Reese’s pieces fill the media landscape

Movie moguls used to have a consistent image.
As portrayed (in films and stories and such), they were big and blunt. They drank a lot, smoked as lot, didn’t read much. They definitely weren’t cherubic-faced book nerds.
That’s what makes this surprising: Reese Witherspoon has become one of Hollywood’s top producers.
Yes, that Reese – the one who convinced us she was a ditz in “Legally Blonde” movies. After lots of success in the past – from “Gone Girl” to “Bright Little Lies” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” – her company, Hello Sunshine, has four series streaming this spring:
— “Daisy Jones & the Six” (shown here) starts Friday (March 3) on Amazon Prime. A richly crafted series about a fictional rock band, it’s filled with characters who are deeply flawed, yet deeply fascinating.
— “Tiny Beautiful Things” starts April 7 on Hulu. Author Cheryl Strayed (whom Witherspoon portrayed in “Wild”) offers a comic view of the low points early in her life.
— “The Last Thing He Told Me” starts April 14 on Apple TV+. Jennifer Garner plays someone searching for her husband, while forming an uneasy peace with her teen step-daughter.
— And “Truth Be Told” is midway in its third season on Apple. Its lead character (Octavia Spencer) rages against the scant attention given to missing Black women.
These follow previous successes – including “The Morning Show” and “Little Fires Everywhere” – and occasional flops. Reese’s pieces are scattered across the media landscape. Is there a common thread?
“Everything we do centers on a woman,” Lauren Neustadter, president of film and television for Hello Sunshine, told the Television Critics Association.
Some people might dispute the “everything.” (In “Gone Girl,” Ben Affleck is the central character, but Rosamund Pike is the emotional key.) But one factor is even more consistent:
Virtually all of these projects are based on novels. “For Reese and for me and for our amazing team, … we are constantly reading,” Neustadter said.
Witherspoon has described herself as “a big dork who reads loads of books” and someone who goes “crazy in a book store. It makes my heart beat hard, because I want to buy everything.”
That might have been an un-hip hobby in her youth, but now it’s a career. Witherspoon has her own book club, snatching some projects long before they reached stores.
Neustadter, for instance, told the New York Times that she received an advance copy of “Daisy” when Witherspoon was on vacation. A few hours later, she e-mailed her: “I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow morning, because the book is so good.”
Witherspoon soon replied “I’m obsessed” and made a surprise phone call to author Taylor Jenkins Reid. The deal was closed in 2018, a year before the book hit stores, becoming a best-seller.
Then the pandemic slowed everything … and offered a bonus for the stars. Sam Claflin (shown here) and Riley Keough hadn’t performed music (despite the fact that Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter). They had an extra year to convert into rock stars.
That year was also helpful to Neustadter and her husband. (Scott Neustadter is a screenwriter who has co-written “500 Days of Summer,” “The Fault in Our Stars” and more, now including “Daisy Jones.”)
During that pause, she was also working on “The Last Thing He Told Me,” a novel by Laura David. The shutdown “gave us an incredible opportunity to go even deeper on the material,” Lauren Neustadter said.
David and her husband (screenwriter Josh Singer) “became sort of our Covid buddies …. We would get together on the weekends and have dinner in the backyard with our kids and talk about the show.”
Garner was cast and became equally obsessed with the novel. “I don’t wanna say it’s like a crazy person marked it up, but … there are marks on every page,” Singer said.
Witherspoon’s career goes way beyond the custom of actors being producers of fllms they’re in.
Yes, she acts in some of these projects, including “Wild,” “The Morning Show,” “Big Little Lies” and “Little Fires Everywhere.” But many of the meatiest ones have no role for her.
In February, she starred with Ashton Kutcher in Netflix’s “Your Place or Mine,” a Hello Sunshine production. That was a perfectly pleasant romantic comedy – but no match for the intensity of “Truth Be Told” and others. “We have heavy subject matter every season,” Spencer told the TCA, but this season, “it feels a little more personal.”
Witherspoon’s world seems to have room for the intense and the giddy. She may be open to anything … assuming, of course, it’s from a novel that centers on a woman.