Reese Witherspoon brings literary tales of strong women to film

Reese Witherspoon was frustrated. Screenplays coming across her desk had one bland female character after another.

Bruna Papandrea, left, and Reese Witherspoon with a script of Big Little Lies, which HBO isdeveloping for a series to be aired next year. Picture: The Wall Street Journal

Reese Witherspoon was frustrated. It was 2011 and the screenplays coming across her desk had one bland female character after another. Defined as wives or girlfriends, they were nice, respectable and, for an actress interested in character work, boring. She was drawn much more to the protagonists of the novels and memoirs she curled up with at night.

“My husband said, ‘Honey, you read more books than anybody I know. Why don’t you just option some and turn them into movies?’ ” Witherspoon recalls.

In short order, she teamed up with Australian producer Bruna Papandrea, launched an inde­pendent production company called Pacific Standard and went on the hunt for challenging female characters.

The pair quickly demonstrated they could sniff out best­sellers. They scooped up their first two books — Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild and Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl — before they were published. In July 2012, just five months after the company was launched, the books hit No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time — in the non­fiction and fiction categories. ­Together, the films earned three Oscar nominations and grossed more than $US500 million.

Since then, Witherspoon has emerged as one of the most influential literary tastemakers in Hollywood. Her regular book ­recommendations on Instagram send Amazon rankings soaring. Pacific Standard is an increasingly ­impor­tant player in the book-to-screen business. She and her partner also have invited some authors to adapt their own books in the hope of bringing new writing ­voices to film and television.

“She’s tapped into a big piece of the gestalt of the country,” says Ivan Held, president of GP Putnam’s Sons, publisher of Liane Moriarty’sBig Little Lies, which Pacific Standard optioned with HBO.

Pacific Standard now has 26 projects in the works, 16 of them based on books. They range from children’s and young adult novels to thrillers, women’s fiction and bio­graphy. Their protagonists are judges, criminals, warrior princesses and Wall Street traders.

Next year, the company has a high-profile series set for release on HBO based on Big Little Lies, about a murder committed among the parents of a primary school. (It stars Witherspoon, ­Nicole ­Kidman, Laura Dern and Shai­lene Woodley.)

A film adaptation of Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive, starring Witherspoon, also could come as early as next year from ­Lionsgate. Three more books ­optioned prepublication by ­Pacific Standard are set to be published this year: The Outliers, a young adult thriller by Kimberly McCreight; All is Not Forgotten, a thriller by Wendy Walker; and The Dry, a thriller by Australian author Jane Harper.

Witherspoon and Papandrea look for books about women who, like the protagonists of Wild and Gone Girl, are strong and complex. They may engage in self-­destructive behaviour or act in ways that are difficult to understand. “I’m on the crusade to find a ­dynamic, female character, whether she’s likable or not,” says Witherspoon. “Likable puts women in a very small box.”

Producer Scott Rudin remains probably the biggest player in the book-to-screen game, favouring literary novelists such as Jonathan Franzen and Rachel Kushner.

While Witherspoon isn’t generally competing in the same space, she does go up against big Hollywood powerbrokers. In 2013, Pacific Standard lost out on McCreight’s first novel, Reconstructing Amelia, to Kidman, who is set to star and produce. And last year Witherspoon’s firm lost to a team involving Steven Spielberg for war photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir, It’s What I Do.

Soon after that, however, they won a heated auction for Ashley’s War, a nonfiction book about the first all-female team working with Special Operations forces in Afghan­istan.

Witherspoon, 40, traces her love of books to her childhood in Nashville, Tennessee. Her grandmother Dorothea Witherspoon, who had graduated from George Peabody College for Teachers, taught her to read by the time she was four. Each day after school, Reese would head to her grandmother’s house, where Dorothea would read to her — not from picture books but from novels.

They included To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Miss Minerva and William Green Hill by another southern author, Frances Boyd Calhoun. “I remember countless hours of sitting on her lap and her just reading to me,” Witherspoon says. “She would do all the voices.”

Today, her favourite authors include Amy Bloom, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. “Authors are my rock stars,” Witherspoon says.

When she was introduced to Nick Hornby at a party in 2010, she jumped out of her seat and gave him a hug. Then she launched into a discussion of a short story he had written called NippleJesus — one of his more ­obscure works. “I was very taken aback,” says Hornby, who would go on to write the screenplay for Wild.

Pacific Standard has a small staff. Besides Witherspoon and Papandrea, there is a director of development for film, another for television and an assistant. They deliberately have decided to stay independent of a studio, preferring the freedom to find the right studio for each project — one that shares their vision and is prepared to move quickly. Both women have invested their own money in the company. (As an A-list star, Wither­spoon reportedly has commanded upward of $US15m for films in the past.)

The opportunity to option a book usually occurs before the book is published. Witherspoon and Papandrea receive dozens of unpublished manuscripts a month by email. They aim to respond within 24 hours for projects submitted by a trusted agent or an ­author whose work they have been following. Witherspoon and her partner read late into the night on their iPads, emailing or texting each other their impressions.

“I’m fast. She’s faster than me. She’s like a speed reader,” Papandrea says.

Witherspoon says she and her partner agree about 70 per cent of the time. If a manuscript doesn’t come from a trusted source, one of their directors of development will give it a look and pass it on to them if it’s promising.

About once a week, Witherspoon stops into her favourite ­independent bookstore, Diesel, in Santa Monica, California. These aren’t scouting trips, as bookstore stock has probably already been optioned, but they help her stay up-to-date on books that may not have crossed her desk.

She and her partner keep a list of authors and screenwriters with whom they’d like to collaborate. Witherspoon also values recommendations by her high school friends. She reads as much for fun as for work, averaging one to two books a week.

Occasionally a book will come to their attention through an ­unusual route. Witherspoon ­ordered a copy of Ruth Ware’s bachelorette-party thriller, In a Dark, Dark Wood, when she read about it in O, the Oprah magazine — and jumped on it when she heard it hadn’t yet been optioned. A 2008 satirical novel by Christopher Buckley called Supreme Courtship was brought to them by Judith Sheindlin, star of the syndicated show Judge Judy. It’s about a television judge nominated to the Supreme Court when the president can’t get any other nominees past the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sheindlin signed on to co-­produce the film.

Agent Shari Smiley forwarded Wild to Witherspoon’s agent ­before Witherspoon had even launched the production company. When Witherspoon met ­Papandrea, Wild was the first thing she sent her to read. Papandrea loved it just as much. In an unusual move, Witherspoon invested her own money to option the book. She intended to star in it and wanted the story to retain its grittiness.

“Part of the frustrating process of getting films made, particularly as a woman, is having a lot of notes from a lot of people, particularly at studios, who are primarily men, about what they want to see my character do,” she says. “I also didn’t want to hear, ‘We don’t want to see Reese Witherspoon do drugs, we don’t want to see her sleep with a bunch of men, we don’t want to see her naked.’ I’d certainly grown up. My audience had grown up.”

Not long after Smiley sent Witherspoon Wild, she returned to the new partners with Gone Girl.

Pacific Standard didn’t option this independently, as it had for Wild. Instead, working with Smiley and producer-screenwriter Leslie Dixon, they went out to ­studios, pitching the project. “A lot of studios passed,” Witherspoon says. “A lot.”

The book didn’t get traction with anyone except Universal Pictures. Negotiations were under way when the book came out — an instant bestseller. Twentieth Century Fox, which hadn’t pursued it earlier, swooped in and purchased the film rights for $US2.5m, ­including $US1m for Flynn to write the screenplay. A deal that big is the exception rather than the rule, Papandrea says. Lionsgate paid an option fee in the low six ­figures for The Outliers, Smiley says. A teen thriller with a speculative twist, it involves a group claiming they can harness ­intuition and use it as a weapon.

When Witherspoon loves a book, she posts a photograph of it on Instagram, where she has 5.7 million followers. She takes the photos herself, arranging books next to freshly cut flowers on her grey-and-white marble kitchen counter or on her blue-and-white bedroom rug. Some of them are books she has optioned; many of them are not. She tags the posts with the hashtag #RWBookClub.

Pacific Standard hopes to branch out even further. Papandrea says she’s dying to do a period drama. Witherspoon wants to do a sci-fi project. The company hasn’t yet found a studio for Barbie and Ruth, a biography of Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel who invented the Barbie doll and later became an AIDS activist.

Witherspoon says one executive told her his company didn’t do biographical films; they were looking for fresh material. “Well, here’s the thing about female biopics: ­almost none of them have been made, so they’re pretty fresh,” she replied. “I can bring you a whole bunch of stories that you’ve probably never heard.”

The Wall Street Journal