Company Town : Ted’s Ready for His Buildup, Ms. Pascal

Amy Pascal has always been someone with a mission.

Now, as production president of Turner Pictures, she’s on the toughest mission of her professional life.

“None of it is easy,” concedes the self-effacing 37-year-old, whose mandate is to build the motion picture label bearing media mogul Ted Turner’s name into a top-ranked Hollywood production company.

The pressure to do so quickly is intense. Though Pascal, who has been on the job 10 months, claims she is not feeling the heat from Turner or her direct boss, Turner Entertainment Group President Scott Sassa, she says, “I feel it from the community and within myself.”

Sitting in a Century City office that shows off her love of antiques and quirky art, Pascal does acknowledge the high expectations of her bosses: “I feel the pressure to win, but I don’t feel the pressure to win yesterday.”

But the truth is, the heat is on. Turner Pictures was launched in 1988 as a maker of cable movies for TNT, and it has produced only two features, “Gettysburg” and “The Pagemaster.” But now Turner and Sassa are determined to transform the company into a major purveyor of star-driven theatrical releases, augmenting the output of the Turner empire’s other two movie outfits, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment.

Pascal’s mandate is to build up to a slate of eight $15- to $30-million films a year by 1998. By that time, Turner Pictures’ output, combined with the 25 to 30 films from New Line and 10 to 12 from Castle Rock, will give Ted Turner the major Hollywood film studio he wants. By the beginning of 1998, when Castle Rock’s distribution deal with Columbia Pictures ends, Turner will bring all of the distribution under one roof.

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Pascal says she doesn’t yet have her first production lined up, but hopes that at least one or two pictures will be under way by early next year. One of them will probably be a live-action version of “The Jetsons,” to be directed by Chuck Russell. “The idea is to make about four or five movies next year,” she says.

Pascal, who spent seven years as a top production executive at Columbia, has always favored in-house development of ideas over movie packages. “We’re going to take the long, quiet approach of believing in material and building that into something,” she says, rather than buying prepackaged deals from talent agencies.

Making an obvious reference to her former home, Pascal says: “What we don’t want to do is have jets and fancy lots. We’re not going to make talent deals and we’re not going to make deals with directors. We’re going to make a few deals with really good producers because they’re about developing material and getting us where we want to be.”

Pascal has already signed an exclusive deal with producer Denise Di Novi, with whom she was the Columbia executive on “Little Women.”

And, in an arrangement that predates Pascal, Turner also has an alliance with Atlas Entertainment, the production company of Dawn Steel, Chuck Roven and Bob Cavallo.

Strong material attracts first-rate actors and directors, Pascal believes. She’s looking to be in business with high-powered filmmakers like James L. Brooks, Mike Nichols and Penny Marshall, whose movies she championed at Columbia.

“At Columbia, my niche was big filmmakers and big movie-star pictures and I think that’s why they hired me,” says Pascal, “which doesn’t mean we won’t make little movies or movies with first-time directors.”

It is both her story sense and her honest, direct style and vulnerability that has won Pascal the trust of such top-drawer directors as Brooks and Nichols.

“She’s unusual,” says Brooks. “What you see is what you get. She’s smart and open and passionate, and there’s not a question in my mind that she’s always speaking the truth. It’s very hard for her not to speak her mind. And you get a bonus with her--she listens to what you say. She’s one of the good guys.”

Brooks, a well-known perfectionist and tough critic, adds: “And besides, her self-deprecating thing is charming. You tend to trust someone more when they have a degree of self-loathing . . . they’re more like you.”

Producer Scott Rudin, who was Pascal’s first studio boss early in her career when he was production head at Twentieth Century Fox, calls Pascal “a complete original who has her own world view.” Pascal, he adds, “is not afraid to be out there on a limb on a piece of material when something is perceived as a risky movie. . . . She’s a real advocate.”

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Rudin, who says Pascal has a special “sensitivity to human behavior in movies,” quips, “I’ve always loved her because I never heard her say ‘character arc’ [a common Hollywoodism]--which is the mark of a great executive.”

Pascal concurs that the kind of stories that attract her are about human behavior.

“I think my interest in the film business comes from being really interested in people.

“I think the best way to approach scripts is by dissecting human behavior. Things that are parables for the truth make the best movies.”

While that might sound highbrow, Pascal is clearly committed to a diverse slate of commercial films.

In addition to “The Jetsons,” some of the movies in the pipeline are remakes of “The Fountainhead,” to be directed by Oliver Stone; “The Shop Around the Corner,” to be directed by Nora Ephron, and “The Jackie Robinson Story,” to be directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington.

Rudin describes Pascal as someone who “rides herself very hard and has always measured herself unfairly against the powerful women in this business,” including another of her former bosses, Steel.

Pascal credits Steel, who was instrumental in her landing the Turner job, with being “a great role model and mentor” and someone who “speaks her mind and is very direct with people.”

Steel says the relationship works both ways: “When she worked for me at Columbia, I taught her everything she knows, and now that we’re working together at Turner, she’s teaching me everything she knows.”

And theirs, Steel says, is the perfect definition of a producer-studio head relationship. “We go to the swap meets and talk about our movies.”

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Pascal, who has followed a well-trodden Hollywood path so far--three weeks as a secretary at Creative Artists Agency, assistant to producer Tony Garnett at Warner Bros., production executive at Fox and then Columbia--plans to follow in Steel’s professional footsteps.

“Eventually, I want to produce. That’s where the fun is. That’s always been the plan,” she says.