Hello, He Lied And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches [Paperback]

"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.  InHello, 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 ofSleepless in Seattle,and into the heated negotiations forThe Hot Zoneand reveals what she's learned in more than twenty years in the business: how to swim with the sharks--and not get eaten.Lynda Obst is the head of Lynda Obst Productions.  She has produced some of today's biggest movies,  includingThe Fisher King, Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day,andContact.  She lives in Los Angeles and Texas.A friend of mine once described me as a Polish producer, because I was the only producer she knew who wrote for extra money.  Over the course of writing this book I discovered that I also write for extra career options, extra outlets for my frustrations, and extra work: What would I otherwise do on Sundays or on planes?  Relax?  But it was only after it was completed, over the course of three years of excruciatingly frustrating work, that I realized why I had felt so compelled to write it: Through it I refound the joy of producing, and remembered the reasons I had started producing at all.

I have a kind of hybrid world view: I ended up in Hollywood accidentally, so I arrived with a reporter's eye and an anthropologist's distance.  Slowly, inevitably, I've gone native.  Fifteen years of day-to-day exposure turns anthropology into sociologló˜