By Cara Waters
Sarah Harden is still pinching herself after selling the production company she co-founded with actress Reese Witherspoon to US private equity giant Blackstone, turning the Geelong-born bookworm into a Hollywood powerbroker.
The 49-year-old from Geelong says the sale of Hello Sunshine, the production studio behind Big Little Lies, to Blackstone last week in a deal valuing it at an estimated $US900 million ($1.2 billion) has been “an incredible ride”.
“We’ve done the deal to set ourselves up for the next phase of growth, the company is scaling really well,” Harden says. “This is Reese’s life work, this is my life work, I look at everything I’ve done in the last 20 years, it’s brought me to the place of starting Hello Sunshine.”
Sarah Harden is the chief executive and co-founder of production company Hello Sunshine.
Witherspoon and Harden started Hello Sunshine in 2016 with the idea of creating movies and series centred on women. Over the space of five years the production company has won widespread acclaim for its dramas Big Little Lies, Morning Wars and Little Fires Everywhere.
Hello Sunshine also makes podcasts, non-scripted television, animation and runs book-selling juggernaut Reese’s Book Club with the Blackstone deal anointing Witherspoon and Harden as major Hollywood players.
“The driving mission of our company is to change the narrative for women,” Harden says. “If you want to change your stories, you have got to change the storytellers.”
Harden, who is also the chief executive of Hello Sunshine, will sit on the board of the Blackstone-backed company which will be led by former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs.
Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Harden are focused on telling women’s stories at Hello Sunshine.
Harden says she will retain her “meaningful” equity stake in the new company alongside Witherspoon, with the pair continuing to run Hello Sunshine.
Harden went to school at Geelong Grammar and studied arts at The University of Melbourne before moving to the United States more than 20 years ago after winning a Menzies scholarship to complete an MBA at Harvard University. It was at Harvard where she became interested in the intersection between technology and entertainment.
After stints at News Corp and Fox, Harden was working at video streaming company Otter Media when she first met Witherspoon, who had already started her involvement in production with the movies Gone Girl and Wild.
“We started the company together,” Harden says. “She put in capital, and I was running this venture Otter Media, and we put in some capital, and we started building it and one thing led to another, the timing just worked out really well.”
Initially, Harden juggled two roles but when Otter Media was sold she turned her focus solely to Hello Sunshine.
She says the inspiration for the company came from Witherspoon, who was frustrated at the roles she was being offered. “Often good things are born of frustration,” Harden says. “I’ll never forget Reese saying before Big Little Lies she’d never acted with other actresses like that, she had been the single actress on the call sheet.”
Hello Sunshine was launched before the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements but Harden says these issues inform the company’s mission. She recalls Witherspoon telling her, “We’ve got to be better, I want to build a company that creates opportunities, and leaves this industry better off”.
Big Little Lies was the first time Reese Witherspoon had worked with an ensemble of women. Credit: HBO/Fox Showcase
Harden says the male-dominated entertainment sector had ignored stories of women and minority groups for too long. “It’s not good enough, we’ve had decades of lost stories of women and you’ve had women, people of colour, and filmmakers, directors and creators just structurally excluded from Hollywood,” she says. “As you change the story, you attract audiences who see a wider range of experiences reflected on screen. It not only feels good, but it’s a great business strategy as well.”
Books are integral to the Hello Sunshine model with Reese’s Book Club a “tent pole” for the company where Witherspoon picks a book in the first week of every month, puts a sticker on it and publicises it on Instagram.
“That’s where we really started the company, putting books at the centre of everything we do, and Reese’s Book Club has scaled to be incredibly influential. We have a wonderful following in Australia actually,” Harden says. “Books are a real source of [intellectual property] and there is the book to film and TV model.”
For the voracious reader, it is one of her “greatest joys”.
“I am the girl that used to go wait on a Saturday morning outside the Geelong library to pick up my books and change my library books over every week,” she says. “I grew up as a giant bookworm.”
Australian director Kate Riedl has known Harden since they were both 18 and says she “devours” books and has flown under the radar in Australia after living in the United States for so long.
“It doesn’t surprise me how, how successful Sarah has been,” Riedl says. “She’s an incredibly passionate person. She really wanted to tell stories by women and give women a voice and I think she’s gone out there and done that in the most incredible way.”
Witherspoon was an early adopter of Instagram where she has 26 million followers and Harden and Witherspoon identified the platform as a key means of connecting with women.
Hello Sunshine has used the platform to ensure everything it launches is part of a “cultural conversation”, using social media to build an audience for its productions.
The pair have grown Hello Sunshine to a staff of 70 people and Harden is proud of the culture they have created where the mother of three says there are “really direct conversations” about work-life balance.
“We’re world class DIYers ... we can pitch a $100 million TV show and then unstack the dishwasher,” Harden says. “There’s an Australian egalitarianism to our values, I would say that.”
Harden says Witherspoon is very hands on and engaged at every level of Hello Sunshine.
“No one works harder,” she says. “I don’t know how she does it. If she’s onset she’s texting me from hair and makeup, and we’re jumping on the phone to talk about something, she’s all in.”
Harden and Witherspoon are both adamant that Hello Sunshine’s sale to Blackstone is only the start for the company which has a pipeline of production coming through and can now use Blackstone’s bank balance to potentially acquire more women-led businesses.
“Our goal was to build a category-defining media brand for women anchored in content,” Harden says. “Reese has got an incredible ambition and it’s an ambition I share with her.”
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