Hello, He Lied -- and Other Tales from the Hollywood Trenches [Paperback]

Linda Obst (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 2, 1997

"Never go to a meeting without a strategy."  "Ride the horse in the direction it's going."  These are just two of the gems unearthed from the trenches of Hollywood by Lynda Obst, one of the most successful producers in the  movie business today.  In Hello, He Lied, Obst offers real, practical advice to would-be professionals in any field: "Thou shalt not cry at work," "thou shalt not appear tough," "thou shalt return all thy phone calls," and more.  She takes us inside high-pressure meetings with David Geffen, onto the set of Sleepless in Seattle, and into the heated negotiations for The Hot Zone and reveals what she's learned in more than twenty years in the business: how to swim with the sharks--and not get eaten.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hollywood producer Lynda Obst (Flashdance, Sleepless in Seattle) recounts her own battles in Hollywood's trenches--from her beginnings as a journalist to her current role as the maker and breaker of careers. Like other "classic" Hollywood books--Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger and You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips--Hello, He Lied is saturated with sleaze and proves, once again, that most of Tinseltown's stars are seriously lacking in the upstairs department. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In her first book, movie producer and former New York Times Magazine editor Obst creates 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 left a dream job at the good gray Times to become a "development girl" (scouting material and overseeing script writes) for hyper-ambitious studio head Peter Guber. From Guber she learned that success means never going to a meeting (or doing anything) without a strategy. Her strategy here is to portray herself at work, describing how she has learned to handle tough situations and tough people. Thus, supermogul David Geffen, who once mused during a meeting that she should consider collagen shots, is praised for his personal manager-like interest in his employees' lives. Obst distills her experience into a coda for survival. She knows not to buck major trends ("Ride the Horse in the Direction Its Going," reads one chapter title). She knows when to put projects on the back burner ("Putting It on the Roof"). Above all, she understands the "Tao of Power," as explained in a chapter that reads like a contemporary Hollywood version of The Art of War: "The secret that all powerful people know is that no one else gives you power.... With power, there is no permission to be granted. Permission must be seized." At times, the writing is awkward: "The latent energy that makes imploding friendships so dangerous is the fact they are playlets of this familial struggle." But there are gems in the gravel. Obst's rundown of the difference between an arty "fuzzy girl" as opposed to an Armani-wearing "crisp girl" is worth the price of admission. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; Reprint edition (September 2, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767900413
• ISBN-13: 978-0767900416
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #297,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 49 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Removes any doubt as to why Hollywood movies are so lousy. October 30, 1997

By Richard Thurston

Format:Hardcover

While Lynda Obst certainly knows her way around Hollywood and has survived and even prospered in an arena where megalomaniacs, narcissists and pathological liars abound and indeed make the rules, her book is most useful in describing why good business makes for lousy art. Obst again proves the observation that 'Hollywood is high school with money'.
Ambitious and driven (and obviously intelligent) though Obst may be, the deal-making she painstakingly describes is the art form, the pictures themselves mere adjuncts.

Shopping witless scripts to a tiny group of hugely overpaid stars and directors insures a steady stream of 'product' and little beyond the most common entertainment and certainly rarely anything approaching art. Sheer persistence overcomes all. A project moves forward only when the right people are 'attached'. Risky, personal pictures do not fit into this equation and subsequently rarely get produced. Instead the motion picture audience receives a steady stream of generic diversions, soulless to the extreme, dull, predictable and adolescent, near perfect reflections of their creators.

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Industry knowledge minus self knowledge equals this book. July 11, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

As this book proves, Linda Obst is obviously intelligent and well-educated. She must have gotten A's on all of her term papers in school. Yet her technical skills as a writer expose her complete lack of emotional depth and put "Hello, He Lied" right up there with "The Kid Stays in the Picture" as two of the most self-serving autobiographical whine-a-thons ever written. At least Robert Evans had some interesting war stories to tell. Obst droning on about "One Fine Day" just gets tedious. This book also bears a strong resemblance to "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," in that Obst lets her confessional veer into vagueness whenever details might cast her performance as a producer (or human being) in a bad light. This book's primary function seems to be to deflect blame. Most of the stories here have been told before, the ones that haven't aren't all that interesting and, as other reviewers have mentioned, there are better books on producing out there. Pass.

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars It's enough to make you retch May 20, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Under the guise of writing an insider's guide to Hollywood, Lynda Obst has written a self-serving book that illuminates nothing so much as her own ego.

Obst, producer of such drek as "Bad Girls" and "One Fine Day", purports to give us an insider's glimpse of a producer's life. But everything is filtered in such a way to display herself in the best possible light, rendering the rest of what she has to say of questionable value.

For example, whenever Obst describes firing somebody, an inevitable occurrence for a producer, she will shift responsibility onto that person, saying "So-and-so had to be let go because he wasn't lighting the picture properly". (I'm sure So-and-So thought he was doing just fine!) She can't take responsibility by saying "I fired So-and-So because I thought he was doing a lousy job"

As a producer who has never produced an exceptional picture, never ventured off the well-trod path, Obst, whose sole criteria is expediency, can't even begin to conceive of the courage of a Saul Zaentz, who could tell Twentieth Century Fox to take a flying leap rather than cast Demi Moore in "The English Patient". Zaentz's courage forced him to close down production - and won him an Oscar!

When Obst whines about how women are mistreated in Hollywood, it's important to remember that whereas it is true that women in general have historically been mistreated, Obst herself enjoyed preferential treatment owing to the connections of her (much older) literary-agent husband. Many an aspiring player would kill to receive the kind of access that she enjoyed owing to her connection.

For a far better book on what it's like to be a working producer, read Art Linson's "A Pound of Flesh"