Paula Weinstein, a film producer, studio government and political activist who turned a fierce advocate for girls in her trade, died on Monday at her residence in Manhattan. She was 78.
Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the demise. She mentioned the trigger was not but recognized.
Within the boy’s membership of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the uncommon feminine high government: Over her lengthy profession, she was president of United Artists, a vp of Warner Bros. and an government vp at twentieth Century Fox. She was simply 33 when she was employed at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vp a yr later, The Los Angeles Occasions referred to as her “the highest-ranking lady within the movement image trade.”
“A person will be mediocre in virtually every little thing, however a girls’s received to be excellent,” she advised Life journal that yr, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Younger Tycoons.”
However Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues mentioned possessed a depraved humorousness — her sister described her snort 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 guide and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a cellphone interview: “Not like 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 in search of good P.R. or a profession enhance. 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 stay 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 films and tv collection utilizing blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly advised her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “In the event you consider in one thing, it’s a must to be prepared to rise up off your ass and do one thing, and in case you don’t rise up off your ass, you actually didn’t consider 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 individual I ever requested for cash as an activist,” Ms. Fonda mentioned in an electronic mail. “It was to open the G.I. workplace in D.C. in 1970, the place considerations going through troopers might be dropped at Congress. She gave me $2,000 — astonishing in 1970. Some years later, Hannah referred to as me to ask if I might assist her daughter, Paula, who had simply graduated from Columbia College, get a job in Hollywood. She mentioned I ‘owed her one.’”
The 2 girls then met for lunch at a Hamburger Hamlet in Los Angeles and had been immediately smitten with one another. They had been of like thoughts, each having been concerned within the antiwar protests of the Nineteen Sixties, and each with arrests beneath their belts — Ms. Weinstein’s for participating in a protest at Columbia. Quickly after, Ms. Weinstein turned Ms. Fonda’s agent, serving to her get the position of Lillian Hellman in “Julia” (1977), based mostly on Ms. Hellman’s ebook “Pentimento.”
“It helped that Lillian was Paula’s godmother,” Ms. Fonda mentioned.
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. Extra not too long ago, she reunited with Ms. Fonda and Ms. Tomlin as an government producer of the long-running Netflix collection “Grace and Frankie.”
Ms. Weinstein produced greater than 30 movies, together with “The Excellent 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 Ladies’s Political Committee, a fund-raising powerhouse for liberal candidates and causes from 1984 to the late Nineteen Nineties.
Together with her husband, Mark Rosenberg, whom she met after they had been each members of the nationwide activist group College students for a Democratic Society, Ms. Weinstein made quite a few movies, together with “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), with Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer, and “Fearless” (1993), additionally starring Jeff Bridges. Additionally they 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 fashioned — 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 Courtroom case that determined the election in George W. Bush’s favor.
“Paula knew tips on how to marry the industrial with the political,” mentioned Lucy Fisher, the veteran producer and former vice chair of Sony Photos, who thought-about Ms. Weinstein a mentor, “however not in a medicinal approach. She invented the format that turned 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, often known as Pete, after they had been employed as speechwriters for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. On 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.
Along with 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 Movie Competition 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 deal with political work.
“I don’t need to sit on the sidelines and rail about every little thing. I actually need to soar in, absolutely, into the campaigns. Each statewide and nationwide campaigns,” she advised Deadline journal after her departure. “It simply feels very very like a second … between the local weather, and ebook banning and every little thing else that I don’t want to enter.”
At Ms. Weinstein’s demise, tributes poured in from her colleagues and associates, together with from Debora Cahn, a author and producer.
“Paula was a drive of nature,” Ms. Cahn wrote. “She taught me a lot about so many issues. Easy methods to get up and be the factor. Stand in entrance. Discuss loud. Be outraged and completely happy.”