Annette Ballester Annette Ballester
“Done. Next.”
Those are the words that Marcia Nasatir, who died Tuesday at 95, wanted engraved on her tombstone. Thanks to her, and as women like Scarlett Johansson and Reese Witherspoon have recently shown, the motto for a new generation might be: “Done. Next. Er . . . not so fast.”
Nasatir came up with her blunt words to live by during the ups and downs of her career, which began as a secretary at a New York ad agency and ended in Hollywood. As an agent, studio executive and producer she had a hand in such classics as “Carrie,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “Rocky,” “Coming Home” and “The Big Chill.” She helped launch screenwriter Robert Towne’s career, back when he was gestating a convoluted yarn about Los Angeles water rights that became “Chinatown.” A voracious reader with an astute sense of story, she read a draft of “Star Wars” and wrote an encouraging memo, praising George Lucas for mixing childlike innocence and technical sophistication and predicting it would be a big hit — and it was, albeit for a competing studio.
I met Nasatir only briefly, at the Middleburg Film Festival in 2016, where Anne Goursaud’s documentary about her, “A Classy Broad,” played to adoring audiences. Stylish, funny and candid, the 90-year-old Nasatir was the toast of the festival, regaling her fellow filmgoers with showbiz legend and lore. My first and regrettably only encounter with her was on the Middleburg shuttle — an appropriate setting, given that in later years she was known for taking the bus to screenings at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 1974, Nasatir made history as the first woman to become a production executive at a major studio. That studio was United Artists, which had been co-founded by Mary Pickford 55 years earlier. (It only took half a century for another woman to ascend.) But she was just as often shut out of the big jobs and paydays that her male colleagues routinely gave themselves. In “A Classy Broad,” Nasatir explains “Done. Next.” within the context of a particularly disappointing period, when she was elbowed out of a top position at UA and then not invited to join her former colleagues as a partner when they formed Orion Pictures (she eventually joined that company as a production executive).
In the film, Nasatir doesn’t appear bitter about these slights as much as resigned. She notes that as far back as her New York days, when she was supporting two young sons as a single mother, she might have known her own worth but wasn’t always empowered to claim it. Having internalized the self-abnegating standards for women of her era, she didn’t even think to ask for a well-deserved raise.
And yet her perseverance, loyalty, impressive track record and eagerness to help younger proteges (“Why not be nice?,” she said of her altruism. “It doesn’t cost you anything.”) paved the way for generations. “If I had been born 20 years later, I would have been the head of a studio,” she told the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg in 2013. As it turned out, she watched as women such as Sherry Lansing, Dawn Steel, Amy Pascal and Donna Langley did precisely that.
There’s something full-circle about the fact that Nasatir died just days after two women in Hollywood claimed their own worth in no uncertain terms. When Johansson announced on July 29 that she was suing Disney for breach of contract involving the hybrid theatrical-streaming release of “Black Widow,” she was swatted away with a response from the studio the tone of which Nasatir might have recognized as sexist and patronizing.
[Comic books have taken over the movies. Must they take our indie auteurs, too?]
Calling Johansson’s lawsuit “sad” and “distressing,” Disney accused the actress of “callous disregard” for the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and noted that she earned $20 million for her work on “Black Widow,” the equivalent of patting her on the head and telling her to be grateful for what she has. Johansson maintains — not unreasonably — that putting the movie on Disney’s streaming service made it impossible for her to collect bonuses tied to its performance in theaters. The issue isn’t Johansson’s alleged callousness but whether Disney fulfilled its obligation to renegotiate her contract once they changed “Black Widow’s” release plan.
Four days later, it was announced that Reese Witherspoon would sell her media company Hello Sunshine in a private equity deal valued at $900 million.
Witherspoon has built her business with such hit series as “Big Little Lies” and “Little Fires Everywhere,” and by following the Nasatir formula: reading lots of books, jumping on the ones with crossover film potential and bringing those stories to life with handsome production values and emotionally powerful narratives.
As Nasatir ruefully recalls in “A Classy Broad,” she became marginalized in Hollywood for being “too classy.” In an industry that increasingly centered on the wish-fulfillment fantasies and escapist exploits of mythic male heroes, “too classy” might easily have been code for “too feminine.” But as Nasatir proved, and as Witherspoon is demonstrating all over again, having good taste and appreciating human-scale stories about the foibles, aspirations and triumphs of real people doesn’t mean losing the common touch. Indeed, when those elements alchemize — usually with the help of a gifted producer — they can become generational touchstones.
I hope that “Done. Next.” does end up on Nasatir’s tombstone. The saying perfectly encapsulates what I observed to be her creative, pragmatic, cheerfully indomitable spirit. And, for the women talented and driven enough to climb the trail that she blazed, it will carry a new meaning — not just shaking off inevitable setbacks, but recognizing what they’ve accomplished, and everything that’s still left to do.
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