POWER PACK : Female Reps of Female Superstars Have the Clout

In the beginning, Susan Merzbach would drag Sally Field to meetings. At movie studios, at talent agencies, in New York, in Los Angeles. The idea was to establish authority. Susan’s, not Sally’s. So she would get up in front of everybody and say, “Here I am, here is Sally and these are the kinds of movies we love to do.”

At one such meeting, to which Merzbach refers with a name too impolite to print, there was an “unfortunate incident.” She won’t say where it was or who was there. But she remembers exactly what was said.

“We asked what these people had for us and someone piped up and said, ‘I want to make an image statement with Sally. Something knockout. Something shocking. Let’s put a magnum in her hand.’ ”

“Why, yes,” answered Merzbach, her voice frosty with phony enthusiasm. “Let’s do it with a crotch holster.”

The meeting was adjourned.

Susan Merzbach may not be famous, but the chief executives in Hollywood know her name. As the friend and film-making partner of Sally Field, she’s one of a handful of women, studio veterans all, who have detoured corporate sexism to run independent movie companies with Hollywood’s most bankable actresses.

With jobs that guarantee more power, less pressure and a higher profile than their counterparts in studio positions, these women now shun the kinds of beach party and bathroom humor movies demanded by movie-goer demographics. Their goal is to collaborate with the industry’s top writers, actors and directors on what they perceive to be quality movies for Field, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Jessica Lange, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. Along the way, they are bringing a new style to making films and they are likely to have a significant impact on the kinds of images we see at the movies.

Three of these women never went to college; four come from New York. One of them used to design costumes for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. One once edited a book about Mae West. They are all smart; they are all confident. And they are helping themselves to the power and prestige once reserved for an elite, male club.

Publicly magnanimous about sharing their turf, the fellows usually call them ladies, often in a less than admiring tone. One male studio executive referred to one of the women as “a piece of manpower.” A male writer who’s been in the business 10 years says: “Some of us aren’t comfortable with women having power. It’s the same way a man would feel getting stopped by a female cop.”

Producer Jerry Weintraub, whose company has three women in top executive posts and five in middle management, detects “reverse prejudice” in the partnerships: “I would like to see men in those positions as well,” he says. “I think it’s kind of strange that all these women stars all have women.”

“Basically, these women rule the world,” says one writer, requesting anonymity. “They have the ears of the hottest actresses. If they tell their person to make a movie about people without legs it changes the lives of people without legs all over America. They can tell Goldie to support the homeless or Sally to make a movie about Polish Jews. They initiate the stuff that washes across the nation.”

But even the attachment of any of these top stars to a project will not guarantee its unobstructed passage from idea to film. The women behind the stars have their calls returned. They have choice parking spaces. They are invited without hesitation to meet with studio heads. They have nearly unlimited access to creative talent and studio management, and enjoy the kind of freedom--and salary--usually reserved for independent producers (none of the women would reveal her salary except to say, in one case, that “the money is great” and, in another, “it’s at least as much as I would make at the studio”).

But the absolute power in the movie industry--the power to say yes to a movie and its price--still eludes these women. They’ve come about as close as one can get, especially if one is a woman, “but ultimately the studio is in control,” says Jessica Lange.

In 1972, Susan Merzbach left her job in the accounting department at Bullock’s to become a file clerk in the story department at MGM, thinking more about the possibility of being an actress than an executive: “Then I discovered, miracle of miracles, that some person could be paid what to me was an enormous sum of money to lie on their tush and read all day long.” She became a reader.

Three years later, a former actress, model and mathematics teacher named Sherry Lansing took over the department and became Merzbach’s mentor, allowing her to sit in on her meetings and calls. “She is my history,” says Merzbach. “I learned by osmosis and observation. She is directly responsible for me getting my foot in the executive door.”

When Lansing went to Columbia in 1978 as a production v.p., Merzbach went along as executive story editor. The pair moved to 20th Century Fox two years later, Lansing as president of production (the first woman to run production at a major studio), Merzbach as v.p. creative affairs. When Lansing set up a production company with Stanley Jaffe, Merzbach joined them as production v.p.

Two years ago, Merzbach decided that it was “time to cut the umbilical cord.”

Now she is the president of Fogwood; her passion is tracking down and developing movies that will star Field.

“If we sat here and waited for the proper thing to come in, Sally would make her next movie in 1999. Her tastes are for things she can sink her teeth into as an actress. Those aren’t easy movies to get made.”

Fogwood is more likely to develop ideas and assign them to favorite screenwriters or scout out material than to option submitted screenplays. “We usually lie around on the floor and laugh and tell intimate stories about our lives,” says Field. They keep an “idea book” for anything that comes up in the creative process, which Merzbach says can get “a little rowdy and a little raucous and four-lettery.”

The pair also meet with writers and directors, read rewrites, scripts in development and go over new books or scripts they’ve come across or their readers have recommended. Or they have “hooky days,” as Field calls them, when they have the secretary tell everyone they’re in conference--while they actually go shopping.

“It (playing) really is important in development,” insists Field. “All that time that seems to be play time, it’s really conversation about stories we’re working on or ideas or notions (for films). Even though it looks like we’re shopping.”

The collaboration began nearly two years ago. Field has just finished shooting “Punchline,” a comedy from writer-director David Seltzer about the hard road to success for two stand-up comedians (Fields and Tom Hanks). In various stages of planning are three other films, an HBO drama showcase segment and, says Merzbach, “a slew of things in between.”

Of all the actresses with women partners, only Field says she never considered a man for the job. “I just feel more comfortable working with another woman,” she says by way of an apology. “It’s just so intimate.”

Jane Fonda, who started her first company with a male partner (Bruce Gilbert), says: “I was looking for someone who wouldn’t be in competition with me, who wouldn’t feel threatened by me the way some men might be. . . . It’s more cozy.”

Over at All Girl Productions, they are blunt. Bonnie Bruckheimer-Martell and Margaret Jennings South work with Bette Midler. Says the star, there is one “honorary girl,” who is a male story editor, and that’s it. Says Bruckheimer-Martell, who has been Midler’s friend and manager for eight years, “Women working together work. Men who work together might be close, but I don’t think they have the same kind of relationship, that caring feeling towards each other.”

The women feel their collaboration is more a matter of historic coincidence than a feminist statement; a natural gravitation of women to women. Beyond that, it’s sheer chemistry.

“Within 10 minutes I felt this was going to work,” Jane Fonda says of partner Lois Bonfiglio. The actress interviewed 15 people for the job, 13 of them women.

“The decision basically comes down to intuition,” says Jessica Lange. “I realized right away speaking with (partner) Lynn (Arost) that she understood what I wanted, that we shared a common ideal.”

“Goldie called for lunch,” recalls Hawn’s partner, Anthea Sylbert. “We went to Mr. Chow’s. She said, ‘Why don’t we have a company?’ and I nearly leaped across the table to kiss her and say yes.”

A graduate of Barnard College and Otis/Parsons Art Institute, Sylbert disappointed her father, who had wanted her to do something masculine, and went into costume design, which he thought was “a lowly thing to do.” She worked on low-budget films in New York, met Roman Polanski on a trip to Europe, and accepted his offer to work on “Rosemary’s Baby.” She ended up in Hollywood designing costumes for films such as “Shampoo,” “Chinatown” and “Carnal Knowledge.” She made friends with and worked for people like directors Mike Nichols or Elaine May, actors Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.

“Then, at the very point where I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ I got a call from Warner Bros.”

Sylbert was invited to join the studio as a vice president and liaison between artists and management, and in 1979 left costume design behind. Three years later, she was wooed by United Artists to be a production v.p. at the height of the “Heaven’s Gate” debacle. She went and became “the closest of friends” with then-production president Paula Weinstein. “We were having the greatest time,” says Sylbert, until Freddie Fields, as MGM movie production head, made his presence felt. “The meddling,” she says, “was unbearable.”

Hawn, a friend from “Shampoo” and “Private Benjamin,” called at the height of Sylbert’s alienation from Fields.

“Being a studio executive is a rather comfortable and cushy thing to do,” explains Sylbert, who had been senior production vice president at UA before she and Weinstein left in a huff. “The seduction of the salary, the car that’s paid for, the expense account, the amount of attention you get from everyone in town. . . . One can lose sight of the reason you came to do it in the first place, which was, I wanted to produce my own movies.”

Today, the Hawn-Sylbert Movie Co. has permanent offices and a production deal at Warners; they keep temporary offices at Raleigh Studios, across from Paramount, where Hawn and husband Kurt Russell are starring in “Overboard,” a movie about a woman’s bout of temporary amnesia that Sylbert is line-producing.

“Last Wish,” the next film Sylbert hopes to make with Hawn, started as nothing more than a vague sentiment shared by the women partners. “Goldie and I are close to our mothers and we wanted to do something serious,” says Sylbert. “I mentioned that notion to each of the agents I call regularly and one day I got a call from William Morris (the agency) about the Betty Rollins manuscript (about a woman helping her terminally ill mother commit suicide).”

Intrigued, Hawn and Sylbert met with Rollins a number of times, trying to extract a movie from the book. They later hired Mark Medoff to write the screenplay and kicked off a series of meetings with him that would continue until the movie was made. Meanwhile, Lee Grant was asked to direct. Eight other projects are also in development, all but one to star Hawn.

Sylbert is not only Hawn’s partner, she is her friend and adviser. And she stands between the actress--who spends much of her time away from Hollywood--and anyone who wants to pitch a movie idea.

“The first person that you’re going to have to convince that an idea is good for any one of these ladies is one of us,” says Sylbert, speaking without reservation for her peers. “It’s like appealing to a saint in order to get to the Virgin Mary.”

The rules are simple, adds Weinstein. “You would never send material to Barbra without talking to Cis (Corman). You would be nuts not to go to Susan or Lynn (Arost) if you wanted to get to Sally or Jessica. It’s the enthusiasm of these (executive) women that make a project go.”

What are they looking for? They’re vague. High concept is definitely low priority: One sentence rarely does justice to the stories they want. Merzbach, who read thousands of scripts during her years as a story editor, makes two fists and brings them in an emotional tug to her heart when asked to describe the material she wants for Field. “We do this a lot,” she says with the gesture.

All the women have to come up with material appropriate for actresses who are over 40, or approaching it (Lange is the youngest at 38). They’re under pressure to help their partners maintain star reputations. And they must share an actress’ vision of herself or help broaden it.

Lois Bonfiglio, for instance, believes that Jane Fonda is genuinely humorous: “She makes me laugh. She is a very warm, very human, very sort of malaprop person I have truly come to love. One of the first things I want her to do is share what I see (in her) with other people.

“The problem is that, because of people’s respect for Jane, because of their awareness of her commitment to the sort of material she does, they (writers) err on the side of ponderousness.”

One of the first projects that found its way to Bonfiglio’s desk: A biography of Margaret Mead. “Well meaning,” purrs Bonfiglio, by way of a cool dismissal. But she’s not looking for slapstick, either. A comedy project for Fonda “has to have a validity.” Ideal scripts “have to say something about life, have to have integrity.”

Since Bonfiglio joined Fonda just a year ago, the pair have initiated six projects, including a buddy comedy called “Flawless,” for which no buddy has yet been signed, and a movie based on the Carlos Fuentes novel “The Old Gringo.” Bonfiglio will produce the latter, an epic love story set in revolutionary Mexico that will star Fonda and two male leads. Argentine Luis Puenzo, who won a Foreign Language Oscar for “The Official Story,” will direct, if shooting begins as scheduled this fall in Mexico.

If Bonfiglio finds something to option or a writer to work on a script idea, like the other women, she approaches the studio with a price tag. Under the terms of a first-look deal, if the studio isn’t willing to back the project, Fonda Films can pitch it elsewhere.

Bonfiglio calls herself “just another smart Jewish girl.” She zipped through high school in the Bronx, steadily consuming books and films, skipped college and headed for Manhattan.

“I was impatient, smart, I had a big mouth and I looked old for my age,” she says. “There was a whole generation of us who just wanted to get out there and have a career.”

She typed. She did publicity. She did advertising. Then she veered into “the whole ‘60s gestalt,” working as an activist in the New York City schools. Along the way she married and divorced.

When she needed to work again to support her two sons, Bonfiglio moved into publishing and wound up heading for Hollywood by way of jobs in development and production with David Susskind, Lorimar Pictures, the Ladd Co. and then Tri-Star Pictures, reading thousands of scripts and books over the years.

Bonfiglio still meets with writers of ongoing projects, listens to pitches from new writers, lunches with agents, reads scripts and chases information about new material that she hears about--but at the same time she’s hiring a crew for “The Old Gringo,” interviewing designers, photographers, casting people, scouting locations, meeting with the studio about the budget. And then she has to drop everything when Luis Puenzo flies in from Argentina to work on the script.

Fonda is in on all the creative decisions, but trusts Bonfiglio with the legwork.

“She’s grown-up, she’s been through the wars . . . ,” says the actress. “There is a whole level of quite cynical, tough, young, upwardly mobile soon-to-be-studio executive types. They have no points-of-view yet . . . I wanted someone who was my equal.”

Says David Puttnam, chairman of Columbia Pictures, where Fonda Films has a production contract, “It never crosses my mind that I’m talking to one rather than the other. Lois is a very professional woman with nice taste and she doesn’t manifest the kind of insecurity that often comes with that kind of job.

“What you are seeing is the responsible use by actors of their power,” he says of the women as a group. “The success of these women depends enormously on the sensibility of the artist and the other way around. It is an interesting two-way track.”

Interesting and a little daunting. In Fonda’s case, says Bonfiglio, “she has built a career of such significance, she looks upon the sorts of things she does now as very meaningful. Each role is an extension of a body of work.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard for us to do some funky little thing,” she says. “It’s what makes the pressure on people like me great--constantly examining not only the substance of the material but the appropriateness for the person you’re working with.”

Ask Bruckheimer-Martell and Jennings South, women with a partner who made a recent space shot to movie stardom. Bette Midler didn’t even have a movie career when Bruckheimer-Martell, one-time assistant to Midler’s manager, Aaron Russo, met her during the shooting of “The Rose.” She took over from Russo when he and Midler split up in 1979--just in time for some of the most traumatic years of Midler’s life.

“I had days where I went to work and Bette cried all day, every day,” recalls Bruckheimer-Martell. “She didn’t get an offer from anyone, not one script arrived, not one call came.” Three years later, when Midler finally got work, it was “Jinxed,” a movie so fraught with acrimony that it caused her to have a nervous breakdown. It bombed. Miss M would not make another movie for three years.

Then came the triple play with Disney--”Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Ruthless People” and “Outrageous Fortune”--and All Girl Productions wound up with a production deal and offices at Mickey Avenue and Dopey Drive. All three women still seem to be in shock. And they still don’t have a film ready to go. (Midler’s next movie, “Big Business,” in which she teams with Lily Tomlin, isn’t theirs.)

“It just takes a long time because Bette has just done three hits,” says Bruckheimer-Martell. “Anything we come up with has to be worthy of her.”

So far, the company has 12 projects, most of them musicals, on its development list. The women are waiting for second drafts from writers on six of the 12 and just hired writers for five others. Only three of the projects are based on books; one came from a screenplay.

Their favorites include the biographies of torch singer Lotte Lenya and all-girl band leader Ina Ray Hutton. The first film they hope to produce, however, is a dramatic comedy based upon “Beaches,” a novel by Iris Rainer Dart about the relationship between two girls who are best friends.

“We love working with women,” declares Jennings, who joined All Girl after a stint working on the HBO “Maximum Security” series for Ron Howard’s production company, Major H.

A theater graduate of Ithaca College who wanted to be a painter and “write,” the youngest member of the All Girl trio was a reader for a small film company in New York and a story analyst for the soaps at ABC before coming West and starting as a secretary with Howard’s company.

Bruckheimer-Martell, who was star-struck as a child growing up in Brooklyn, started in the movie business as a secretary at Columbia in New York “without ever intending to be in the movie business.” In 1969, she moved to Los Angeles with then-husband Jerry Bruckheimer, who wanted to be a producer. (He has since co-produced “Flashdance,” “Beverly Hills Cop” I and II and “Top Gun” with partner Don Simpson). Before long, she was getting movie jobs, usually as liaison between production and talent.

When she met Midler, Bruckheimer-Martell, as assistant to Russo, knew nearly every aspect of the star’s business. She became Midler’s super pal Friday; a kind of pint-sized Rosalind Russell-type who organized tours, orchestrated business and publicity matters and, eventually, became movie partner.

“There are dozens and dozens of transactions that take place on a weekly basis here between Bette (and the studio),” says Disney studio motion picture chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Bonnie really manages our collective lives with one another.”

Says Midler, “When I was dead as a doornail, Bonnie was the one who pointed out that the women who were working were doing the development themselves.”

The partnership “is the longest relationship either of us has had,” says Bruckheimer-Martell. “We were both single up until three years ago. We had boyfriends, we were leading a wonderful single life, traveling on the road. Neither of us thought about getting married.”

Now they’re married, have babies and are the godmothers of each other’s children.

Most of the women still read up to a dozen scripts or writing samples each week. They still do dinner meetings and conference calls late at night. And when a movie is shooting or about to shoot, they may not take a day off for months.

Yet their jobs have been like settling down compared to the tortured existence of the studio executive. The amount of work isn’t much different, they say, but they are “doing for themselves.” And they also can decide not to do anything for a day or even a month. Merzbach is ecstatic because her job at Fogwood is so relaxed that she can take off Saturdays. It means she can have a personal life.

“I don’t have nine other members of a team jockeying for position, competing for material. I don’t have 50 projects to sustain. I remember being at Fox and having to defend to the death the value of ‘Porky’s,’ ” she adds, grinning. “I don’t have to do that any more.”

Lynn Arost had been a vice president at Freddie Fields Productions and a development executive at MGM before she became Jessica Lange’s partner at Prairie Films. She says there is no better job.

“I wanted to accommodate my interests, my life--everything,” she says.

She spent nearly two years trying to get producers to make movies out of children’s books before she gave up and took a job as a story editor with the Begelman-Fields independent film company at Columbia in 1980. Even as she moved up to better jobs, Arost hoped, “to get something done I could have pride in.” A former inner-city school teacher who hung out in Boston in the ‘60s, “to prolong college,” she shares with Lange a small-town background and the wish to make movies with a message.

Unlike her counterparts, Arost comes across as ordinary, even shy. She is quietly friendly and likes to talk about her 3-year-old son. (Motherhood obviously is a big part of Prairie life with Lange, a mother of three, one just a few weeks old.)

“Lynn is very smart, which is very important,” says Lange. “There is a lot of drive there, yet it never overpowers the situation. It is a great balance--tremendous energy, ambition and intelligence, yet none of that becomes difficult to be around.”

Since starting Prairie Films last year, Arost and Lange projects include a drama based on a play about the lives of Klan wives, a comedy of manners set in the horse world, a 1950s comedy with Cher and a period suspense thriller. With a new deal at Universal and the steady interest of other studios, Arost can be fairly confident about the movies on her list.

“Jessica’s commitment to a project gives it fuel,” she says. “We have access to some of the most talented writers and directors. We get great material from mainstream to eccentric stuff. You have no idea the luxury of that.”

For all the success of these women, for all their power, they are still haunted by insecurity--”the bag lady syndrome,” as Merzbach calls it.

“All of us have it to some degree,” says Merzbach, sighing. “The worry that we’ll be on the street at 60 with no one to take us in.” She tries to invest, she adds, to “forestall” the nightmare.

Bonfiglio is circumspect. “I would love to know where this generation of women will be in 15 to 20 years,” she says. “One of the reasons being a producer is so important for women like myself is to make a statement with your work and make enough money so you won’t have to worry.

“There is no old folks home for development ladies,” she adds.

Sylbert says she has recovered from her own fears. Yet she also recognizes that she may one day be elbowed aside.

She says there was a time when she used to drive past a crumbling apartment building on her way to work and see the same cat each day in a fourth floor window.

“I imagined myself as the old lady who lived with the cat,” she says. “All washed up and lonely. But I am over it because I thought about it and decided, who could blame someone taking it all away and saying, ‘O.K., enough for you, its time to give someone else a turn now.’ ”