Paula Weinstein, 1945–2024
I know I am not alone in my surprise and regret at hearing about the death of Paula Weinstein. She was, as her daughter Hannah Rosenberg told Deadline, “… a lifelong activist and force of nature who was a champion for social justice and underdogs for more than half a century. She shattered barriers in Hollywood and always lifted other women along with her. I know my mother would want me say this: if you’d like to honor her, please stop what you are doing and turn your attention toward re-electing President Biden and making sure Democrats win down the ballot so we can be sure Democracy survives in America and around the world.”
It’s hard to assimilate this news. She was one year younger than I and I feel like my life is just beginning, yet she has died. I am flashing back to how she kickstarted my career in 1973 when she moved to L.A. from New York where she had been the special events director for Mayor John Lindsay, bringing cultural productions and street festivals to communities across the city. She had also been Jane Fonda’s reader as I learned when I asked to become a reader at IFA.
Paula, no relation to Harvey, said to Page Six of the Post in 2017, “In the ’70s, my generation of women in Hollywood used to look at each with envy over their jobs — there was no sisterhood.” She was wrong. She stood by me in my early beginnings in the film business, advising me and and making introductions. And I shared her own struggles as she moved from reader at IFA to literary agent. I adored her sister Lisa and greatly admired her mother Hannah. I liked her friend Mark Rosenberg who eventually (finally! according to him) became her husband. I met her oldest sister oddly enough in Paris where she and my older sister were friends. She told me funny stories about her friends and semi-client at that time, Jane Fonda and I even met Jane and other clients of course, among whom my favorite was Donald Sutherland. By the time she moved on to Warner Bros as vice president in 1976, we had gone our separate ways, but I always thought we would meet again somewhere. Now that is no longer possible.
By 1975, I was in Amsterdam training as a distribution executive for 20th Century Fox International while she had left the Agency to become VP of Production at Warner Brothers and then went on to be EVP at 20th Century Fox which she left in 1978, to be succeeded by her best friend, Mark Rosenberg. She went on to become President at United Artists from 1981 to 1982.
Then, as an independent, she produced A Dry White Season, American Flyers, The Fabulous Baker Boys and dozens of other films. She also exec produced all 94 episodes of the 2015–22 Netflix series Grace and Frankie, starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the streamer’s longest-running comedy. She joined Tribeca Enterprises as EVP in 2013 and played a pivotal role in building Tribeca Studios, where she pursued programs focusing on underrepresented filmmakers.
She left in 2023 to focus on political campaigns telling Deadline in September, “I don’t want to sit on the sidelines and rail about everything, I really want to jump in, fully, into the campaigns. Both statewide and national campaigns. It just feels very much like a moment…between the climate, and book banning and everything else that I don’t need to go into.”
Weinstein was grand beyond whatever I could imagine. At the time we met, she epitomized New York to me. Her arrival in L.A. shook oldtime and slow-moving Hollywood with an energy that shaped independent films up to today. Scorsese was just finishing Raging Bull (she knew him), Donald Sutherland was just signing the deal for 1900 with Bertulucci — Paula brokered the deal. I adored Donald because he would joke with me when I brought him coffee, one of the more onerous tasks of being a secretary which I was in those days. And Jane Fonda who as her client, though shared with the veteran agent down the hall from us, Ben Benjamin, got down on the floor with me to collate the many scripts I had just xeroxed of From 5 to 9. What noblesse oblige I thought at the time, but now, I am so grateful to have had these experiences.
She energized the agency and even got us secretaries to unionize, showing me how to lead the move. We laughed at how the agents were so scared that they would hide behind their doors whenever we came walking down the halls. Ben Benjamin and his secretary Dorothy, both veterans from way back, encouraged us. Eventually, management gave us all our demands, number one being getting paid for overtime, and the unionizing efforts stopped. By then I was on my way out as well.
Paula was raised in a Jewish family, the daughter of television producer Hannah Weinstein (née Dorner) who was also in my eyes, bigger than life. Paula sent me to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to take dictation from Hannah whenever she came to L.A. Hannah Weinstein was born on 23 June 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. In the early 1950s, disgusted at the political climate and with her marriage failing, she moved with three young daughters to Paris and later London. She was very close friends with Paul Robeson and she and Paula would tell me stories about him. In London she worked with blacklisted writers, and invented the modern TV series with The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1955 with Sir Lew Grade. In the early ’60s, the family came home, and Hannah Weinstein went on to produce Claudine starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, Greased Lightning and Stir Crazy, both starring Richard Pryor. She died at 73 on 9 March 1984 in New York City of a heart attack, as Paula, her sister Lisa and Mark Rosenberg were flying to New York to plan Paula and Mark’s wedding.
Her father Pete Weinstein, a reporter for The Brooklyn Eagle; and Hannah divorced in 1955.
Paula was married to producer Mark Rosenberg until his death in 1992, at the age of 44. They married in 1984 — her first marriage, his third — but they were the other’s “best friend” and, “safe haven for each other” from the time they met in New York in 1970 planning demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In 1993, Weinstein spoke with The L.A. Times about continuing her work after losing her husband and raising their daughter, born just after he died, alone.
“I had good training,” she said, “an extraordinarily strong mother who said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No matter what, you get up and you keep going.’ And I was wise to marry a man who was quite the same. So at any moment when I think, ‘Oh my God, not today, ‘ I hear those voices saying, ‘Get out of bed, do your work, love that baby, laugh.’”
In 1973, when she began her career in L.A. first as a reader and then as a literary agent whose stellar clientele included Jane Fonda, today one of her closest friends, I was just discovering the world of Hollywood and movies myself.
I had ended my nine year relationship and realized after getting my Ms in Education and teaching five years, I no longer wanted to be a teacher marrying my soon-to-be lawyer fiance and having three children. It wasn't going to happen. Friends in L.A. where I was born and raised, suggested I go into the film business. That sounded fun. In those days you started as a secretary and rose from there. All I wanted to do was to push paper clips around until I figured out what to do with my life. Friends helped me get a job at a talent agency where I worked for Richard Emler the agent who booked composers to score movies and TV. He showed me how to organize files, how to use the phones and how to pitch his clients to producers. People working at the agency were interesting and in fact I knew a couple from before. I was given books and scripts to read and comment on. Then I started taking minutes at the motion picture department’s weekly meetings and reviewed them with each agent to be sure I quoted thhem correctly. I learned from inception to completion how movies, financing and talent were developed, brokered, produced and distributed through the studios. Because I knew as a teacher how to run a 16mm projector I ran the projector and so was able to watch clients’ movies. That first year and a half was such an adventure; life was so diffferent from what I had ever imagined. Eventually I got up the nerve to ask the head of the department, Mike Medavoy if I might become the Agency’s reader. He told me normally that might be possible, but Jane Fonda’s personal reader was moving to LA and would become the reader. He suggested I make friends with her and when she became an agent, she might make me the reader. With his advice, I became Paula’s secretary and then a reader.
When her best friend Mark Rosenberg was moving to L.A. she told me she wanted him to have him the job of reader but I could still be her assistant. She had already told me about Mark who always wanted to marry her but with whom she only wanted to be friends. I tried that for a while but was not having as much fun by then.
At that same time IFA, one of Hollywood’s top three talent agencies along with CMA and WMA was merging with Creative Management Associates to form International Creative Management (which in 2022 merged with CAA). It was a good time for me to leave as I knew I did not ever want to be an agent, nor could I possibly ever remain a secretary.
When∂ I left IFA, I thought wanted to be a writer but didn’t know what that would mean or how I would do it. Paula helped get me my next job, helping a director write his memoirs. While that is a whole other story, she still helped me after that until I found my calling in international distribution. Thereafter, as I said, we lost touch.
Her numerous honors attest to her many talents and interests and include the National Urban League Award, the Bill of Rights Award and the Crystal Award for Women in Film. Weinstein also has served on the boards of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU and the National Finance Committee for President Obama. Weinstein was also a founding member of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, which raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates for more than two decades.
Her daughter Hannah Rosenberg told Deadline that Weinstein died peacefully at her home in New York Monday morning March 25. She was 78.
My condolences to to her daughter Hannah and her sisters and families.
And for all who have read this far, in her name, speak up and “please stop what you are doing and turn your attention toward re-electing President Biden and making sure Democrats win down the ballot so we can be sure Democracy survives in America and around the world.”
