Julia Phillips, producer of "Taxi Driver" and other films, dies
Bat Child (Sue M.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/03/obituaries/03PHIL.html
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January 3, 2002
Julia Phillips, 57, Producer Who Assailed Hollywood, Dies
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
OS ANGELES, Jan. 2--Julia Phillips, the Hollywood producer who turned
her rage at the stars and power brokers into the best-selling
chronicle "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," died Tuesday at
her apartment in West Hollywood. She was 57.
The cause was cancer, her daughter, Kate Phillips, said.
Julia Phillips was a producer of classics including "Taxi Driver" and
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The 1973 film "The Sting," which
she produced with her husband at the time, Michael Phillips, and Tony
Bill, won seven Academy Awards, including best picture. She was the
first woman to produce a film that won the best-picture Oscar.
But Ms. Phillips's film career was dwarfed by her angry 1991 book
about Hollywood and what Ms. Phillips viewed as the mendacity,
selfishness, greed and hypocrisy of the town. She skewered numerous
famous people, including Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Warren Beatty
and Goldie Hawn. One producer described the book as "the longest
suicide note in history."
But Ms. Phillips was far more brutal about herself than about any of
the people she scorned. She detailed her descent into drugs, which
almost killed her. She wrote that on Oscar night for "The Sting" in
1974, she took "a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, six
halves of Valium, which make three, and a glass and a half of wine."
The index listing of her name at the end of her book seemed to sum up
her personal life: "depressions of . . . drug wanderings of . . .
pregnancies of . . . loneliness of . . . suicidal behavior of . . ."
As Ms. Phillips said in an interview several days before she died: "I
knew that if this book was going to be commercially viable, I would
have to spill my guts. I knew I would have to be as honest as possible
about myself as I was about all the others."
To critics who termed the book cruel, she replied: "We all have our
standards. People behaved in an ugly and despicable fashion towards
me. I felt no constraints." She added, "Nothing I did in my book is as
mean as any of the people I wrote about."
Ms. Phillips was feisty, funny and blunt, and never stopped loving the
movies. In the days before she died, she sat in her apartment
overlooking Los Angeles and talked about them; she asked friends to
bring her a tape of "Ocean's Eleven" because she adored George
Clooney.
"I couldn't have made it today in the movies," she said at one point.
"In the 70's people were making some great films. Look what they're
making now."
In the last decade, Ms. Phillips struggled in vain to write another
best seller. In 1995 she wrote "Driving Under the Affluence," a
sometimes surreal personal examination of her problems with the
Internal Revenue Service, the 1992 Los Angeles riots and 1994
earthquake, the impact of AIDS and the death of her father. In 2000
she helped Matt Drudge, the internet commentator, write his book
"Drudge Manifesto."
In recent years, Ms. Phillips, who was constantly battling financial
problems, said she had considered trying to return to the movies. But
her few meetings with younger executives left her despondent. "Did I
really want to be patronized once more as a woman?" she said recently.
"Did I really want to be told what a major motion picture was?"
Ms. Phillips was born in New York City on April 7, 1944. Her father,
Adolph Miller, was a chemical engineer. Her mother, Tanya, was, in Ms.
Phillips's words, a difficult and depressive woman who drove her
daughter to intellectual pursuits.
Ms. Phillips grew up in Brooklyn; Great Neck, N.Y.; and Milwaukee and
attended Mount Holyoke, where she won awards for creative writing.
She married Michael Phillips, a Dartmouth graduate, shortly after
their graduations. Mr. Phillips became an investment banker and
producer. They were divorced months after "The Sting" won its Oscars.
Ms. Phillips worked at Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's and then
became a story editor in the New York offices of Paramount Pictures.
Her career started moving quickly when she was hired to find material
for Barbra Streisand, among other jobs. Ms. Phillips helped get the
rights to "Yentl" years before it was made.
In her mid-20's Ms. Phillips and her husband met the actor-producer
Tony Bill, and the three optioned "The Sting" and "Steelyard Blues,"
which became a film starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland and was
made with the support of Richard Zanuck and David Brown.
The Phillipses moved to Los Angeles and soon became the nucleus of a
group of young, dynamic filmmakers who were, essentially, taking over
Hollywood in the 1970's, a time when the studio system was crumbling.
Their friends included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert De
Niro, John Milius, Paul Schrader and others. It was also a time when
drugs proliferated in Hollywood.
The high point of her career was Oscar night in 1974. Upon being
handed the Academy Award for best picture by Elizabeth Taylor, Ms.
Phillips said, "You can't imagine what a trip it is for a nice Jewish
girl from Great Neck to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor
in the same night."
The breakup of her marriage, drugs and a series of sour relationships
with men, along with being elbowed out of the power loop in the making
of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," pushed her over the edge. At
one point, after a 30-day rehabilitation stay at the Mayo Clinic, Ms.
Phillips said she had spent more than $120,000 on cocaine. By the
early 1980's, Ms. Phillips said, she had turned her back on drugs with
the help of various therapies.
Ms. Phillips recalled that she began writing her book because she was
running out of money and felt a deep grievance against many in
Hollywood. The book took several years to write and 14 months for
Random House lawyers to clear.
Its publication turned her into an outcast among many of the Hollywood
elite.
"At first it bothered me because I really didn't expect that kind of
reaction," she said. "I thought people had a sense of humor. I really
did.
"Understand, I wasn't a pariah because I was a drug-addicted,
alcoholic, rotten person and not a good mother," she said. "I was a
pariah because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered
them as contemptible as they truly are."
The book was criticized because Ms. Phillips recalled conversations
from years before without the benefit of notes; she replied that she
had a photographic memory. A harsher criticism was that the book
discussed physical flaws of numerous people. Ms. Phillips said later
that she had only one regret: referring to one woman as "a city of
flesh."
In later years, Ms. Phillips said, she sometimes went to restaurants
and accidentally met some of the people she had written about. She
said they were polite, even friendly.
Ms. Phillips is survived by her daughter, of Los Angeles; her brother,
Matthew Miller of Weston, Conn.; and her son-in-law, Modi Wiczyk of
Los Angeles.
Her first book led Morton's, a popular movie industry hangout, to tell
Ms. Phillips that she was unwelcome. But the restaurant soon rescinded
its ban. Shortly before she died, Ms. Phillips recalled with a laugh
that she had her daughter's 1999 wedding- rehearsal dinner at--where
else?--Morton's. "They had no problem taking my money," she said.
"That's Hollywood."
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