Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast the podcast at Pomona college. I'm Patty Vest in these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes. As we all shelter in place, Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona, faculty and alumni about the personal professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Our guest today is sometimes referred to as one of the most prolific women producers in the film industry, but she's actually one of the most prolific producers, period. Lynda Obst class of 72 is the producer of such groundbreaking films as The Fisher King, Contact, Sleepless in Seattle and Interstellar among many, many more. Mark Wood: Welcome Linda. Thank you. It's good to have you with us here in cyberspace. Lynda Obst: Very reassuring to be in cyberspace. Mark Wood: It is. Yeah. So while we're talking about that, these are pretty challenging times for, for a lot of people, but the film industry, it seems in particular in some ways how are you adjusting professionally and personally to all of this? Lynda Obst: Well, you're watching it. Mark Wood: Yeah, of course our listeners can't see it. Can't see, but we're, we can see we're all on zoom. Lynda Obst: Describe it to them. This is my work in the movie business during the pandemic, my desk on my own. And I talk on zoom and then that zoom is finished and I go walk around my house for two minutes or maybe I walk out to the patio and they might come back. And then there's another zoom. And then sometimes I talked to my staff for five minutes and we do a director's list or a writer's list. And then we have another zoom. That's sort of how it goes. What used to be a meeting is now zoom. Yeah. So it's that old song who's zooming who. It's kind of crazy right now, as we speak, they're trying to figure out you know, how productions are going to start up. So there are many shows. My son in fact, had shows that were shooting as the pandemic shut down, shut us all down. Lynda Obst: I did not. So my life is less dramatically affected. I was in development in production on three things. So he's in the middle of these questions of some shows are shut down and they don't come back. Some shows are shut down and they don't come back for last year's episodes, but they'll come back for this week, this year, his episodes, which means they're going into a writer's room and they have time to figure out how to shoot. That's why they're not going back to production right now. It's not worth it. Movies have to be finished as it was going to television show. So movies are figuring out how are we going to do this? What are the logistics of this? And some shows were just canceled. So it was like you know, that game of musical chairs, right? And the music stopped and wherever you were standing and you hope there was a chair, there was a chair, something happened wherever you were standing or sitting. Lynda Obst: Yeah. Linda, you grew up in the East coast. Can you tell us a bit of how you were like as, as, as a child? Yeah, I always my favorite question that he was never asked that I grew up in Westchester outside of the state. And I liked to think of myself as a city kid, cause I was always running away to Greenwich village. When no one was looking with my girlfriends. So I would say I was in a bit of a, a nightmare. I was certainly noisy relentlessly or horrifically periods, a bit of a Raptor. And I, I think I had a terrific time, I must say, but I would not have wanted to be my mother, terrific qualities are not adult. Mark Wood: The famous parents curse is may you have a child just like you. Lynda Obst: And I did the big manager. He's the ones who had all those shows. Shootings gave me quite a time as well, that parents doors always works. Mark Wood: It does. And he can pass it on down exactly to. So,uhow did you find your way to Pomona? Lynda Obst: Well, you know, it was that era that you all have heard about it, but you probably weren't alive. Or the late sixties and early seventies, I was there really were, were contemporaries. So I took a year off 19 end of 1968, the beginning of 1969 and explored the existential, whatever I known. Lynda Obst: And I had a really fun time. And I said, I think I'm going to go back to school. Know that my mother said something to me. She said, why don't you just take one philosophy class? And then if you don't want to go back to school, I'll believe you. It was very, very telling of her. Yeah. So I really wanted to seek California. I had really had it with the East coast. I applied to Pitzer. I went there, I got in, I had no idea about it. Other than I could take a lot of different courses. I got very involved in politics. My first year there, it was Penn state and it was a very political year. I got very, I was very radicalized and got very involved in the student movement in Claremont. And then all of a sudden in the little of the student movement, I discovered philosophy. And I took all my courses at Pomona and philosophy. So something really strange was happening to me because this radical, that I was, was turning into a person who wanted to have long arguments about the bird life. Lynda Obst: They sent me to men's prison in Chino to teach the prisoners about Marx and Lennon. And then all I wanted to teach the prisoners was about going to college. I found myself becoming less and less radical in terms of like, I didn't want to tell these guys that when they got out of Chino, there was going to be a revolution for them to join. Irresponsible of me to prepare them for a revolution that wasn't really going to happen, which is what they wanted me to tell them. Of course, though, I prepped them instead for vocabulary like dialectic vocabulary, you know, they loved it, but I suddenly realized that my goal was to get them to school and that I was subversively radical. I thought I was. And then in fact, what I really was was a person who wanted to teach these guys philosophy. And then I became more and more of this philosophy student and I transferred to Pomona. Lynda Obst: And the next thing you knew, the next thing I knew I was studying hardcore logic a little bit of phenomenology and existentialism. I really went into Anglo-American philosophy big time and just fell in love with thinking. And I remembered something really interesting happened to me at Pomona, everything interesting Apple to me and Pomona, which is why I fell in love with it. But we had this big sit in this teaching with the ROTC and we had done this big March all around a Claremont and we ended up outside the ROTC building and they were supposedly our enemies. And so these guys from ROTC, they were the guys who wanted to grow up and be in the army. And also the conservative men's philosophy group from CMC came out to debate with us about our sin. And so I started to debate with these guys and I brought some of my team, my sort of SDS group. And the next thing I knew, I was debating with the CMC reactionaries about the nature of the good life and Aristotle. Well, we just adored each other. Lynda Obst: They couldn't believe that I wanted to discuss the nature of the good life and Aristotle and ethics and I couldn't go, they wanted to discuss that. And then there was no more sit in having this great big philosophical conversation. Yep. Mark Wood: Hey, that's what his philosophy is supposed to do. Right? Lynda Obst: I mean, I just turned into a really lousy, radical, Lynda Obst: And and, but it was a great teaching to now found themselves actually communicating, which I think is become for me. I think it's very much what I try to do in my movies. You know, his famous middle ground somehow, do you know this? It's not a middle ground, like a middle position, but just a point at which people can communicate nonideological point. Anyway, it was a regulatory moment at Pomona. I became completely less political and just immersed myself in philosophy, nothing but philosophy and, and tutorials and Joyce. And that was the thing about Pomona. Then I transferred, I, I fell in love with it. I became the head of the philosophy club. I, I, I, I just became devoted to the academics there and spent three years on campus. After that being a nerd, the happiest nerd, you could imagine, I went to graduate school in philosophy after. Patty Vest: Linda, Your mother suggested you to take philosophy. Had you already expressed some interest in philosophy or that she knows something that you didn't know? Lynda Obst: I think she knew something. I didn't know. I think,uif I had ever been exposed to it before, I had always been interested, but I didn't know what it was. She was, she had studied with Sydney Cook NYU. So,uand I think she and I had had some good conversations. I think she knew I would love it, but I didn't really know what the curriculum was going to be. And,uit was the, what did they say? It's the disease for which it pretends to be the cure, right? E it was what my mind needed to get out of a fever. Lynda Obst: And it taught me how to think. And you know, one of your questions was it's this, it's the field that your, your parents always say, Oh my God, what are you going to do with yourself? How are you going to get a job? What is the end for a awhile? I did think I was going to be a professor that sort of was what I was aiming for, but the truth is it trains your mind to think. And I don't think there's a day that I don't use it in my story in breaking down story and figuring out what's interesting to make a movie about in, in, in going down rabbit holes to figure out what, what is ethically interesting that I can extrapolate into a sci-fi piece or a genre piece that has richness and texture enough to be a tale. Do you know yelling? I think it's been, I don't think any other field, it would have given me as much, but it's not in terms of craft it's in terms of sort of running as a nation, you know? Yeah. Mark Wood: Now between, between the, the philosophy study and movie-making, there was a career in journalism which also seems to fit into that picture. You were just talking about pretty well, but how did that happen? Lynda Obst: Well, I got married to this guy, always one of those, he was he had a very interesting career. He was the literary agent for Bernstein and Woodward and John Dean and all the Watergate characters during the Watergate era. And I was lucky enough to, at that time, neat. You know, obviously many of his clients, one of them obviously Bernstein and Woodward, and he and I met at the exact same time that Nora Ephron met Carl Bernstein and Nora became my mentor. And she was my mentor ever since we did sleepless. And I mean, many years later together and her directing debut together and we were pregnant together, then it became one of the, maybe the biggest influence in my life. Mark Wood: Yeah. That's, that's a lot of bonding influences there. Lynda Obst: Yeah. She used them. She's probably the biggest influence in my life. So when when I met David, he was with all these extraordinary journalists and I was in graduate school at Columbia, studying philosophy, studying philosophy, having a very good time, except for the thing about philosophy, is that the most brilliant people that you ever met are sort of vaguely they're called bright, right? You did the most amazing thing ever. Right. You know, that was good. It was really a hard field for an ambitious person, any kind of Denton. And I had a great teacher named Sydney, Morganbesser, who made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I didn't know what he was saying. He adored me, but I was like, is he talking to that during this period? I remember going to my decent sized thesis advisor and saying, you know, I'm not sure if I'm cut out for this. He said, Oh no, you are Linda. This is perfect for you. I said, no, really? I don't understand a thing that professor Morgan was saying to me, he said, Linda professor Morganbesser knew what he was saying. He would have written it down 30 years ago. Lynda Obst: Like famously convoluted. Yeah. Mark Wood: Yeah. Lynda Obst: During this time, while I was, I started, I was writing about philosophy of science. That's what I got hooked on. And as you may have noticed in my work on a science nerd. So that's when I started to get really interested in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science. And I made some very good friends and working in that area then, which was starting to get juicy. And but just around them, I fell under Nora's wing and Nora was really not about to add me in graduate school. Mark Wood: She had big plans for you. Lynda Obst: She was like, you're a magazine editor. And she decided I was in magazine editor being like, here's the story? Isn't true story that I actually believe is true, but he's smarter than I am. So she may be right. But she gave me a story of hers to edit when we met, like during a volleyball game that our fiances, our husbands were playing in Washington. And it's impossible to edit. Nora's copy. It's perfect. Okay. Seriously, every word read Nora's copy. Every word is perfectly placed. She never has an extra word. There is not a piece of punctuation. I mean, it's ridiculous. I handed it back to her and I said, this is perfect. You're a magazine editor. Lynda Obst: There's lots of ways to read that story. But yeah, that's not true. She, she, there was a job. She entered, got me an interview at Esquire. And then there was a job that opened at the times magazine. And my ex husband got me an interview there. And then Nora called the guy up and said, she's so bossy. You kind of add to you what she told you to do. Right. Which is how we knew she was a director. You know, he said to this guy, you know, you'll have to hire Linda. And she wrote a piece for me for the New York times magazine. My first piece is by Nora Ephron's. Yeah. So then I got a job as an editor of the magazine, which was pretty great. It's a great magazine. I had fun. I had a great time. I got to do things like get Taylor branch to write about his philosophy convention. Do you know those academic that are so much fun and so crazy? And he wrote about that and, and I edited Glenn Gould, you know, the great musician. I had a lot of, a lot of fun there. And then I got pregnant and, and my ex husband said to me, guess what? We're moving to California. Patty Vest: Yeah. This was before telecommuting was a thing. [Inaudible] I could have stayed there. Well, there wasn't, there was a reason why it's done. Tell us about this, this move to California. And how did you transition into film industry? Lynda Obst: Well, I really didn't want to go. I was very happy at the times. I could have stayed there forever. I wanted to be the first woman national editor. I, it was the first time I ever sort of announced an ambition to myself. You know, I was fiercely ambitious. I, I loved it there. I mean, it was heavenly world, but I had just, I had a baby and and David said to me, go get a house in California. If I hadn't had the baby, I would have stayed in New York and we probably would have broken up then. Yeah. But my baby was not even a year old. Yeah. So I I had to move and I had no interest in being in the movie business. This had never occurred to me. I had done some stories about the movie business when I was at the times, but I was much more an academic than I was a movie person. I never studied any movies. So I wasn't even an academic about movies. I had never studied Kurosawa. Do you know what I mean? There are huge absences in my education about movies. In fact, when people are watching really brilliant movies, I'm reading the New York review of books, Lynda Obst: It's kind of an East coaster. Do you know? Yeah. But here I was with a husband and a baby and I had to learn how to do a job, new job. And, and it was hilarious. I wrote about this in my first book, but there I was in this office that was so ridiculous. Looking. It had a desk with a burgundy skirt, leopard. Yeah. Lynda Obst: I'm telling you, okay, burgundy leopard. And then it had a logo on the paper that said Casablanca, that ran three quarters down the page. So you didn't even start writing dear. So, and so until you were in the last third of the page, I couldn't write on the page. I couldn't write to my writers. You were embarrassing. Wait on the second page. Mark Wood: Yeah. Lynda Obst: Cover sheet. It was, yeah. It was the most ridiculous place. It was where Donna Summer had made bad girl, do you know the bad guy? And we worked in bad girl motel. I'm now starting to just go dance. Just you're missing out that our listeners are missing this. Isn't my first job in the movie business where Peter Guber said to me, if you want to do books, do books. If you want to do movies, do movies. If you want to do magazines, do magazines. And what he really meant was please bring me water into meetings. Mark Wood: Yeah. Lynda Obst: I read the script. I have to pretend to talk about in the meetings and, you know, write me a paragraph about what I'm supposed to. And over the course of those three or four years, the first two of which I had no idea. What I was supposed to do is fair. Everyone who goes first too. And they, Oh, they told me I could make up any title I wanted. This is coming from New York times. Right. You don't do that there. Can you tell me from the New York times, and they're like, I don't know, make one up director of creative affairs. Mark Wood: Where did you go? Lynda Obst: Really? There was nothing funnier. My friends just loved director of creative affairs to become a vice president. I said, I've never done the job. What do you care? I mean, that's how much titles meant, you know, couldn't believe I didn't want to be a vice president. No, from the get go. I not really everything. Don't so fraudulent. I was in a depression, you know, for the first year I had come from a place that was all about merit, where there was ethics. Like you had to take, you had to pick up the check because if you didn't pick up the check at the times, you know, you could be used by, you know, you could be bought by people here. It was like, you wanted to be back. Of course, the title of my first book came from 11. Mark Wood: Yeah. I love that title. Hello, He Lied Lynda Obst: Instead of negative. Mark Wood: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's this wonderfully witty title, but behind it, there's this view of, of the sort of dysfunctional institutionalized insincerity that that's kind of scary. Is that, was that really what it was like? And how did you, how did you survive in a place like that given, given where you came from and your... Lynda Obst: That's why I started writing. Because you hit the nail on the head. It was so cynically dishonest to compared to coming from a time that I felt like I had the bends and I felt like it was going to change who I was at the core. And I didn't know if I could do anything good that way. So I thought that I met this guy named Harold Hayes who had come from Esquire and was then the editor of the Los Angeles Magazine. And he asked me if I wanted to write something because I was making him laugh about Hollywood. I was telling him about how we all distributed water at meetings. So I wrote this article about pitching. It was the first thing I ever wrote. And in writing, I started to develop this distance. It's like anthropological distance from what was going on that really made me laugh. I used footnotes Mark Wood: Scholar of Hollywood, this dishonesty, Lynda Obst: I had footnotes. I had, you know, I had CLA wardrobe, you know, all of this really projected me. Yeah. It really made me laugh. So writing that book, I think saved and starting to write those articles gave me first of all, a very unique identity, but that's not, I wasn't aware of that. What I was aware of is that it gave me a distance from which I could work. And I was working out my ethics and seeing hello. He lied that what I was doing was coming up with a way to work from someplace clean because your source has to stay clean or you're just chasing everybody. Yeah. You know, I mean, and I think that's how I've continued to do good work all these years. I mean, not everything is fantastic, but everything I stayed at pretty high level and it's because I don't chase. Lynda Obst: Do you know, I try to keep my source pure so that I'm working from what I truly care about. And the only way you can do that is to know what you truly care about. And that, so that I think is the greatest, the easiest thing to violate here, which is to become a cloner and a chaser. And, and so that was my goal was in writing pillowy live was to find out how to keep who I was intact, my ass. Yeah. And writing safe, you know, I think being a writer saved my ass. Yeah. Patty Vest: Lynda the first, a big film on your resumes is Flashdance. Can you tell us a bit about your work then that movie? Lynda Obst: Yes. I was working for Peter Guber at the bad girls motel. And I met this guy named Tom Edley, who used to work at Esquire. So we were so happy to find each other. It was the first six months of my being in Hollywood. It was the first six months of his being in Hollywood. He wanted to be a screenwriter and both of us were like lost children in crew, from land. So we were always having drinks together and talking about who was lying to us about what, and who was saying what, and who was hustling home. And he was very elegant. He was from Toronto. He was very elegant on ed Lake. And he said, I actually have the best idea. And he tells me about these girls who danced, who, who were welders during the day. But at night they, they made their own costumes and they danced in bars, two tapes that they made up for themselves. Lynda Obst: And I said, really? And he said, yeah, I'm going to do get them. I'm going to do an illustration of this. I'm going to show you what I mean by the costumes that they designed for themselves. So he worked with, cause he was a magazine editor. He worked with a guy who did stills with these girls, went back to Toronto and the girls shot and brought them back to me. And they were fantastic looking and raw and sexy. And I got it and out of a bar and I said, this is a Bob Fosse in musical. And I'm like, I get it. I get it. I'm buying it. So I went to my boss, Peter Guber, and I said, this is the most, this is unbelievably commercial. We have to buy it. Didn't completely understand it. But I was there for reasons like this, to buy things like that, I thought were unbelievably commercial. So we started working on the script and towards the end of the first draft two things happened. I knew Diane Von Furstenberg. So I told her about it so she could tell Barry Diller about it so we could get it to paramount simultaneously Dawn Steele, who became the first woman, Adam, his studio later, my best friend at this point, not my best friend. Okay. Are we getting that? Not my best. My competitor. Yeah. Lynda Obst: Okay. All the women were out for themselves at this time. There was only one woman at each place. She got wind of this script, flash dance. And she had it slipped to her by an agent. And she was like, I have to get this for paramount. So we have Diane Von Furstenberg bringing it into Berry and we have Dawn making it into Don Simpson and at Penn who was the president of paramount then, and all of a sudden I like called on and I'm like, do we both have the script? And we decided we had to put our forces together. So Paramount thought of it. She went off and made it with Jerry Bruckheimer. I mean, Don got fired as president of the studio because he was taking way too much below. So they fired him as president, but he became a partner of Jerry Bruckheimer and they became the producers. I became the, I could be anything from executive producer to associate producer. So obviously at the end of the day I became associate producer, but everyone knew I had done it right as I had been with the script for two years. So when the movie was done, Dawn called me and she said, I need you to see it. Your name is on it. I want you to be proud of it. Lynda Obst: And she was really nervous and I went to see it and I completely loved it and I burst into tears and then we started hugging and then we were best friends ever since. And her daughter is my goddaughter. Mark Wood: Oh, that's a cool story from competitors to best friends. How often does that happen? In Hollywood? Lynda Obst: It was the era of girls becoming allies. And so we were among the first group because when there's such scarcity, it was hard for women to become allies. Yeah. We have to recognize that we were stronger together than we were fighting for crumbs. Yeah. Mark Wood: Let's jump forward to one of my favorite film Sleepless in Seattle, one of everybody's favorite romantic comedies gotta be tell us how that movie came about. Lynda Obst: Well, Nora got the rewrote that movie and it was sort of a great premise that had been hanging around for awhile. Cause it wasn't a great script and they gave it to Nora to rewrite and she changed it completely. She changed Megan. She changed the Meg part to being a reporter. Is she changed the bill borrowed. She changed all the parts. She made it hilarious. She made it everything. So she completely rewrote the script and it immediately got a green light and got Tom anx attached. And so, because I had done Nora's directing debut, this is my life. She said to Tristar, I have a producer. I would like Linda to produce this. So they said, okay, aim on the script at the point that we were casting and prepping and searching locations. And the most exciting apart from the fact that it's the most wonderful thing to do in the movie business is scout locations with Nora because it's basically shopping, eating at the end of the day. Mark Wood: Yeah. Lynda Obst: Just cant have a better scouting day than that. Mark Wood: Okay. Lynda Obst: The most exciting and exciting and the bad sentence thing that happened was that the young boy that was supposed to play against Tom froze and couldn't do it. So we cast him. So we had to switch the order in which the two sections of the movie were filmed. So we can recast while Meg Stupp was shooting. So that was very wow. Yeah. Every movie has a thing. Mark Wood: Yeah. I guess every big project has a thing. Yeah. Patty Vest: There's always something. Lynda Obst: Whereas I like to call it a situation. Several of those members are. Patty Vest: Linda, you mentioned your, your interest in science earlier and several of your films and TV projects involve science contact interstellar. Most recently you're not deal channel project, The Hot Zone. What, what draws you to science was how, now that you have done those projects, how do you, what do you see? What's your interest in bringing those to life? Lynda Obst: I don't think there's anything more interesting in the world in science. I mean, look at the world we're living in right now. What's going to save us. Science has done to save us. It's the only thing that's gonna save us Mark Wood: If we listen to the scientists, of course. Lynda Obst: Well, you know, if we don't more or less at the end of the day, science is still going to save us the science with the treatment and the science with the vaccine whoever's going to die is going to die because they didn't listen to science. But yeah, I mean the most to the questions that I was interested in, in philosophy, right. What sorts of things are there in the universe, right? Like how did the universe begin? What is life made of what, all of the deepest questions, these are now questions of physics that are answerable, and that is an astonishing time to be alive. And more questions can be answered now in physics then in the history of man. And so I feel grateful to be alive at a time that we can be reading week to week about things that our ancestors, you know, sat around the fire speculating about and attributed to astrology. Lynda Obst: Yeah. There's just nothing more interesting, even just the science of vaccines right now is unbelievably interesting. So I'm also what are heroes, I mean, are heroes, the guys in Revenant? I don't know, maybe, but to me heroes are the guys who make half the amount of money of a movie executive, a starting movie executive and work day and night and day at night and invent something that will save the population of the world and then they lose and they're doing it anyway. And so I want to show what real human heroism is and what real good guys are. And also the every time you invent something in science, you invent 50 things. Do you know, because that's the nature of itself. So I'm just in love with the process. Do you know what the scientific method I'm in love with facts because we're living in a democracy it's written for the very reason that fake facts are not understood. I mean, what makes something fake is not. So we're also lucky that we have this education that we do and that we're able to distinguish between nonsense and truth. And we have the resources to sort out garbage from jewels. Yeah. I think it's the most important thing we're going to do for the next, for our lifetime is traditional life of separating the wheat from the draft and the truth from the false and pushing science forward. Mark Wood: Speaking of both science and heroes the Hot Zone, I know was something that took up a lot of years of your life involved with a fellow alum Richard Preston, one of my favorite writers. And I, I mean, I know there's a, there's quite a story behind that. Can you tell it? I I'm, I, you know, I know we don't have a whole lot of time. It's a long story. Lynda Obst: We got Richard you know, put the, the story was the most popular and, and widely read magazine article of, of a decade when Tina Brown first took over New Yorker and Richard. And so it was auctioned among many producers. He interviewed which producers he wanted. I won and it didn't matter. That's sort of the bottom line lost, stole. The article, gave it to his directors, to his crew. As we were organizing our writer, our cast, we had the best writer, the best cast. And he just proceeded despite the fact that he lost, which didn't, I didn't even know was legal and it's marginal, doesn't it, it's barely legal. Now that you can only, if you're a magazine writer, you can only protect the sequence of the ideas, not the ideas themselves. So it was a very dicey situation. They started shooting monkeys before we were ready to start shooting actors. So outbreak got made first, this last couple of weeks where everybody's talking about outbreak just drives me up the ones. I'm not a very big person. I'm five foot one. Mark Wood: Well it's pretty bad movie too. Lynda Obst: And one of my weaknesses, if people talking about Outbreak. Is it's a touchy subject. Mark Wood: I have to tell you, even before I knew, even before I knew about Richard Preston, Mark Wood: I ha and the story, I hated outbreak. It was, it's a horrible movie Lynda Obst: In my family, you weren't allowed to say it, Mark Wood: But you persisted. You know, nevertheless, she persisted Lynda Obst: The less she persisted. And then we got it made with this wonderful network Nat Geo in six series. And we had a great cast and Richard was there and I adore him. Mark Wood: And he says, now that he, he thinks that needed to be a TV series mini series all along. Lynda Obst: No, you would not have gotten as much science and yeah, because you have to fill, you have to finish everything in the third act in a movie. Right. And I don't think we could have done that in the hot zone. It was a, not as good a movie as it was a series. It was a very good series. Thank you. Limited series. I like them. Patty Vest: Linda,uI want to ask you a little bit about the me too movement,uyou know, you you've been in Hollywood for a long time, do you think it has generated any real change in Hollywood? Lynda Obst: Oh God. Yeah. Maybe the biggest change I've ever seen. Hmm. Lynda Obst: Well, I think the move for African American directors and material is just as big, but those are the two biggest movements I've seen in Hollywood in my lifetime. And they're not cosmetic like on material. You are going to be seeing as much material for diverse audiences, as you see for non diverse audiences now, and you can not, not have sufficient amounts of diverse writers on that. It's not like a thing that you have a couple, do you know what I mean? Then anybody know a couple of diverse writers that's not gonna happen. So it's fierce. And I love that. I mean, as a person that hired Forrest Whitaker for a white movie, 18 years ago, this is just unbelievable. So there's that. And then for women directors, I mean, I can't even find any, they're all working. So that's a permanent change. I can't put out a list without having women directors on them without going to HR. Lynda Obst: That's institutionalized. That's become systemic as far as men's behavior. I'm mean, I think they're afraid to well, these days we have another problem. Of course, we're only touching each other on the elbow. Well, and now we don't even see each other because we're on zoom calls. So I think before, even the pandemic, of course, which will change people even, you know, going within three feet of each other there was a terror on the part of men. Terror is the word that I would use to be accused of anything. And that changed things like ever touching someone's shoulder. Do you know the, kind of what we would call the, the moderate range of stupid behavior, creepy behavior, as opposed to, you know, invasively creepy behavior, which was common, right? Serial, hoppers, serial Crowders people are way, way conscious of that now happened in a year. Lynda Obst: As far as sexual harassment. Oh my God. I mean, cancel culture is berserk here. So there are, you know, showrunners have been thrown off shows and I've never worked again. Hmm. It's tough around here. I mean, Louis C K can't get arrested. Do you know what I mean? So nobody less powerful. That's going to be trying to get away with anything. If anything, I feel like it's a little bit, almost two fierce and that I fear women won't get hired by men. They're so scared. So there's that reaction? So women are getting hired by women and men are getting hired by men, you know, like to see it normalize again so that women and men can work together. Cause I think then I think that our work has done co-ed. And when men and women are more comfortable with each other, but I think it's going through a very, this is, I think things are, they have periodicity, right? And at this moment we're going through a series of estrangement. And until, and maybe after the band dynamic, dude, that'll be a good thing. People will come back together in a different way and then maybe then be in co-ed groups again. But it's almost like a resocialization. Yeah. And it's interesting that the pandemic is at the tail end of this crisis because it's retraining us physically anyway. Yeah, for sure. Mark Wood: Linda, Richard Preston has said that he wanted you for the Hot Zone because he wanted a warrior. Do you consider yourself a warrior? Lynda Obst: Yeah. I'm, I'm a short warrior. I am. I'm a, I'm an astrologically, an aeries that's supposed to be a warrior side, but yeah, I think I am indefatigable and I'm not scared. I don't get scared and I'm strategic and so I like to be a wise warrior. Do you know when you get older, you don't just sort of look at a chess board, maybe more strategically, see how you get things done as a warrior. You know, I think there are older warriors and middle aged warriors and young warriors, but I do believe that at each of those stages, it was an age appropriate warrior. Patty Vest: Linda, how are you as a moviegoer, as a professional in the industry? How would you describe yourself as a movie goer? Lynda Obst: You know, there's certain movies. I I'm going to see a movie. I see it the first weekend. If I want to see a movie, do you know if it's like a coen brothers movie or there are certain movies that I'm just going to see that first weekend, The Favorite, the first week, you know, there are certain movies that I just know I want to see big sci-fi I'm going to go to the first weekend, but I have gotten a little bit lazier in terms of, you know, we get spoiled, we get all the screeners and so I have to really be a fan of the filmmaker to, to go to that movie and then I'll go right away. No, I'll go to Chris Nolan's movie the first weekend. I'll probably go to Adam McKay's movie the first weekend, you know, I saw, I saw a bear suit parasite, the minute it came out and I love, and then I thought three times, wow, what makes you see it more than once seeing that movie is it was so just full of turns, you know? Lynda Obst: And also we I'm lucky too, because we get screenings of the big movies early. Right. I'll know what the buzz is from pan. And I'll go to that point, like Paris. Yeah. Mark Wood: Well, on that note, I'm unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap this up. This has been fun. We've been talking with noted film producer, Lynda Obst class of 72. Lynda Obst: Thank you, Patty Vest: Linda. Thank you. That was so much fun. Lynda Obst: Thank you guys to all, to all of my Sagehen friends. Patty Vest: And to all who stuck with us this far. Thanks for listening to Sagecast. The podcast at Pomona college stay safe and until next time.