According to people who are supposed to know about these things, the most powerful woman in Hollywood is not Julia Roberts or Nicole Kidman or even the unstoppable Oprah Winfrey.
It is the blonde woman in the baggy white top and jeans sitting in front of me chewing on a lump of cheese in the vast white office once occupied by the ruthless movie mogul, Louis B. Mayer.
This is Amy Pascal, the chair of motion pictures at Sony, one of the world’s largest film studios and now, thanks in large part to Pascal, one of the most lucrative as well.
The office suite is the size of a tennis court, with a large fireplace on one side. The view is unremarkable: a sprawl of sound stages and low-rise buildings in suburban Los Angeles. But the room exudes power.
Its current occupant may not look like an archetypal Hollywood mogul, but at 47 Pascal is running one of the few glittering stars in the troubled Sony galaxy.
While the corporation’s consumer electronics business is barely profitable and its music operations battle endemic piracy, Pascal’s team has delivered more than $1bn in ticket sales for three consecutive years.
And when the company announces its full-year results on Wednesday, analysts predict that the film business’s profits will have risen by an impressive 40 per cent to Y50bn - almost half the corporation’s expected Y110bn operating profit.
Pascal has always had a talent for picking hits. Groundhog Day, A League of Their Own, Men in Black II and Charlie’s Angels are all films she has made or overseen in her two decades in the industry.
But much of her recent success has been due to her decision to make the 2002 blockbuster Spider-Man and its 2004 sequel, Spider-Man 2 - one of the most successful film franchises since Star Wars.
So how does she do it?
Picking at the sparse Hollywood brunch of fruit, cheese and crackers that she has had delivered to her office for us, she is modest about her formula. “I will probably live to regret this, but putting together a slate of movies is really an opportunistic thing.
”As a company we make 20-24 movies a year that we hope will make money. You try to have four or five in summertime that you think will be big and will be as entertainment-oriented as you can. You have four or five movies in November and December that are more family friendly. One of them will be more Oscar-oriented and adult, and you fill in the blanks for the rest of the year. That’s pretty much the deal.
”And then smart journalists ask you about the theory. It’s all crap. What you do is make movies that will make money.”
Pascal, who speaks with a slight lisp, rummages her mop of unruly hair and tucks her legs beneath her in the armchair. She smiles disarmingly, as if to say “simple”. As she admits though, for Sony it has often been difficult.
”There was a long period of time when the company was, out of six studios, seventh. Sony said ‘keep going’ and when things started to get better they said the same thing.”
The daughter of an economist father and librarian mother, Pascal worked her way up from small independent studios to the executive suite, first at Columbia, then Turner Pictures, then back at Columbia, which by then had been acquired by Sony.
In that time, she has seen audiences become much more discerning. Yesterday’s cinema-goers today face a huge array of entertainment outlets, from PlayStations to iPods, which means they can never be taken for granted, says Pascal.
”We didn’t treat Spider-Man like a comic book, even though the graphic novel is a great part of American pop culture,” she says. “When people are kind of winking at the audience, that’s a danger. Any time people aren’t taking what they do seriously it doesn’t work.”
Pausing to sip an espresso, Pascal admits that some movies have been made on the wrong scale. In a statement that could have come from Louis B. Mayer, she says: “Movies tell you what size they should be. Stars tell you how big they should be. After you’ve done this for a certain amount of time you should have a feel for it.”
Mayer himself “got a feel” for his stars on the casting couch that used to sit in a part of Pascal’s office that she has now turned into a miniature conservatory filled with exotic plants and the occasional hummingbird.
While Mayer was notoriously intimate with his stars, Pascal is far more businesslike. She was single until her late 30s, then married The New York Times’s Hollywood reporter, Bernard Weinraub. (This proved complicated: amid mutterings of conflicts of interest, Weinraub stopped reporting on the film industry.)
For all her commercial success, she does not identify herself as one of the Sony “grey suits” who fret about margins and return on investment. Instead, she panics.
”When you have greenlit something for the wrong reasons you want to die. You want to get into bed, pull the covers over your head and pray to God that someone else saves it,” she says.
Ignoring most of the fruit laid out for her, she says: “To me it’s about movies. I’m a movie guy. You’re driving to the first preview and saying to yourself ‘This is going to be a catastrophe.’ I always think it’s going to be a catastrophe in my craziness. It’s the normal Hollywood thing.”
Nobody else at the studio seems to think Pascal is crazy. Earlier in the day, a studio guide assigned to showing me around the film lot before brunch identified Pascal as one of the studio’s stars, and listed all the hit films and television shows she had produced.
When we walked through a mocked-up police station - part of the set for Joan of Arcadia, the prime-time television show - I noticed a dog-eared police file, sitting on a desk, in which someone had scribbled: “Hollywood Priorities: 1. Kiss ass. 2. Kiss more ass. 3. Go to parties.”
Pascal does not play by those rules, either in dealings with other industry leaders, such as John Calley, the former Sony Pictures boss and her predecessor in the Mayer suite, or with recently arrived Sony executives.
But she admits: “Hollywood’s in a funny place. It’s always been isolated from reality. But it’s going through a transition. It used to be a small town and the people who used to run Hollywood were really big personalities. The people who run Hollywood now are business people who are not such big personalities. It’s changing the face of Hollywood.”
Sony itself is a big part of that change, recently negotiating a $4.8bn takeover of Mayer’s old studio, MGM. Inside Sony Pictures, the power structure was overhauled a little over a year ago when Michael Lynton, formerly head of AOL’s European arm, was appointed chairman and chief executive of the film division. Pascal wasn’t pleased. She had previously shared power with other senior executives, each boasting the title co-chairman.
On paper, Lynton would appear to be her boss but Pascal made it clear she would answer only to Sony’s newly appointed chairman and chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer.
”I was mortified and pissed,” she says candidly. “But it was overdue. The previous power-sharing partnership was just silly and not practical.”
So how does the new arrangement work? This is sensitive territory. Pascal leans forward. “We were put together in a shotgun marriage that Howard Stringer arranged, with me running the movie company and Michael running the corporate. I was pissed at the start. But now we’re partners and I love it. He’s my greatest friend, but I don’t report to him.”
So while Lynton works the numbers - planning the integration of MGM and driving savings from the business - Pascal focuses on the production slate. Shooting begins this summer on The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks, and Spider-Man 3 is under way, with a fourth instalment at the scriptwriters. She makes no apology about sequels, rejecting suggestions that studios have run out of ideas. As long as the script works, Pascal says the film should too. But she is wary of classic remakes, in spite of a strong temptation when Sony and its partners gain control of MGM’s large film library: “There is a danger of trying to remake something that you cannot ever do better.”
That nod to the past reflects Pascal’s own film tastes. In spite of her passion for the 21st-century imagery of Spider-Man, she does not rate any film produced after 1975 among her 10 favourites - which include Last Tango In Paris, All About Eve and Shampoo.
Since then, the industry has been transformed both by changing distribution technology and international demand. “It’s no longer domestic versus international, it’s just the world. You absolutely cannot make money on a movie that only works domestically.”
In her direct manner, Pascal takes another cheese cube and adds simply: “You read a script and say, ‘This could make money.’ You just make movies you like. You think I don’t?”
Tim Burt is the FT’s media editor.
Louis B. Mayer Suite, Sony Pictures, Culver City
cheese cubes
crackers
blackberries, strawberries, melon, papaya and mango
1 x grand espresso
1 x large filter coffee
2 x Evian water
Gratis
