house on a secluded, tree-lined Smithville street fit the bill exactly.
Hope Floats is actually set in a town called Smithville, with Bullock playing a recently divorced former prom queen who returns home, young daughter in tow, to live with her mother in a home filled with stuffed wildlife; Dad was a taxidermist before he moved to the nursing home down the block—another eerily coincidental script detail, for there really is a nursing home down the block from the house in question. The film was originally going to be set in Arkansas, but given Obst’s Fredericksburg connection and Bullock’s recent purchase of Central Texas property, the switch was a no-brainer. (The two women recently exchanged bumper stickers: Bullock got Obst one that says “Texan By Choice”; Obst got Bullock “Don’t Mess With Texas Women.”)
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