The Woman Who Loved Movies
Ileen Maisel was the kind of producer other producers would do well to emulate.
This is not an obituary.
For a proper summation of Ileen Maisel’s life and career, I recommend The Hollywood Reporter’s extremely fitting obit, as well as Julian Fellowes’ deeply touching tribute. What follows here is more personal. Ileen’s premature and untimely passing on February 16 left a sudden and unexpected hole in many of our lives. I was a late-comer to her circle — she was already a storied forty-year veteran of Hollywood’s studio system when we were introduced in early 2019 — but we became fast and close friends, and collaborated on a variety of projects over the next five years.
In my own more than three decades in this business, I have known and worked with numerous producers, many with distinguished resumés and reputations — but I have never known anyone as motivated, passionate or inspiring as Ileen Maisel. As a friend, mentor and collaborator — she redefined my perception of what a movie (and television) producer should be, and in the process opened my eyes to what Hollywood can be again. In a business where role models are more illusory than visual effects, Ileen Maisel was an authentic original.
It was in late 2018 when I phoned a longtime friend, Gloria Fan, then a VP with Fox 21 Television Studios (now Disney VP Creative Scripted Programming), to field interest in a true crime television series. The call was purely to facilitate a connection — the property had dropped in the lap of an old film school buddy, Chris Buckley, a veteran commercial producer with three number one Bud Lite Super Bowl spots to his credit. Chris needed a referral in the television world, and I went no further than Gloria, whom I considered one of the brightest young executives in the business. “I know just the producer for this,” she said. “Ileen Maisel.”
Previously a studio executive and feature film producer (she had supervised 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons and produced 2007’s The Golden Compass) Ileen segued into television in April of 2018 with a highly-touted first look deal at Fox 21. Gloria’s instincts, as usual, proved correct — Ileen loved the property and in February of 2019 we met to discuss further steps.
No matter what people say, no one looks forward to a Hollywood meeting. Meetings are minefields on the path to a deal. This meeting was different. Whatever preconceptions I had coming in evaporated immediately. Meeting Ileen Maisel for the first time was like meeting Ileen for the fiftieth time. It was as if we’d known each other all our lives — and it had simply slipped my mind. There was none of the pretense, preening and judgment with which parties typically stake out territory and suss out weakness. Jovial, unguarded and smart as a whip, Ileen loved every solitary second of what she did, and come hell or high water she was going to make sure you loved it too.
At the same time, Ileen was a creature of contradictions — all of which she gladly embraced. A proud San Fernando Valley Jewish girl, she had relocated to London some thirty years prior having fallen in love with what she glowingly called “the greatest city in the world.” Unabashedly American and unapologetically Anglophile, Ileen bridged her two worlds with effortless aplomb, masterminding the Oscar-winning Warner Bros. screen adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons while putting her stamp on such distinguished British and European productions as Onegin (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and Romeo and Juliet (2013). She also famously helped launch the career of Julian Fellowes, for which he thanked her in his 2002 Oscars speech. During her trips to Los Angeles, we’d grab a booth at Factor’s Deli, one of the oldest and last great Jewish delicatessens on the west side of Los Angeles. During my trips to London, Ileen would treat me and my family to breakfast at the historic 127-year-old Claridge’s Hotel in the upscale Mayfair district — the closest thing she had to an office — always taking far more interest in my daughter’s movie tastes than mine.
It took me some time to appreciate that these were not two different worlds for her — it was all part of a single, beautiful world of television and movies. What so many of us compartmentalize by nation and language, Ileen embraced in its international fullness. Wherever there was a pulse, Ileen had her finger on it — and after forty years of bouncing between Hollywood and London, she knew everyone, everywhere.
Ileen’s trips to Los Angeles were predictably intense — spending time with her sister, publicist Cheryl Maisel, while packing in as many meetings as possible for all the projects she was juggling. If you had a slot in her calendar — it wasn’t wasted. Nor was the free time between slots when I would marvel at her ability to manage two cell phones at the same time (one U.S., the other U.K.), taking care of business right up to the start of a lunch meeting. Once a meeting began, however, she gave you her full, undivided attention — and affection.
I had to laugh reading Fellowes’ characterization of their breakfasts at Claridge’s, at which Ileen was “accompanied by about a hundred mysterious vitamins,” because those vitamins accompanied her to Factor’s Deli too.
Ileen was refreshingly fearless in her candor. “What did you think of…” she would often ask me. At first, I’d have to check myself — wearing two hats, as I often did, the film critic was eager to answer while the screenwriter was more circumspect: “Is this a test?” In that nanosecond of hesitation, Ileen charged forward, answering her own question so I could exhale. “What in God’s name were they thinking?” Once again, I hesitated a nanosecond too long — and she again answered her own question with scathingly spot-on insight. “I’ll tell you what happened!” And she did. And she was always right. Even when waxing indignant, Ileen was a delight — punctuating her tirades with hilarious flourishes of profanity and artful dollops of Yiddish. It was in moments such as these when I recognized that she wasn’t just a great judge of story — she was a great storyteller.
Never was that gift for storytelling more evident than when spinning her own tales. Though formally credited as having “supervised” Dangerous Liasons, it was she, as a young Lorimar executive, who was principally responsible for bringing Christopher Hampton’s play Les Liaisons Dangereuses to the screen. It was she who dragged her Lorimar boss, former agent Bernie Brillstein, kicking and screaming to see the play in London (one of the funniest stories I have ever heard), and it was she who fought for Stephen Frears — then only known for directing gritty, contemporary, low-budget British indies — to direct it. She was also immensely proud of her numerous mentions in producer Julia Phillips’ brutal Hollywood tell-all, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, in which she is, quite literally, the only person who not only escapes Phillips’ knife — but emerges as her frequent guardian angel.
Throughout 2019, as we pushed forward on the true crime series as well as a variety of other projects where we found shared enthusiasm, I continued to marvel at her infinite capacity to consume, process and mentally catalog material. This was, after all, “Peak TV,” when the sheer volume of television shows being produced was such that no one could keep track of it all — except Ileen. “You’ve got to keep up, honey! You’ve got to know what’s out there!”
Then came COVID-19 — and the entire machinery of show business ground to a halt. Only a few months into the shutdown of 2020, restructuring from Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox rippled down to the television divisions — Fox 21 was re-christened Touchstone Television, only to be folded into an entirely new management structure at 20th Television several months later.
All of it added delays and layers of complexity to Ileen’s workload — and yet, despite the disruptions — and health problems she hid well — Ileen was a tireless workhorse. As Hollywood stalled, Ileen maintained a pace that would shame people half her age, with none of her health challenges. Incredibly, work with Ileen never felt like work — her enthusiasm was too infectious. Perhaps on some level she understood she was operating on a shortened clock — or perhaps it was the only way she knew to be.
It’s natural that our first impulses in honoring the deceased are rear-facing — paying tribute to the the legacies they leave behind. But forward-facing legacies matter, too — not just the movies and TV series she didn’t live to see to fruition, but the example she set for other producers to follow. No, there will never be another Ileen — but audiences and artists would be far better off, and movies and television would be better, if more producers endeavored to be like Ileen:
Be honest. No writer (or director) is helped by false praise or pulled punches. Ileen never held back, always spoke her mind, and delivered copious notes. If a writer’s latest draft was a step backward, she’d say so. If it was brilliant, but not what the network was looking for — she’d say so. Everyone’s time is precious and life is too short to not tell the truth. In all the meetings and email exchanges we had with other writers, not once was anyone angered or frustrated by her candor — because they knew she was as mindful of their time as her own and wanted nothing but for every project to be the best it could be.
Be a friend. No business is more transactional than film and television. It’s simply too fickle and too hard. Everyone wants something from everyone else because every missed opportunity carries with it the risk of making or breaking a career. The drawback is that when all relationships are transactional, no relationships are meaningful — and a lack of meaningful relationships makes for bad and insincere work. Ileen understood this intuitively — she had seen it play out time and time again. It wasn’t enough to win a collaborator’s trust — she needed you to know she genuinely cared, and not just about the project, but about you.
Be humble. Ileen didn’t lack for confidence — her track record spoke for itself. She was an impeccable judge of material and she knew it. At the same time, she was also keenly aware of her own limitations and wouldn’t hesitate to lean on a trusted collaborator. “What do you think, Wade?” I never quite got used to that question — she would drop it like a hammer in the middle of a lunch meeting when I least expected it. But that was the idea. If I’d seen it coming, it might have been easier to rehearse an answer I thought she wanted to hear. What she wanted was the truth —and when you’re caught off-guard, you have no choice but say precisely what’s on your mind at that very instant. In a business where the truth is typically the first casualty of every conversation — that’s a rare and wonderful quality.
Be tough. Ileen was big-hearted, buoyant and earnest — but she was no fool. The business is still a shark tank. Even if you can navigate it and forge meaningful relationships with good people, at some stage you still bump up against sharks. Ileen had been around long enough to have dealt with nearly all of them and she didn’t mince words. While researching a property we were hoping to option, I clashed with an especially intransigent gatekeeper with whom Ileen already had a long history. She was unflappable. Not only would we not entertain his demands — we wouldn’t even give him the courtesy of a reply. The demand didn’t warrant it. His penchant for obstruction would not be dignified. He would have to come back to us — or we would approach the option another way. Ileen understood that bad faith and bad behavior beget bad projects. Neither should be tolerated.
Do the work. There’s a longstanding Hollywood principle of proportionality that the greater a producer’s success, the bigger their staff and the less work they personally do. Not Ileen Maisel. She had one assistant, took all her meetings at Claridge’s and did her own reading. Not only that, she read voraciously. When I gave her two books to consider for a series — she read both inside of three days. When she received a script or a draft, she typically turned it around overnight — with notes. It was all part of her karmic sense of fairness and reciprocity — work for work, goodwill for goodwill, grace for grace.
Work hard. Ileen had ample excuses to postpone her frequent travels between London and Los Angeles, especially during the pandemic. At one point, in addition to her general health struggles and compromised immunity, she suffered a broken bone after a stumble in London. Rather than wait for the break to heal, she and her boot hobbled to Los Angeles for meetings as scheduled — to which she still drove herself, boot and all. I was never less than awed by her stamina and strength of will. But Ileen knew no other way but to give 200%. She understood that a producer has no right to expect others to work harder than they work themselves.
Have fun. Fame. Prestige. Money. Power. The entertainment business offers no shortage of Faustian incentives for aspiring creatives. None of which necessarily make for good movies — and none of which ultimately mattered to Ileen. She was in it for love. I must here make something of a confession — because the title of this tribute was meant to reference François Truffaut’s 1977 film The Man Who Loved Women (and, by extension, Blake Edwards’ 1983 remake, starring Burt Reynolds). The irony of the title, for those who’ve seen the film, is that it’s not at all about a man who loves women — but a man who loves himself. Likewise, it’s not quite correct to say that Ileen loved movies — because what Ileen really loved was people. I had hoped to see her again at Claridge’s at the end of March — but it was obviously not meant to be. Just the same, my family and I arranged to have breakfast at Ileen’s table in her honor. As we traded Ileen stories amongst ourselves, we also conversed with the Claridge’s staff, who were happy to share stories of their own. “I’ve known Miss Ileen for four years,” proudly beamed one young female server. “She was always asking about my boys,” said a senior member of the wait staff of her affection for his team. At one point near the end of our meal, the maître d' approached and put his hand on my shoulder. “Did you see the plaque?,” he asked, pointing toward the base of our table. Not quite certain to what he was referring, I leaned down to see a small brass plaque attached to the foot of the table. It reads:
Ileen Maisel held court here from 1988-2024. A Pioneer Producer in International Film Productions. A true original as a person and a creative force. Respected and beloved friend to her artist community. Her family and Claridges’ family will miss her always.
Some producers spend a lifetime collecting awards, riches and prestige — while trampling people and relationships. Ileen spent a lifetime collecting loyal friends and faithful collaborators. She reveled in the companionship of creative people and treasured every moment she was blessed to work with them. May her memory and her legacy be for a blessing for us all.
