Mother knows best at Disney

Nina Jacobson realized how “prudish” she’d become when she took her two children, ages 3 and 5, to see “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” in the theater. The 38-year-old president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group had made the movie, so she thought she knew what to expect. What she hadn’t made was the trailer playing beforehand.

“There were allusions to drug use and someone getting the munchies. I was horrified!” She riffs on trying to explain to your children a G-rated meaning for munchies. “My kids aren’t ready to be finding out about drugs. There were allusions to sex. I’ve not only become my mother. I’ve become worse than my mother,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t want my kids seeing that.”

Unlike most moms though, Jacobson could do something about it. She called up the head of distribution, who in turn called the theater owner to complain. “Childhood is so truncated, at least in America and in most Western cultures,” she says. “I want to prolong it as long as possible for my kids and other people’s kids.”

In retrospect, it seems like it should have been an obvious decision to put a mom in charge of the biggest family label in the world -- especially since mothers drive the market, influencing what their children see and usually chauffeuring the brood to the cineplex.

Yet when Jacobson ascended to the job of picking all the live-action movies in the Disney empire four years ago, there were eyebrows raised around town. The company had recently hemorrhaged executive talent. Jacobson felt it very directly -- losing her boss, Joe Roth, as well as her former partner in the position, Todd Garner (and, soon after, her next boss, Peter Schneider).

She was hardly your classic titan-in-training, speed-dialing through multiple power breakfasts but a forthright anti-schmoozer who eschewed the town’s frenetic social-work circuit, an openly gay woman in a committed relationship. She was also newly pregnant, a fact she then revealed to her bosses so they knew precisely what they were getting into.

“At the beginning, a lot of people thought she was one level under the job,” recalls producer Scott Rudin, who produced “The Royal Tenenbaums” at the studio. “She’s proved everybody wrong. She’s had an incredible run, and she’s made a bunch of movies others wouldn’t have made and she was right on every one. They feel aimed between New York and L.A. while everyone else is aiming at New York and L.A. They’ve all scored. She has a particular personal appreciation for sophisticated things and a tremendous ability to understand the unsophisticated things, which I envy.”

Four years later, she -- along with her new boss, Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook -- has presided over a banner year at the box office. Michael Eisner might be suffering through a stagnant stock price, difficulties at the network, low theme park attendance and the very public rebuke by former Disney director Roy Disney, but in 2003 the studio had the best year in industry history, grossing more than $3 billion worldwide, more than Fox during its “Titanic” glory or Sony the year it spawned “Spider-Man.”

A chunk of the riches does derive from the year’s biggest title, Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” but the rest comes from Jacobson’s divisions, which not only had the year’s second-biggest title, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” ($305 million domestically), but several surprise $100-million hits, including “Freaky Friday” and “Bringing Down the House.” In a year long on sequels with escalating battle sequences, much of the Disney fare was fresh and clever ... even when it was derived from a lowly theme park ride.

Moreover, the films weren’t just popular, they were profitable. Along with Jacobson’s ascension came a mandate from Eisner to further cut costs and to make more comedies and inspirational fare that were traditionally the Disney staple.

Some of the biggest hits, such as last year’s odes to Americana “The Rookie” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” cost close to half the $60-million average of films these days.

The studio also borrowed a page from the earlier Jeffrey Katzenberg regime, and cast under-used but talented stars, such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Queen Latifah, Dennis Quaid and even Johnny Depp to great, career-remaking effect.

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Focus on fractured families

On a recent Thursday morning, Jacobson exudes all the zeal of a young mother concerned with the effects of pop culture on developing minds. She’s just dropped off her two children at nursery school and kissed her partner goodbye and is now eating a crepe in a modest Santa Monica restaurant. Small with dark, curly hair, she sports a dusky blue suit, which has somehow been reconstituted with both a black and a white T-shirt to suggest more funkiness than power.

As Jacobson describes her job, she loads the chamber with bullets, and Cook, a 32-year veteran of the company, actually pulls the trigger.

This said, Cook has never vetoed her movie choices and has backed her as she’s subtly updated the family film for the 21st century, introducing not only the first PG-13 Walt Disney movie (“Pirates of the Caribbean”) and an in-your-face comedy about race (“Bringing Down the House”) but also making a huge number of films that feature fractured families struggling to stay together, from “Freaky Friday” and “The Princess Diaries” to “Signs,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and even “Bringing Down the House,” which looks a lot like “Mary Poppins” at hip-hop speed.

It’s family values without the traditional family structure -- the struggle to connect despite each family’s idiosyncratic dysfunction. The palpable yearning for closeness is often what gives the films an emotional pulse, or as Jacobson is fond of saying, “heart.”

Jacobson says it’s true, but it hasn’t been a conscious strategy on their part. “It does have more to do with the fact that the traditional nuclear family is not as commonplace as it used to be,” Jacobson says, “whether it’s single parenthood, or extended family getting engaged in parenting or forming a new family in the wake of the old family through divorce or death.

“You have to take on the fact that families endure a lot of conflict. Families go through a lot of angst and pain in order to stay together and you can’t shy away from that pain or be naive about the fact that youth is full of temptation.

“It used to be the idea a really big conflict between a parent and child in a Disney movie was ‘No, you can’t get the puppy,’ ” she says, adopting the voice of parental reason. “ ‘Why can’t I have the puppy?’ In ‘Freaky Friday,’ [the daughter tells the mother] ‘I hate you. You’re ruining my life.’ Everyone who has a teenage daughter or son knows that you reach that point where you feel like you’re losing each other but the idea of repair is just deeply gratifying.”

For Jacobson, the goal has never been to guess what the audience wants, but to follow her own instincts.

She recalls having lunch with Eisner after she assumed the job.

It was the first time she’d ever been alone with him.

“He said to me, ‘I would rather you go with your own gut and you don’t second-guess yourself and you pass on something that someone else makes into a success than to have you trying to put a slate together by guessing what other people might want. I would rather you go on your own judgment.’ That was very inspiring advice, and it helped me a lot.”

To those who deal with her, Jacobson is unusually direct for a studio executive.

“She’s straightforward and tells you the truth, which I love,” says Jerry Bruckheimer, the studio’s biggest producer. “When she reads a script, she says, ‘This works for me. This doesn’t.’ She doesn’t give you a political answer. She says, ‘My company is going to support it or not support it.’ That’s the way it is. So you know the truth. In Hollywood, that’s a hard thing to find.”

And William Morris agent David Lonner says, “You always know where you stand with her. There’s no innuendo.”

Forthrightness, coupled with a dash of insouciance, landed Jacobson her first bona-fide job in the movie business.

An L.A. native, and Brown semiotics major, the then-23-year-old Jacobson went to interview with mega-action producer Joel Silver during the 1988 writers’ strike. The waiting room was well stocked with lithe and buxom women -- Silver was personally auditioning all the strippers for his film “Road House.” When she was finally ushered in, Silver, who later produced “Die Hard” and “The Matrix,” asked her what she’d heard about him.

“I said, ‘I heard you’re not a mensch.’ He found this so amusing I was hired on the spot. ‘Hmm. Jew with glasses. I like Jews with glasses,’ ” says Jacobson, imitating Silver.

She lasted a year before getting fired sight unseen by the new head of Silver’s company.

She eventually wound up as a junior executive at Universal, where she worked on a spate of Jean-Claude Van Damme films and became known as the “body count” executive. She also spent two years at DreamWorks, where she pitched a movie based on her experience as a corporate drone and a nature documentary that her girlfriend happened to be watching. It became the company’s animation success, “Antz.”

It was during her days at Universal that Jacobson came out officially, first at work, and then in the Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t take it for granted that it’s been such a nonissue in my career. I’m working in Hollywood at the millennium. If I were working in a different city, a different state, a different industry, it would be very different.

“In some way, it has made things easier because you’re dealing with so many men. It kind of lets them off the hook. We’re liberated from [the sexual tension] that’s a part of every workplace. It’s made for less of the awkward moments. Homophobia in the movie business is much more a thing of the past than sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is still alive and well in all businesses. It’s like, what’s the point of sexually harassing me?”

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‘The value of honor’

Being gay does impact her taste. “The theme of tolerance is a value I hold dear, but I also hold dear the value of honor. It’s a big deal for me, and that doesn’t have anything to do with being gay. There’s no way your own experience can be absent from events, but being gay is only one of many experiences. What Jen and I joke around about is now [that] we’re parents we’re too busy to be gay,” she says, speaking of her partner, homemaker Jennifer Bleakley. “The experience of parenthood pretty much trumps all other experiences.”

Jacobson’s well aware of the in-house laboratory going on in her own home. She noted her son’s fascination with his Playmobile pirates set, (“Hmmm. Pirates are cool”) and how the two kids adored Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” about a young witch. (“Don’t think I didn’t immediately snap up the live-action rights!”)

Jacobson had in fact only one hard and fast rule that she instituted when she took over production: “NO HACKS.”

For instance, she was contemplating hiring Mark Waters to direct “Freaky Friday.” From her purview, he’d made one interesting movie (“The House of Yes”) and one bad movie (“Head Over Heels”). “We decided, instead of going with someone who’d just made a bunch of so-so movies but could do it in his sleep, we’d rather take a risk on a person who had made a great movie. And he really rose to the occasion and was really appreciative of the opportunity to get out of director jail.”

Indeed, while Disney might be best known for its All-American fare, Jacobson seems to take personal pride in having been able to nurture such original writer-directors as Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers, who a generation ago would have been making movies for indies like Miramax. Their next films, “The Life Aquatic” (featuring not only Bill Murray but fish invented by director Anderson) and “The Ladykillers” (starring Tom Hanks), are both coming from Disney, as is M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village.”

“There’s a certain kind of movie which is right at the intersection of art and commerce, that has enough pop elements that we can do great things with them, and those movies, in addition to being reasonably priced, beget more good movies because they attract other filmmakers. Being in business with talented filmmakers is an invitation to other filmmakers that you won’t get burnt here, that we can treat a filmmaker with respect.”

“She’s hands off when she hires somebody. You don’t feel like she’s looking over your shoulder. You feel like she has ultimate faith in what you’re doing, which is great,” says writer-director John Lee Hancock, whom Jacobson hired to make his first film, “The Rookie,” as well as this spring’s mammoth epic, “The Alamo.”

Of course, there have been misfires. Disney was routinely ridiculed for launching a series of films based on theme park rides, which was an idea that trickled up from Jacobson’s group. While “Pirates of the Caribbean” scored, “The Country Bears” fizzled and “Haunted Mansion” underperformed. Jacobson has also forsworn “puerile comedy,” which she admits she doesn’t get but thought at first she needed in her repertoire, leading to such bad-taste bombs as “The Bubble Boy.”

She’s been in the business long enough to know that success can be fleeting. “Dick and I are both superstitious,” she says. “We both feel that a lot of it, the movie gods have smiled upon you. Sometimes they smile and sometimes they frown. Part of it is completely out of your hands.”

Still, they’re always playing to win. Jacobson tells of the time Cook organized a company outing to Arcadia, where the executives drove around in mini-race cars.

“The people who were the most insane were Dick and me. We were bashing into each other, desperately trying to win, and beat other people. As different as Dick and I are, we both hate losing. That is something we completely share.”

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Jacobson’s vision at work

The first movie Nina Jacobson remembers seeing as a kid was “Black Beauty.” “I was 6. I loved it because it had a horse in it. I loved horses. I’m a girl. My parents told me I talked through the entire movie.” The first movie Jacobson worked on was “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” where she was the studio executive on the film. “I shepherded it through production. I love that movie. I love the score. It was by Randy Edelman, who usually does comedies. It’s been used in the Olympics, in trailers. I would sing it, but it would be embarrassing.”