UCSC Review Summer 1996

Alumna Lindsay Doran (B.A., creative media, Merrill '70) is producer of the Oscar-winning movie Sense and Sensibility.

Accepting an Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of Sense and Sensibility at this year's Academy Awards ceremony, Emma Thompson thanked her "friend and teacher, Lindsay Doran, for being the single most frustrating reason why I can't claim all the credit."

Indeed, as Sense and Sensibility's producer, Doran was quite likely the most important reason the movie was made at all. It was her idea; she commissioned the screenplay, participated in hiring the director, and had creative supervision of every aspect of the project, including screenplay revisions and film editing.

"Essentially, there was no moment of this movie I was not involved in," said Doran during a telephone interview she squeezed into her hectic schedule the week before the Academy Awards. "That was not true for other movies I have produced--some producers don't even go on the set. What I was able to do on this movie is every producer's dream."

Doran's relationship with Sense and Sensibility began almost 25 years before the film's release. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1970, Doran moved to England, where she read Jane Austen's 1811 novel. Having grown up in Hollywood as a studio executive's daughter, Doran immediately felt the novel's movie potential. "It had great characters, terrific plot twists, three good love stories, lots of jokes, a surprise ending," she said. "I was only surprised no one had made it into a movie before."

In 1979, Doran moved to Los Angeles where she worked for Embassy Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and finally Mirage Enterprises--a film company owned by director Sydney Pollack, of which Doran is now president. She has been involved in a number of feature films, including This is Spinal Tap, Ghost, Dead Again, The Firm, and Sabrina.

It was on the set of Dead Again in 1990 that Doran became acquainted with Emma Thompson, the movie's star. Doran and Thompson discovered they had much in common, including a shared love for Austen's novel. Doran also observed that Thompson had the right writing "voice"--a combination of satiric wit and romance--to adapt Sense and Sensibility into a screenplay.

Over the ensuing four years, Doran worked with Thompson on screenplay drafts. In the fall of 1994, Ang Lee was hired to direct, Thompson and Hugh Grant agreed to play the leads, and the studio granted a $15 million budget--an amount Doran said is less than half of that typically spent on an American movie. The studio then left the creative team alone to make their movie, something that rarely happens in Hollywood.

For Doran, the making of Sense and Sensibility was the fulfillment of a dream. "Because it was such a dream, I always assumed it would turn out badly," she said. "It's often the movies you don't give a lot of thought to that grow up to be the movies that everybody loves and remembers. The ones that you say 'Oh boy, this is going to be nominated for Academy Awards' don't usually turn out to be anything at all."

That unquestionably wasn't the case with Sense and Sensibility. Not only was it nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, it won two Golden Globe Awards and is forecast to gross as much as $120 million by the end of its international run.

If Sense and Sensibility had won best picture on March 25 (an honor it lost to Braveheart), Doran would have personally accepted the Oscar and taken the ultimate bow in Hollywood's spotlight. Yet, a week before the Oscars, Doran made it clear that winning the award would not be as important to her as many might think.

"What's important is that people have found this movie and have enjoyed this movie, and been terribly moved by this movie, and whatever happens on Monday (Oscar night) can't take that away," she said.

Besides, not winning the Oscar for best picture puts Sense and Sensibility in the company of a long list of noteworthy nominees that failed to garner the top prize. "It's a Wonderful Life--which was nominated for five Oscars--didn't win anything," Doran said. "And yet you can't think of a movie that has lived in the hearts of America longer or stronger." --Francine Tyler