Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.
Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.
Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.
As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.
She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).
After spending much of the 1970s in the New York journalism world, including as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Obst moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to work for a production company, Casablanca.
Her first success came when a writer she knew, Thomas Hedley, pitched her the idea for “Flashdance” (1983). The movie was a surprise hit, but she was relegated to a meager associate producer credit, below the names of more established men who came into the process later.
It was an early lesson in the gender politics of Hollywood, something she was determined to change.
In 1986 she and a friend, Debra Hill, formed Hill/Obst Productions, which made a string of critically and financially successful movies, including “Adventures in Babysitting” (1987), “Heartbreak Hotel” (1988) and “The Fisher King” (1991).
After she and Ms. Hill parted ways in the early 1990s, Ms. Obst continued to work as a producer, both for studios and independently. Her other films included “Bad Girls” (1994), “One Fine Day” (1996) and “The Invention of Lying” (2009).
She also produced a number of more recent television shows, including “The Hot Zone” (2019), “Good Girls Revolt” (2015) and “Hot in Cleveland” (2010).
“In some strange way it’s a real meritocracy now,” she told The New York Times in 1996. “If you happen to fall on a great script and it happens to get made, you can make a quantum leap, gender unbiased, in your career.”
Ms. Obst became known for engaging audiences, male as well as female, with smart comedies and dramas. Films like that blossomed in the late 1980s and ’90s but began to suffer by the 2000s, as the economics of American filmmaking was upended by the shift to on-demand viewing and the explosive growth in international markets.
She used her background in journalism to document and criticize such changes, both in interviews and in articles for decidedly non-Hollywood publications like New York, Rolling Stone and Slate.
“The kinds of movies that they like abroad are movies with huge special effects, movies with gigantic explosions,” she told NPR in 2013. “Women’s movies — that is, romantic comedies, dramas — they don’t play well overseas.”
Ms. Obst wrote two well-received books about the film industry: “Hello, He Lied: And Other Tales From the Hollywood Trenches” (1996) and “Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business” (2013).
Though her books were rooted in her personal experiences and challenges as a woman in Hollywood, critics praised them for abjuring gossip in favor of a sociological dissection of how the industry does — and doesn’t — work.
Her second book in particular lamented how studios had shifted to what she called “the new abnormal,” in which big-budget, big-action films — “tent poles” — dominated the industry, and as a result the sort of movies she once specialized in were shoved aside.
“We producers fight for the precious diminishing space you could justifiably call the ‘in-between,’” she wrote. “So the question is, with all these tent poles, franchises, reboots and sequels, is there still room for movies in the movie business?”
Lynda Rosen was born on April 14, 1950, in Harrison, N.Y., a northern suburb of New York City, and grew up there. Her father, Robert, was in the garment business, and her mother, Claire (Shenker) Rosen, was a teacher.
All three of the Rosen children went into entertainment: Rick was a founder of the Endeavor Talent Agency and is now the head of the TV division at its successor, WME, and Lynda’s other brother, Michael, was a TV producer.
Both of Ms. Obst’s brothers survive her, as do her son, Oliver Obst, a manager and producer at 3 Arts Entertainment, and two granddaughters.
She graduated with a degree in philosophy from Pomona College in 1972 and began graduate school in the same subject at Columbia. But she left to edit a book for Random House, “The Rolling Stone History of the Sixties” (1978).
When Simon & Schuster hired her husband, David Obst, to start a production company in Los Angeles, the couple relocated to California, and Ms. Obst decided to follow his lead into film. The marriage ended in divorce.
In 1993, in need of an escape from the pressure chamber of Hollywood, Ms. Obst bought a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, about 80 miles west of Austin. With its awe-inspiring views, it became her happy place.
“No special-effects house can beat our own: In the distance I hear rolling thunder. As if etched with Zorro’s sword, the sky is streaked with lightning,” she wrote in The Times in 1997. “And the sight of the bluebonnets — now that’s the most thrilling spring release to me.”
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