Reese Witherspoon is being honoured as Adweek’s 2020 Media Visionary for her success with production company Pacific Standard and media company Hello Sunshine.
At 44 years old, the star is a proven hitmaker with “Gone Girl”, “Wild”, and the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies” under her belt, but it was not always that way.
“Even being, at the time, an actress that was in a really enviable position in Hollywood, I could not get any traction as a producer,” Witherspoon recalls of her experience producing “Gone Girl”. “Multiple times, I got doors closed in my face or people tried to kick me off of [the project].”
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It was not until the success of “Gone Girl” that she found more opportunities and support for her production endeavours.
“I had learned, if you want systems to change, you have to rethink how you want the system to work,” she says of the experience. “It doesn’t work doing the same old studio deal where they pay your overhead, and they put your projects in development for years and they don’t ever get made.”
In fact, part of Witherspoon’s motivation for starting her own company was to change some fundamental issues in the system.
“I think there’s a myth that there’s a secret stash of perfect scripts waiting around for the Oscar winners, but every Oscar woman that I know didn’t experience this windfall of great material,” the “Walk The Line” star explains. Witherspoon won the Oscar for Best Actress for the film in 2006. “That’s when I started to understand the pipeline problem: There’s pipeline issues with people not developing things for women and not enough female filmmakers and not enough female screenwriters getting the opportunity to write from their own perspective.”
While her company is trailblazing in the industry, Witherspoon hopes that it will not be the exception.
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She advises others in the industry, “The people that are coming up—I hope they all start companies like this. Because I don’t want to be a lone entity. I want this to be an example that if you work really hard and you really care about whatever it is about storytelling that you care about, that it’s possible to start your own company.”
