Julia Phillips, Producer Whose Book Scandalized Hollywood, Dies at 57

Movie producer Julia Phillips, who made Hollywood history as the first woman to win a best picture Oscar--for “The Sting” in 1973--and who became the talk of the town almost 20 years later with her scandalous autobiography “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” died Tuesday at her West Hollywood home. She was 57.

Family members said she had been diagnosed as having cancer in August.

Colorful and sharp-tongued, Phillips was known as a creative player in the freewheeling 1970s when young Hollywood filmmakers were gaining clout. She won the Academy Award as co-producer of the blockbuster “The Sting” and then co-produced Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed “Taxi Driver” in 1976, followed by director Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Her 1990 book helped redefine the nature of Hollywood autobiographies with its insider’s chronicle of petty indiscretions and vindictiveness among the town’s top echelons. Phillips not only named names, she also offered sometimes harsh personal judgments of former friends in high places in the movie business.

In an image-conscious industry, Phillips’ candor was not appreciated. The book alienated many among the industry’s elite--some of whom never spoke to her again, at lunch or otherwise. Friends and family members said she was stunned at the reaction to what she considered her honesty, and spent much of her remaining life in retreat. Still, they said, she would not have changed a word.

“You always have to pay your dues,” she once told a reporter. “I paid them backward--starting at the top and going to the bottom.”

Her son-in-law Modi Wiczyk said Phillips based her life on a two-word philosophy: “No rules.” Though no one was off limits from her biting wit, she was always hardest on herself, he said. She died as she lived, he said: unrepentant and with no regrets.

“She didn’t know the power of her own words,” her daughter Kate said. “I think she was shocked that people would take things to heart and be so offended. . . . Would it make her do anything differently? No.”

The daughter of Jewish intellectuals, Julia Miller grew up in New York and Wisconsin. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she failed math and French but won prestigious awards for her short-story writing. In 1965, she married investment banker Michael Phillips; they had one child, Kate.

After a career in magazine publishing, Phillips joined Paramount Pictures in 1969 as its East Coast story editor. She headed Mirisch Productions in New York, and later became creative executive for First Artist Productions, a group of actors seeking greater creative control.

Along with actor Tony Bill, Phillips and her husband went into business for themselves to produce “Steelyard Blues.” Later, Phillips became president of her own company: Ruthless Productions in Los Angeles.

The name of the firm attested more to her candor than any chicanery, Bill said. “Her honesty was what set her apart,” he said. “It was her calling card and her Achilles’ heel.”

Short, bright, stylish and profane, Phillips was a trailblazer in Hollywood where women producers, directors and executives had found few opportunities, said producer Roz Heller, a longtime friend. Like other women, Phillips had to assert herself and inflate her ambition just to avoid being trampled on, Heller said.

“Taxi Driver” was just one of the unpopular projects they had to fight to produce, Heller said. “We couldn’t get the green light. I remember her being enormously pregnant, wearing a circle dress, standing up and saying, ‘I’m going to drop this baby right now if we don’t get this green light.’ The men got very nervous.” The film won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or in 1976 and was a commercial hit.

In a statement, Scorsese noted that Phillips worked with him personally in post-production on “Taxi Driver” and, along with her husband, helped the movie reach the screen as the filmmakers intended. “She was a friend,” he said, “and I am sad for her loss.”

Phillips had a visionary ability to identify talent, said Peter Biskind, author of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” an account of Hollywood in the 1970s. At their Malibu beach house, she and her husband lived large, entertaining Scorsese and Spielberg, Brian de Palma, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Peter Boyle and Richard Dreyfuss, among others.

Ideas flowed as freely as mind-expanding drugs, and Phillips fit right in, Biskind said. “Someone would throw an idea out; Julia would say you ought to write that up.”

Increasingly preoccupied with drugs, Phillips came to grief over producing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) with Spielberg. “He essentially kicked her off the movie,” Biskind said. “It pretty much ended her career.”

By the time she published “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” Phillips was ready to burn her bridges, friends said. In the book, she castigated the duplicity, selfishness and bottom-line mentality of the town and insulted Hollywood’s power brokers by name. She captured the era perfectly, as only an insider could, Biskind said.

Many consider the time before corporate and conglomerate pressures took over movie making to be a golden age of Hollywood, Biskind said. “She was its Edith Wharton.”

Some complained that Phillips’ book was mean-spirited, riddled with inaccuracies, a thin effort to regain entry to the top echelons of Hollywood.

However, Phillips told People magazine: “I’m just being honest. I didn’t write the book to get back in the business. I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t in the business before I wrote the book.” Nothing she wrote was as mean as the people she wrote about, she said later.

After reading about himself in the book, movie and recording industry executive David Geffen released Phillips from a contract to work on a movie version of Anne Rice’s novel “Interview With the Vampire.” Some old friends never spoke to her again.

Friends said she was surprisingly sensitive to the criticism. Ten years later, they said, she was pondering whether to respond to negative reviews that appeared on the amazon.com Web site.

She spent the ensuing years dealing with financial troubles and working on writing projects, including her sequel to “Lunch,” “Driving Under the Affluence,” which was released in 1995 and poorly received.

Fascinated with mischief making, Phillips co-wrote 2000’s “The Drudge Manifesto” with Matt Drudge, the controversial Internet political gossip columnist. She also wrote an essay on powerful Hollywood lesbians for Harper’s Bazaar, she said in an interview, because she liked “any outlaw group that makes themselves apparent.”

Friends said she disliked revisiting the past, and preferred thinking about the future. “She loved youth,” Drudge said. Phillips was well versed in techno music and, until the last few years, attended clubs. “She was a hipster to the end,” he said.

Friends debate whether Phillips was a victim of Hollywood or the cause of her own troubles.

“By the end, no one was speaking to her. It’s probably not fair to say it was all her doing, though probably a lot of it was,” Drudge said. “She was difficult, difficult in a way that she wouldn’t take any [guff]. She was angry with the club for cutting her off.”

At the same time, her most memorable traits were optimism and generosity, family and friends said. Her effervescence and generosity of spirit defined her, daughter Kate said. “She was generous with her time, with her words, with her ability to listen and to help financially. Even when she was struggling with financial insolvency, she was lending her friends money.”

As with the rest of her life, Phillips faced its conclusion eye to eye, her family said. Even on her deathbed, Bill said she was lucid, in control, acerbic and funny. He remembers his final image of her beside a movie screen-sized window framing a panorama from Hollywood to Catalina Island with a morphine drip control in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Wiczyk said Phillips called people she hadn’t spoken to in a decade. “Not for a conciliation. It was just to say, ‘You were important to me at one point in time and, so, goodbye.’ ”

Phillips and her husband divorced in the ‘70s. She is survived by her daughter Kate Phillips and a brother, Matthew Miller of Connecticut. Services will be private.