Breakfast with Amy Pascal is just how a meeting with a Hollywood studio boss should be. In just over an hour, the co-head of Sony Pictures Entertainment was hugged by a movie star (Paul Bettany), a bestselling author (Dan Brown) and a scion of the Kennedy clan (Bobby Shriver). And when she talks of ”Steven”, she is, of course, referring to Spielberg.
Yet the 48-year-old seems some way from the stereotypical foot-stamping studio boss; she is in turns tough as nails and surprisingly sensitive. ”I’m not someone you’d think of as a typical studio executive, whatever that means,” she says.
Sony is run as a two-headed beast, with Pascal largely responsible for the creative side, while CE Michael Lynton takes care of the business side. Both report to Sir Howard Stringer, the head of Sony.
A UCLA graduate who worked her way up from secretary status, the woman responsible for Spider-Man, Memoirs of a Geisha and Closer, among others, is keen to dispel the suggestion that she is the one spending the money and doing the more ”girly” bits of the job. ”[Michael’s] not always the one who says something is too much [money], sometimes I do,” she says. ”Michael and I really do everything together.”
There is no doubt, however, that it is Pascal who is credited with making the studio so successful in the past few years — number one at the Hollywood box office in two out of three years from 2002. And it is she who bears much of the burden for dropping to number three last year. Last Friday saw the worldwide release of The Da Vinci Code amid much fanfare and the Japanese electronics and media company hopes the film will end Sony’s quest to return to the number-one slot.
An executive at Sony’s Columbia Pictures for 19 years — with a short break to work for Ted Turner — Pascal was promoted after 2002’s blockbuster success, Spider-Man.
Spider-Man (and its sequels) helped quieten film industry sniping that Pascal was only good at making chick flicks such as Sense and Sensibility, Charlie’s Angels and Little Women. Conscious of the flak that she has received, it is still refreshing to hear a senior executive make no excuses for her preferences: ”I like movies about women, and I think it’s important.”
Pascal’s emergence as a ”pretty straightforward, unpolitical, artist-friendly” studio executive has not been without hitch. The daughter of a Rand Corporation economist father and bookshop-owning mother, the native of Los Angeles had ”always wanted to get into movies”. While studying international relations at UCLA, she answered a job ad in the Hollywood Reporter and ended up working for British producer Tony Garnett at Kestrel Films for six years.
She eventually left to work at 20th Century Fox, where she was a ”lousy executive”. Why? ”I didn’t understand the politics at all. I didn’t understand how you were supposed to play the game.”
She was saved by the late Dawn Steel, the first woman to run a leading United States movie studio, who brought Pascal to Columbia in 1988. Steel taught the younger woman an invaluable lesson. ”She taught me to be myself. That to be like anyone else is going to be a big-time failure.”
What of the next generation? Reports suggest that there are now fewer women aspiring to head a studio than there were 10 to 15 years ago. Pascal says that ”sadly” that seems to be the case, and ”it’s not just happening in the film business, but in every business. The minute women got more powerful, there were all these stories about how nobody should put their children in childcare and how everyone should breastfeed.”
She put off having children until she was 42. She married the now-retired New York Times veteran Bernard Weinraub in 1997 and her son Anthony wore Superman clothes throughout Spider-Man‘s international tour. ”It was mortifying,” she says.
She is obviously a tough taskmaster but admired by colleagues for it. ”Work will take everything you give it. It’s up to you to work out what you want to give it. I happen to love my job. I loved my job last year when we had Stealth.” Last year’s turkey about an artificial intelligence programme, Stealth was one reason for Sony’s poor performance. She groans when I bring it up, but Pascal was also responsible for passing on the year’s blockbuster, Brokeback Mountain.
After buying the rights to the Annie Proulx short story, Pascal felt that the film was better with a smaller producer. As a result of this miss, Sony is considering a new division to support relatively low-budget films that do not fit happily within Sony Pictures Classics.
After so many years in the industry, what is next? She looks at me as if I have just arrived from Planet Saddo: ”I want to keep doing this. Forever.” — Â