Nina Jacobson is an American film executive who, until July 2006, was president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. [1] With Dawn Steel, Gail Berman and Sherry Lansing, she was one of last of a handful of women to head a Hollywood film studio since the 1980s.
Born in 1966, she is a graduate of Brown University, graduating in 1987. She began her film career as a documentary researcher. She joined Disney in 1987 as a story analyst but was dismissed in a management change.[2] In 1988, she joined Silver Pictures as director of film development. She was later head of development at MacDonald/Parkes Productions before she joined Universal Pictures as senior vice president of production. There, she took part in the development and production of such projects as Twelve Monkeys and Dazed and Confused.
Later, Jacobson became a senior film executive at DreamWorks SKG where she was responsible for developing What Lies Beneath. She also takes credit for the idea behind DreamWorks' first animated feature Antz.
In 1998, she moved to Walt Disney where she was responsible for developing scripts and overseeing film production for Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures. Among her projects as studio executive were The Sixth Sense, Remember the Titans, Pearl Harbour, The Princess Diaries The Chronicles of Narnia and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
In 2005, Forbes.com named Jacobson one of the world’s "100 Most Powerful Women" in recognition of her success. [3]
Closely associated with film director M. Night Shyamalan at Disney (besides The Sixth Sense, she also worked with him on Unbreakable, Signs and The Village), she and Shyamalan clashed during pre-production of his 2006 film, Lady in the Water. Shyamalan left the studio after Jacobson and others became, in Shyamalan's eyes, overly critical of his script, which would eventually be produced by Warner Bros. Shymalan is quoted in a book about the difficult period that he "had witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his own wide-open eyes. She didn't want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made money." In her own defense, Jacobson said, "in order to have a Hollywood relationship more closely approximate a real relationship, you have to have a genuine back and forth of the good and the bad. Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker." [4]
In 1995, she and film director Bruce Cohen formed Out There, a collection of gay and lesbian entertainment industry activists. [5]
She has a female partner and together the couple have three children. It was immediately after the birth of their third child, while still in the delivery room, on 17 July 2006, that Jacobson was fired over the telephone by Richard "Dick" Cook, studio chief for The Walt Disney Company.[6] Apparently as part of a studio restructuring, she was replaced by Oren Aviv, marketing chief of the studio. Soon after she was fired, Jacobson remarked, "There are two kinds of people in this job: the ones who think they'll have it forever and the ones who know they won't." She said she had treated her own job at Disney "as a privilege, not an entitlement." [7]
References
- ↑ Buena vista bio (cached) [1]
- ↑ Baby Moguls: From Pablum to Porsche NYT (21 March 1993) [2]
- ↑ Brief Bio [3]
- ↑ Los Angeles Times (23 June 2006): "Book Tells of Breakup with Disney"
- ↑ Bruce Cohen profile [4]
- ↑ Deadline Hollywood: Nina... And Then There Will Be None (19 July 2006)[5]
- ↑ Orlando Sentinel from LA Times, "Disney Fires Film Production President" (19 July 2006) [6]