Lynda Obst, Veteran Film Producer, Writer and Champion of Women in Hollywood, Dies at 74
Lynda Obst, the pioneering producer who put her mark on beloved films like Sleepless in Seattle, Contact, Flashdance, The Fisher King, Adventures in Babysitting, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Interstellar, died Tuesday. She was 74.
Obst died at her Los Angeles home surrounded by loved ones, her son, manager-producer Oly Obst, told The Hollywood Reporter.
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“My mom was a trailblazer and a fierce advocate for women. Also, she was an amazing mother, sister and best friend,” he said in a statement. “[My wife] Julie and I are incredibly grateful that she was my mom and that my daughters got to have her as a grandmother. We will miss her.”
Obst’s brother Rick Rosen, the longtime and respected partner of TV at WME, said: “Our family is immensely proud of the career that she had and the role model she was for women in the industry, but beyond that, we will always remember her incredible love of our family. She was always happiest when she was around the family.”
As the veteran insider revealed to THR in a story published in February, Obst battled chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, better known as COPD, or as she quipped at the time, “Spanish for, ‘I fucked up my lungs.’” The condition is incurable, progressive and often fatal.
The leading cause of COPD is smoking, and Obst, who described herself as a passionate smoker from age 16 until her 2018 diagnosis, shared details about her health to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of cigarettes and marijuana.
“I very much want people to know that you could be the one hit with the fickle finger of fate, and I want to be clear what the consequences of smoking are. It’s not the way you want to spend your retirement or your last 10, 20 or 30 years,” cautioned Obst, who relied on a portable device that took air and turned it into pure oxygen to help her breathe.
Aside from a long list of enviable credits on a wide range of projects, Obst was known in the industry for being a fierce champion of women in Hollywood and for developing close, longtime relationships with writers, actors, executives, filmmakers, fellow producers and insiders like CAA’s Bryan Lourd, who encountered Obst not long after he made it out of the mailroom.
“She was very savvy and smart about how things worked and how movies got put together. Her special sauce is this crazy intuitive intelligence and taste,” Lourd previously told THR. “She loved the audience as much as she loved the filmmakers and understood that the ultimate win was when you could tick both boxes in making something great with great people and creating an experience for the audience that was not only satisfying and entertaining but moving.”
Obst also was a wordsmith, and she used that skill to author two how-to-make-it-in-Hollywood books that were equal parts dishy and informative: Hello, He Lied & Other Tales From the Hollywood Trenches, published in 1996, and 2013’s Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business.
The onetime editor for The New York Times Magazine for years also worked as an Oscar columnist for New York magazine by partnering with critic David Edelstein.
Raised in Harrison, New York, a Westchester County suburb, Obst studied philosophy at Pomona College as an undergrad and later attended Columbia University for graduate school. Before finishing her degree, she left Columbia when a gig presented itself to edit the 1993 Random House book The Sixties, a historical look at the revolutionary decade through interviews with key players.
Obst also had a stint as a classical music deejay (“for five minutes”) and as a copywriter for rock ‘n’ roll artists while she contemplated what to do next. “I was always driven but had no idea where I was going,” said Obst, who grew up as a tomboy playing baseball with the boys in Harrison before segueing to gymnastics later in life, a sport that became a passion she fueled into her 70s.
An opening in her career came when she and her husband, David Obst, a literary agent, traveled from their New York home to Washington to visit a friend’s farm. That’s where she encountered filmmaker Nora Ephron. “I had read every column she’d ever written for Esquire, and there she was, playing volleyball,” she recalled. “I decided that I was going to be the greatest volleyball player I could possibly be so she would notice me, because she loved winners. Nora did not like losers. I somehow transformed myself into a great volleyball player” — not an easy feat for someone 5 feet tall.
A newfound friendship with Ephron led the writer to ask Obst to read one of her essays. Obst returned it with no notes. “It was perfect. She decided I was a brilliant editor. Nora then called Lee Eisenberg at Esquire to get me a job, but there were no openings.” When a position opened at The New York Times Magazine, Obst’s husband put in a good word, and she eventually landed an editor position.
When David Obst was offered a job by Simon & Schuster to start a production company, the couple moved to Los Angeles (they would later divorce). Having assigned and edited many stories about the industry during her Times tenure, Obst leaned on her connections to land a job working for high-profile producer Peter Guber, who gave her a position in development at Casablanca Records and FilmWorks. In Guber, Obst found, at times, a supportive boss who “gave me license to do whatever I wanted.”
In shaping her role, Obst knew she would need talented writers so she met with a roster that included someone she found “in exile” from Esquire, a man named Tom Hedley. He pitched Flashdance, a project about a female welder who moonlights as a dancer at a local bar but dreams of being accepted to a prestigious dance conservatory. It would become Obst’s first produced credit.
Obst developed it for years and set it up with Dawn Steel at Paramount but had to fight to keep her name on it as duties were handed over to influential Hollywood producers like Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer and her Casablanca bosses.
“I was the low man on the totem pole (remember the words of Bob Dylan: ‘He who comes first will later come last’) and ultimately reduced to my lowest possible contractual credit: associate producer,” Obst wrote in her 1996 Tinseltown memoir, Hello, He Lied.
She credited her father, Robert, for the steely determination. “My mom was a brilliant weakling, and my dad built his own business. When one of them went bankrupt, my siblings and I put signs on our door that read, ‘You can’t keep a good man down.’ And he rebuilt.”
Obst offered gratitude to her mother, Claire, for cultivating a love of writers and their craft. “She read three books a week and brought me up on poetry, reading me works by Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Matthew Arnold and great Irish poets. She instilled in me a great love of words,” Obst said. “Had she been born in a different generation, my mother would’ve been a book editor. She was always my first editor on anything I wrote.”
Obst was close with her brothers, Michael and Rick Rosen. While the latter continues his stronghold at WME, Michael works as executive vp development, marketing and strategic communication for the Center for Discovery, a research and specialty center that provides residential, medical and education programs for a myriad of disabilities and complex conditions like autism. He previously spent more than two decades in TV news at ABC, CNN and CBS, where he served as an executive producer on The Saturday Early Show and This Morning.
Obst left Guber’s Casablanca, and a slice of Ray’s pizza with mentor David Geffen turned into a job offer. Obst was reluctant, so she called another A-list mogul mentor for advice. Barry Diller suggested that she instead partner with Mary Tyler Moore.
“Barry thought it was a great idea because he was really close with her,” Obst said of the actress who, at the time, was fresh from a personal and professional split from husband Grant Tinker and looking to manage her own affairs through the company they founded together, MTM Enterprises. It proved to be a dead end.
“It was an extremely unpleasant experience,” Obst said of the one-year gig during which she only saw Moore two times. “Apparently, Mary did not control her destiny at MTM, and we all learned later that they didn’t want her active because she was threatening to the men who actually were running the company and they tried to shut her down.”
Obst recalled getting John Hughes to agree to write a screenplay for Moore and pushing several other projects to the fore, but her MTM partners said no at every turn. “It was ridiculous. I couldn’t do any better than a John Hughes movie,” she told THR.
Obst was fired, and back to Geffen she went “with my tail between my legs” asking for a job at the Geffen Film Co. “It was the best decision I ever made because David’s brilliant. He was active, unafraid and an inspiration. He’s mean, but at the same time, he couldn’t be more fun,” she said of the mogul who went on co-found DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. She used the word “phenomenal” to describe the tenure.
One day she recalled having a meeting with Prince; another day it was Michael Jackson. Then, there was the day they both were in her office at the same time sitting across from her. “They happened to be visiting David for a meeting and I had to entertain them while they waited,” she said. “I just sat there, and they barely looked at each other.”
She stayed with Geffen for three years, ultimately leaving to take charge of her own fate. “I wasn’t in a fief about any particular project. I realized that to be a producer, you could be more of an independent actor and choose to work on what you loved.” Though he was dismayed by her departure, Geffen set Obst on the path to her next professional phase when he encouraged her to put an end to a rift she’d had with Steel over Flashdance. She placed a call to offer congratulations to Steel on her recent successes (including her own picture, Flashdance, as well as Footloose and others). What came back was an invitation to attend the Women in Film luncheon honoring Barbra Streisand in May 1984.
Thus began “one of the deepest relationships of my life,” Obst recalled of Steel. “She was my best friend, and I became godmother to her daughter. I was with her when she passed [in December 1997].” It was Steel who planted the seed for Obst to segue from development to producing. “But she said, ‘You don’t know physical production. I know who you should partner with, and that’s Debra Hill. She’s brilliant at production and you two will make a perfect team,’ ” Obst recalled of the introduction.
The two teamed for five years, running one of Hollywood’s first all-female production companies, Hill/Obst Prods. During their time together, they produced Chris Columbus’ directorial debut, Adventures in Babysitting (1987), starring Elisabeth Shue, and his follow-up, Heartbreak Hotel (1988), as well as Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991), starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams.
Steel was right — Obst learned by watching Hill expertly manage productions, thanks to time spent shepherding early installments of the Halloween franchise, The Fog (1980), Clue (1985) and Escape From New York (1981).
“I also learned that as a producer, if you don’t have a point of view about talent, you’re an employee,” explained Obst, who described herself as a busybody on set, someone who always knows what everyone else is doing. “Plus, I have the Teamsters telling me everything — that’s the secret.”
Her other tricks of the trade included great catering and good parties: “You have to keep the spirit going and keep the crew really happy and the actors really happy.”
Splitting from Hill after The Fisher King, Obst went solo. Knowing her productions like the back of her hand was a point of pride, and during the past 30-some years, Obst turned out 20 projects, among them Ephron’s directorial debut, This Is My Life (1992), and her follow-up, Sleepless in Seattle (1993), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (which was executive produced by Obst and produced Gary Foster who had sole producing credit); Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day (1996), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney; Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster; Forest Whitaker’s Hope Floats (1998), starring Sandra Bullock; Ed Zwick’s The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening; Donald Petrie’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey; and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). The latter marked the highest-grossing film on her résumé, with more than $730 million in box office receipts.
Getting the 2019-21 National Geographic series The Hot Zone off the ground was a decades-long Herculean effort that remained another point of pride. Star Julianna Margulies was “the greatest,” someone on Obst’s short list of actors that she had hoped to reteam with one day.
During her last interview with THR, Obst said she loved all her projects for different reasons. “They’re perfect for what they are,” she said. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was the most fun she’d ever had on a set, thanks in large part to the warmth and humor of Hudson and her comfort with McConaughey, whom Obst worked with “a million times.”
Hudson credited Obst with including her on every aspect of the film, an experience that changed her career. “She was so excited to not only work with me, but even as a young woman, made me feel like what I said mattered. She never dismissed any of my ideas. She always encouraged me to speak my mind and have a real opinion about everything. And our partnership became one of real mutual respect and real love,” Hudson told THR, adding that while Obst was “a very tough producer and very strong-minded,” her indefatigable skills kept everyone on their toes to the benefit of any project she touched.
“She will forever go down as my most cherished working partnership on How to Lose a Guy from the very beginning, from doing rewrites with multiple writers, to her pulling me into a movie theater in New York City, because she wanted me to experience the laughter in a real theater and to really feel the success of the movie with an audience. The whole experience was not only an absolute blast, but a real defining moment for me in my career.”
Obst with Paramount chair Sherry Lansing at the 2003 premiere of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
Obst was widely credited with rescuing the all-female Western Bad Girls -(1994) — starring Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson and Drew Barrymore — from an utterly calamitous shoot. Obst was a late hire, brought in as an executive producer by 20th Century Fox chief Peter Chernin to right the ship after director Tamra Davis was fired two weeks into filming.
“All the girls were arguing over a red dress, and the hair and makeup people all hated each other,” Obst said of the mess, made worse by the fact that cast and crew were all being paid during the shutdown (with the actresses earning nearly $100,000 per week). “I had a fun time solving it, moving the whole production to a Western town in Brackettville, Texas, and sending the actresses to cowboy camp, where it didn’t matter how good or pretty you were. You had to learn how to ride a horse and shoot a gun, and that made them like one another again. It broke the ice.”
Movies like Contact and Fisher King reflected who Obst was a person, someone with a passion for philosophy and an obsession with facts and science. “I’m always searching. Contact really reflects the extension of my life that I dedicated to asking big questions about science and religion.” Meanwhile, Fisher King was her soul. “It’s a movie about grace, redemption, how kindness can transform a person. It’s a reminder that you’re never just one thing.”
She has said that continuing to work and being creative into her mid-70s delivered energy and a spark that she needed. “I would be bored out of my wits if I didn’t work, and I’m still doing good work,” she said, noting recent projects like a K-pop film with Parasite executive producer Miky Lee that’s set to star Charles Melton.
Several years back, Obst got her very first tattoo, the word “Next” spelled out in Korean. It was a nod to Diller, who issued a succinct statement when he lost a bid to acquire Paramount in 1994: “They won. We lost. Next.”
The word served as a personal mantra, and the tattoo was the first place she looked when feeling overwhelmed. Despite the challenges of the disease, Obst, who described herself an eternal optimist or “Pollyanna” while she beamed with pride, always found joy from spending time with Oly, Julie and their daughters, Sunny and Marlowe. She lit up most while talking about her time with them.
“He’s responsible for a lot of my joy because he’s my only child, he’s my best production and my best friend,” she said. “We are each other’s confidants. If either of us are down, we’re there for each other in privacy. To see him make movies and television shows and rush from the editing room to take his kids to school, it’s a triumph for the family.
“I think that’s what makes you feel good as you get older, the things you really care about and that you worked so hard on come to pass. Being a mother is transformative. Being a grandmother is transformative, because you care more about other people and less about yourself or your career.”
Details are being sorted out for a private funeral service for family with an eye on a 2025 event in partnership with the Producers Guild of America that would serve as a commemoration and celebration of her life and career.
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