Producer championed women in male-dominated Hollywood

Lynda Obst, a journalist turned producer who championed women in Hollywood while working on hit films including Sleepless in Seattle, Contact and Interstellar, has died at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said her brother Rick Rosen. Obst revealed her diagnosis in a February interview with the Hollywood Reporter, blaming her illness on five decades of smoking. “I smoked with joy and with pleasure,” she recalled, “and was one of the most devoted potheads around. Smoking with movie stars like Kate Hudson outside of trailers was one of the great things a producer could do.”

For years, Obst was among the most successful and well-respected producers in the business, known for shrewdly managing the talent around her while developing films that were often modestly budgeted but enormously successful. A self-described “psychotic optimist,” she produced nearly 20 feature films, emerging as a rare female producer in an industry long dominated by men.

Lynda Obst onstage at the 2006 Platinum Circle Awards in Hollywood.Credit: Getty

“You have to develop a thick skin,” she told The New York Times in 1996. “You have to be able to depersonalise drama without becoming depersonalised. Every day, there are crises and dramas and disappointment. Just to survive without being thrown, you have to be tough.”

Diminutive but energetic, with a gravelly voice and wry sensibility, Obst worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine before coming to Hollywood in the late 1970s, scouting potential projects as a “development girl” under producer Peter Guber.

Her first major discovery led to her first Hollywood credit, as an associate producer on 1983’s Flashdance. Starring Jennifer Beals as an aspiring dancer, the film became one of the year’s biggest hits.

A decade later, Obst’s career took off after she reconnected with writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron, a friend from the New York journalism world. Obst produced Ephron’s directorial debut, This Is My Life (1992), and was the executive producer for Ephron’s romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which grossed more than $US227 million worldwide.

Obst found continued success with romantic comedies, including How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003). She also produced thrillers such as The Siege (1998), made dramas including Hope Floats (1998) and helped shape the modern science-fiction genre. As an executive producer on Contact (1997), she successfully campaigned for Jodie Foster to be cast as an astronomer and later produced Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), which became her biggest commercial success, grossing more than $681 million during its initial release.

“It’s not a departure to work on a science-fiction film,” she told the website Salon in 2013. “I’m just a geek who loves romantic comedies.”

As Obst settled into her Hollywood career in the 1980s, she returned to her journalistic roots, writing sharply observed articles for magazines including Harper’s and Premiere. She also wrote two books inspired by her time in show business, beginning with Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches (1996), which Publishers Weekly described as “a peculiarly Hollywood kind of hybrid, a memoir/survival guide that describes what it’s really like to get a movie made while still managing to say something nice – or at least benevolently neutral – about everybody in power.”

Obst with actress Kate Hudson at the 2003 Hollywood premiere of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.Credit: Getty Images

Praising former bosses such as producer David Geffen, she also noted examples of sexist or boorish behaviour, such as the time Geffen casually suggested she get collagen shots.

As Obst told it, success in Hollywood comes about in part from following the trends and giving audiences what they wanted (she titled one chapter “Ride the Horse in the Direction It’s Going”). But she also advised aspiring producers not to be complacent. “The secret that all powerful people know is that no one else gives you power,” she wrote. When it comes to power, she added, “there is no permission to be granted. Permission must be seized.”

The oldest of three children, Lynda Joan Rosen, was born in Manhattan on April 14, 1950, and grew up in suburban Harrison, New York. Her father worked in the garment business – “We called him The Shoulder Pad King,” Obst recalled – and her mother was a schoolteacher.

Fascinated by New York’s 1960s counterculture, Obst would skip school to try to spot Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village. She became involved in the left-wing student movement after enrolling at Pitzer College in California and volunteering to teach at the state prison in Chino, introducing prisoners to the works of Marx and Lenin.

After transferring to Pomona College, Obst “turned into a really lousy radical” and, after receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1972, enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, planning to launch a career in academia.

She dropped out after about a year. About the same time, she met her future husband, literary agent David Obst. He helped her meet writers including Ephron, who encouraged Obst to become a magazine editor.

Aided by her husband’s literary connections, Obst soon joined the Times, where she edited articles by author Taylor Branch as well as pianist Glenn Gould. She also edited a book, The Sixties: The Decade Remembered Now, By the People Who Lived It Then (1977), which included personal essays from Muhammad Ali and Abbie Hoffman.

Obst moved to California reluctantly, after Simon & Schuster enlisted her husband to start a production company in Los Angeles. She had hoped to spend the rest of her career at the Times and said she hardly knew anything about movies.

But she said she began to find her footing in the industry while learning from Guber, the executive producer of Midnight Express (1978), who “gave me licence to do whatever I wanted” at his production company Casablanca.

Obst later worked with Geffen and teamed with Debra Hill, with whom she produced movies including the teen comedy Adventures in Babysitting (1987) and director Terry Gilliam’s genre-defying The Fisher King (1991), a fantasy-comedy-drama that became one of her favourite projects.

“I laughed and I cried,” she told the Times, recalling the first time she read the script. Even when she had to leave the office and run errands, she couldn’t stop reading, she said. “At one point I cried so hard that I took the script and threw it against the windshield.”

After the film was released, Obst went out on her own, producing movies including One Fine Day (1996), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney, and The Invention of Lying (2009), with Ricky Gervais. She also worked as an executive producer in television.

Obst attends a 2012 Oscars screening of Julie & Julia.Credit: Getty Images

In her last book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (2013), Obst lamented recent industry trends, including the rise of predictable mega-franchises and action films.

“We’ve got this formula: set-piece, set-piece, blow up a city, dystopian universe, robots that do the same things,” she told the Guardian. ”It’s not easy to make those things fresh.” Moviegoers needed “to gang together and vote with our feet,” she added. “It’s about wanting a little more. A little more drama, a little more reality, and a little more emotion.”

The Washington Post