EGN NEWS DESK
Paula Weinstein, a film producer, studio government and political activist who grew to become a fierce advocate for ladies in her business, died on Monday at her dwelling in Manhattan. She was 78.
Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the dying. She stated the trigger was not but recognized.
In the boy’s membership of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the uncommon feminine prime government: Over her lengthy profession, she was president of United Artists, a vice chairman of Warner Bros. and an government vice chairman at twentieth Century Fox. She was simply 33 when she was employed at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vice chairman a yr later, The Los Angeles Times known as her “the highest-ranking girl within the movement image business.”
“A person might be mediocre in nearly all the things, however a ladies’s acquired to be good,” she instructed Life journal that yr, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Young Tycoons.”
But Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues stated possessed a depraved humorousness — her sister described her giggle as an infectious cackle — and a steely dedication to social justice, was uncommon in Hollywood past her gender. As Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations advisor and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a telephone interview: “Unlike so many, she didn’t play at politics. To her, social and political change was paramount. She was the antithesis of a phony Hollywood activist searching for good P.R. or a profession increase. She was distinctive in a sea of pretenders.”
Activism was the household enterprise: Her mom, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 took her three younger daughters to reside in Paris after which London, fleeing the grim and punitive politics of the nation’s McCarthy period. In Britain, the place the household lived for greater than a decade, Hannah Weinstein produced motion pictures and tv sequence utilizing blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly instructed her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “If you imagine in one thing, you must be prepared to rise up off your ass and do one thing, and if you happen to don’t rise up off your ass, you actually didn’t imagine in it.”
“She was a frightening position mannequin,” Lisa Weinstein added.
It was Hannah who steered Paula into the film enterprise, by the use of Jane Fonda.
“Hannah was the primary particular person I ever requested for cash as an activist,” Ms. Fonda stated in an e-mail. “It was to open the G.I. workplace in D.C. in 1970, the place issues going through troopers might be dropped at Congress. She gave me $2,000 — astonishing in 1970. Some years later, Hannah known as me to ask if I may assist her daughter, Paula, who had simply graduated from Columbia University, get a job in Hollywood. She stated I ‘owed her one.’”
The two ladies then met for lunch at a Hamburger Hamlet in Los Angeles and have been immediately smitten with one another. They have been of like thoughts, each having been concerned within the antiwar protests of the Nineteen Sixties, and each with arrests underneath their belts — Ms. Weinstein’s for collaborating in a protest at Columbia. Soon after, Ms. Weinstein grew to become Ms. Fonda’s agent, serving to her get the position of Lillian Hellman in “Julia” (1977), based mostly on Ms. Hellman’s guide “Pentimento.”
“It helped that Lillian was Paula’s godmother,” Ms. Fonda stated.
Her subsequent job was at Fox, the place she oversaw the manufacturing of “9 to five” (1980), the hit comedy starring Ms. Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as workplace staff who revolt in opposition to their sexist employer. More just lately, she reunited with Ms. Fonda and Ms. Tomlin as an government producer of the long-running Netflix sequence “Grace and Frankie.”
Ms. Weinstein produced greater than 30 movies, together with “The Perfect Storm” (2000), starring George Clooney as a Massachusetts fishing boat captain — and co-starring an epic nor’easter — in addition to the comedy “Analyze This” (1999) and its sequel, “Analyze That” (2002), with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. She was additionally a founder, with Ms. Fonda, Barbra Streisand and others, of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, a fund-raising powerhouse for liberal candidates and causes from 1984 to the late Nineteen Nineties.
With her husband, Mark Rosenberg, whom she met after they have been each members of the nationwide activist group Students for a Democratic Society, Ms. Weinstein made numerous movies, together with “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), with Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer, and “Fearless” (1993), additionally starring Jeff Bridges. They additionally made “Citizen Cohn” (1992), an HBO film about Roy Cohn, the lawyer and fixer for Senator Joseph McCarthy — a subject near Ms. Weinstein’s coronary heart, given her upbringing. Their last manufacturing collectively was “Flesh and Bone” (1993); Mr. Rosenberg died of coronary heart failure at age 44 whereas engaged on the set of that movie.
Ms. Weinstein continued to make movies for Spring Creek Productions, the corporate she and her husband had shaped — notably one other HBO movie, “Recount” (2008), a political thriller based mostly on the hairline end of the 2000 presidential election and Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that determined the election in George W. Bush’s favor.
“Paula knew how you can marry the business with the political,” stated Lucy Fisher, the veteran producer and former vice chair of Sony Pictures, who thought-about Ms. Weinstein a mentor, “however not in a medicinal method. She invented the format that grew to become HBO’s imprimatur, the high-quality however gossipy-behind-the-scenes drama.”
Paula Weinstein was born on Nov. 19, 1945, in Manhattan, the youngest of three daughters. Her mom, Hannah (Dorner) Weinstein, met her father, Isidore Weinstein, referred to as Pete, after they have been employed as speechwriters for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. At the time, Hannah was a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune and Pete was a reporter for The Brooklyn Eagle.
The couple had separated by 1950, and Hannah subsequently left the nation along with her daughters. They returned to the U.S. in 1962, and Paula enrolled in Columbia quickly after.
In addition to her sister Lisa, Ms. Weinstein is survived by one other sister, Dina, and her daughter, Hannah Rosenberg.
Since 2013, Ms. Weinstein had been chief content material officer for Tribeca Enterprises, which incorporates the Tribeca Film Festival and Tribeca Studios, the place she developed branded content material and ran mentorship packages for rising writers and administrators. She left Tribeca final fall to give attention to political work.
“I don’t wish to sit on the sidelines and rail about all the things. I actually wish to leap in, totally, into the campaigns. Both statewide and nationwide campaigns,” she instructed Deadline journal after her departure. “It simply feels very very similar to a second … between the local weather, and guide banning and all the things else that I don’t want to enter.”
At Ms. Weinstein’s dying, tributes poured in from her colleagues and buddies, together with from Debora Cahn, a author and producer.
“Paula was a pressure of nature,” Ms. Cahn wrote. “She taught me a lot about so many issues. How to face up and be the factor. Stand in entrance. Talk loud. Be outraged and glad.”
