‘It’ executive?
Of course the Angels were the center of attention at the premiere of “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” drawing friendly strobe fire and squeals from fans enthusiastic enough to feed the egos of movie stars giving their all to a publicity juggernaut. But as a delicate brunet in a ruffled crimson chiffon mini-dress moved along the gantlet of cameras bordering the red carpet at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, photographers hoping to capture a salable picture shouted, “Amanda! Amanda! Look this way!”
Paparazzi with a broad understanding of the marketplace know that while Amanda Goldberg, the movie’s 29-year-old associate producer, might literally stand on Hollywood Boulevard, she is actually poised at the intersection of movies, celebrity, fashion and power. A photo of Goldberg in her Dior dress and nearly naked Christian Louboutin sandals might sell to InStyle or W, to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar or People. She is just pretty, important and connected enough to qualify as the sort of bright young thing the media love to put forth as an example of all things glamorous.
There has been a long history of “it girls,” well-bred or wild or just in-the-swim young women such as Jacqueline Bouvier, Amanda Burden, Jade Jagger and the Hilton sisters, who are wealthy, stylish and, thanks to the magazines that anoint them, highly visible. But all is not necessarily bliss in the “it girl” universe. Goldberg, daughter of veteran film and TV producer Leonard Goldberg, doesn’t complain about the struggle to be taken seriously in the face of nepotism and the “it girl” machine, but she knows what a tasty target a Hollywood princess can be. After all, the sign on the door of her father’s company, where she works as vice president of development and production, reads “Mandy Films.”
“People can’t fault me for being Leonard’s daughter. There’s nothing I can do to change that. But they could fault me for not doing my job,” Goldberg says. College friends not on the genetic fast track are stuck in assistant jobs at studios around town, but she has learned that any energy expended defending her good fortune would be wasted. “All I can do is do my best, be myself and not worry about whether people have a problem with me.”
In his own career, Leonard Goldberg has been head of programming for ABC, president of 20th Century Fox, and a successful TV and film producer. During his partnership with Aaron Spelling, Spelling-Goldberg Productions was responsible for a string of hit television series, including “Hart to Hart,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Fantasy Island” and, of course, “Charlie’s Angels.”
“When Amanda said she wanted to try working with me, that was great news because I’d get to see her every day,” he says. “But I didn’t think it would be an advantage for her to be my daughter. I still don’t. With a lot of people, there’s an underlying resentment, and she has to go that extra mile to overcome it.... And she has to be sensitive to their feelings and give them more wiggle room when they’re horrible to her, because she knows where it’s coming from.”
The truth is, Hollywood is driven by an occupational caste. Adam Bellow, son of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, has just written a book on the upside of nepotism in America. “There’s a lot invested in the myth that Hollywood is a meritocracy, that any little boy can grow up to be Michael Douglas,” says Bellow, whose book is titled “In Praise of Nepotism” (Doubleday). “But Hollywood was nepotistic from its origins, and it is still heavily populated by sons and daughters, nephews and nieces and cousins. The movie business is essentially a craft. If you grow up in a family involved in something, you absorb a lot of the specialized craft knowledge that other people have to learn when they come into it. No self-respecting successor wants to follow in their father’s footsteps and underperform. Many of today’s young people who end up going into their parents’ profession resist it at first and try to go off in other directions. But often there’s a yielding to the inevitable.”
The morning of the premiere, Goldberg, casually dressed in Levi’s frayed at the hem, a black nylon bomber jacket, black suede Adidas and a Cartier tank watch discreetly outlined with diamonds, heads to a meeting in her father’s office, steps away from hers.
They discuss an outline for Mandy Films’ “Wonder Woman” project in Warner Bros.’ pipeline, and father and daughter agree that so far, the structure is solid but the character development lame. If a decision is made to replace the writer, Amanda gets to make the bad-news phone call.
Another screenwriter who’s been working on a script for two months is only in the middle of the second act. “He’s very excited about it, he’s just slow,” she reports in her soft, little girl voice.
“Does he understand that he doesn’t have to carve it in stone?” her boss asks. “He just has to type it.”
She asks her father’s opinion on a list of writers being considered for another movie based on a TV series. He has favorites, but so does she. “It’s hard for me when we have real conflicts, and we do,” he says.
Goldberg’s on-the-job training began in 1998, when her father invited her to “help out” on “Double Jeopardy,” starring Ashley Judd. She had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania two years before, and spent one summer in Paris and another as an intern in designer Todd Oldham’s New York studio. (She was introduced to Oldham by way of Julia Roberts’ agent, a family friend.) Goldberg had discovered Prada before puberty and always thought she’d have a career in fashion. After she got out of school, Oldham hired her. While attending Parsons School of Design at night, she worked two days a week on Oldham’s public relations and three days designing, commuting to Soho on the subway from the Upper East Side apartment her parents keep for New York visits.
“I wanted to do something on my own that was very separate from what my father did,” she says. “The idea of following in his footsteps was daunting. I’d always wanted to go away to school, and I fell in love with the East Coast and loved living in New York. Todd was really encouraging in the same way Leonard is, so I felt really lucky being able to learn from him.”
Oldham was not the ideal mentor, however, because he’d become disenchanted with fashion. What he really wanted to do was direct. Goldberg, with the rest of the designer’s six-person staff, helped him make a music video. Then, instead of staging a fashion show for his final ready-to-wear collection, Oldham presented it in a short film.
“We were on the set making that movie,” Goldberg says, “and it felt like all roads were leading me back to production.” She’d had a similar experience in college. “I was amazed how many people were interested and curious about film and Hollywood and how many wanted to get involved in it. There’s a lot of naivete about how difficult it is to get movies made. It’s been a wake-up call for me to see how long the development process is. I was in college when Leonard was talking about the [first] ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movie, and that was long before Drew Barrymore became involved.”
Hollywood is nothing if not a small town: Barrymore and Goldberg had been playmates as preteens. Less than two decades later, Barrymore was co-producer and star of “Charlie’s Angels,” and Goldberg had worked her way up through a couple of TV movies to an associate producer credit. That job is hard to define, but it’s essentially to participate in myriad decisions, to be, as Goldberg puts it, “another voice, another opinion.” According to McG, the director of both “Angels” films, Goldberg was “involved in every element of casting, script, production design and everything from Day One. She has a sense of history about the franchise, and she’s plugged into the audience we’re most trying to reach.” Production meetings were crowded with female producers and executives. “Poor Leonard and McG were often the only men in the room,” she says.
Goldberg is accustomed to the company of women who are powers in Hollywood. Her aunt, Toni Howard, is a veteran agent at International Creative Management, and her mother, Wendy Howard Goldberg, founded the California State Summer School for the Arts. At the premiere, Wendy Goldberg stood just beyond the spotlights that shone on her husband and daughter, wondering if Amanda would be bold enough to remove the black silk Gucci jacket that covered her bare arms and revealing decolletage. (She wasn’t.) “Dior offered to dress Amanda for this evening, so I went along when she tried things on,” her mother said. “She was afraid the dress was too much, but I said, ‘It’s fun. It’s happy.’ She hates this, but Leonard pushes her a little because it’s part of the business.”
Along with a model-socialite-law student and a shoe designer, Goldberg agreed to appear in a feature in the June Vogue on how “real” young women bring Valentino creations down to earth, but she knows that too much of that kind of exposure can lead to an exalted place on lists for shoe store launch parties.
“It’s very flattering,” she says, “yet I’m conflicted about publicity. I’m shy, and I’m a little uncomfortable about putting myself out there. If I have a project to talk about, or it’s business related, Leonard feels attention is good for the company. To do it just to do it, that wouldn’t interest me. I like to be seen as a professional who’s working.”