Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

Lynda Obst

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 1476727759

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The veteran producer and author of the bestseller Hello, He Lied takes a witty and critical look at the new Hollywood and why the movie business is floundering. In a new introduction, she describes the tumultuous seasons that followed and predicts the crises still to come.

Over the past decade, producer Lynda Obst gradually realized she was working in a Hollywood that was undergoing a drastic transformation. The industry where everything had once been familiar to her was suddenly disturbingly strange.

Combining her own industry experience and interviews with the brightest minds in the business, Obst explains what has stalled the vast movie-making machine. The calamitous DVD collapse helped usher in what she calls the New Abnormal (because Hollywood was never normal to begin with), and studios are now heavily dependent on foreign markets for profit, a situation which directly impacts the kind of entertainment we get to see. Can comedy survive if they don’t get our jokes in Seoul or allow them in China? Why are studios making fewer movies than ever—and why are they bigger, more expensive, and nearly always sequels or recycled ideas?

Obst writes with affection, regret, humor and hope, and her behind-the-scenes vantage point allows her to explore what has changed in Hollywood like no one else has. This candid, insightful account explains what has happened to the movie business, and explores whether it’ll ever return to making the movies we love—the classics that make us laugh or cry, or that we just can't stop talking about.

Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide

Faulkner and Film (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha)

The Art of the Moving Picture

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Releasing the Image

Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

packaging fees, 237 pitch season, 32, 226–27 profitability of, 205–6, 235–39 rating points, 237 reality programming, 165 seasons, 224–26 series, 206, 253 showrunners, 180, 183, 191 studios, 236–37 syndication rights, 228, 235, 237, 238 as writer’s medium, 191, 195, 219 Television People: blending with Movie People, 200–206 vs. Movie People, 198–200 Tellem, Nancy, 234 tentpole movies, 5–7, 12, 18, 23, 35, 41, 46, 130, 192, 204, 244, 246 That ’70s Show, 198 There’s Something About

left. It was not a fear-based culture at the beginning. It was ‘this is what we stand for, this is what we are going to do, now let’s make it work.’ And then it became very much ‘How the fuck do we do that? How the fuck did that happen? How can we not do this?’ “It went from being proactive and accountable to being at the expense of that accountability,” John recalled. “As much as you want to be accountable, the last thing you want is to be accountable for decisions you feel unsure about. And

especially me. He had just gotten his first pilot picked up, while I was awaiting the fate of my major tentpole in features. Drama writers are moving to television in droves. It’s like an oasis where they can write characters and not set pieces. Drama is a whole department in television, not a reason to be rejected. And since the onslaught of tentpole über alles, dramatic films have been mainly relegated to the indie side of the market. From the vantage point of four years in television, it’s

strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting System (TBS and Adult Swim). It also just created its own experiment in iPad publishing: The Occasional, a new iPad magazine. Soon webisodes moving to cable will be as common as cable being watched on the Web. The icing on the cake of this changing menu was applied in 2012, when Microsoft lured Nancy Tellem, longtime number two to Les Moonves at CBS and among the most highly respected network executives in the business, to head its digital and media

movie who’d never seen a theater before. That kind of reach helped make Titanic the most successful picture of all time until Avatar. (6) The closest thing Hollywood has/had to a queen, Sherry Lansing reigned from 1992 to 2004 with an abundance of class and charm. She made choices with her brain and gut and then cut the budget to a number she’d fought to the bone with her partner, Jon Dolgen. Their strategy worked until the town changed. She was loyal to her friends, didn’t have enemies and

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