The Universal Studios lot, 390 acres of prime real estate just across the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood, impresses a visitor with its sheer size—a physical reminder of the financial clout and starmaking capacity of the studio, one of a handful of major movie companies that were known in gentler days as “dream factories.” Today, with its security checkpoints and unmarked hangarlike buildings, the lot evokes something more akin to a munitions factory, the place where an entertainment superpower assembles the moving-picture weaponry for its global media campaign. But way at the back of the lot sits a more inviting structure, a Tuscan-style office building surrounded by gardens and gracefully arching oak trees. This is hallowed ground: home to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, where, on the second floor, producer Nina Jacobson has a large office suite appointed with a fireplace, contemporary artwork and a private conference room.
Jacobson struck a production deal with DreamWorks, the studio cofounded by Spielberg, after she was fired from her last job, as president of Disney’s Motion Pictures Group, in July 2006. Given the slate of blockbusters Jacobson had overseen at Disney, including the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and The Sixth Sense, her dismissal, less than a year after she’d renewed a lucrative contract, was unexpected, to say the least.
“Hollywood is agog,” wrote LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is an industry staple. Jacobson, who is well liked in the business, was left jobless by a corporate restructuring under new Disney chief Robert Iger, and she won widespread sympathy for her unusually forthright handling of the situation.
“There simply isn’t room for everyone in the new structure,” Jacobson said in a press release at the time, eschewing the usual smoke-screen platitudes. In a particularly cruel twist, Jacobson had learned of her demise by phone while her partner was in labor with their third child.
A year after that happy moment was marred by the bitter news, the 42-year old Jacobson, who is openly gay, sits down in her new digs to discuss the state of lesbians in the entertainment industry. Naturally, her firing comes up as well, but what is most interesting perhaps is that the way Jacobson talks about the one could equally apply to the other.
“Honesty is a sign of confidence,” she says of her handling of her dismissal. “My metaphor is that you never see a really powerful man with a toupee, because if he had a toupee, he would be covering up the truth about himself. You would know that he wasn’t proud of who he was. You should never let anybody have anything on you. ‘Tell it like it is’ has always been my calling card.”
Today Jacobson is just one of many lesbians working in Hollywood who, intentionally or not, are on the vanguard for letting their private identities emerge in their public and professional lives. Often they are working mothers or in long-term relationships, and most are completely out to their colleagues. Indeed, a constant refrain heard during interviews for this story is that being lesbian is almost inconsequential for women working in the tolerant atmosphere of Hollywood’s creative community.
