The 74th Academy Awards broadcast, which Laura Ziskin produced in 2002, will go down in history for a couple of reasons: It was the first ceremony in which both of the top acting awards went to black actors (Halle Berry and Denzel Washington), and the first held at the newly opened Kodak Theatre. But in the memories of some Oscar watchers, it has a more notorious significance: At four hours and 23 minutes, it was the longest broadcast, by far, in the history of the program.
"I have that sad distinction," says Ziskin, sitting in her office on the Sony lot in Los Angeles. She admits that she'd been warned multiple times about the show's length but refused to make cuts. "I liked everything we were doing, so I didn't want to cut anything," she recalls. "I sort of put my head in the sand and was stubborn."
Despite its length, however, the show was well received, and Ziskin was asked to produce again this year. And fortunately for those who enjoy a good night's sleep, she has a history of learning from her mistakes. A onetime fledgling actress, struggling typist, and failed quiz-show writer, she's now one of Hollywood's top film producers, with such credits as Pretty Woman, To Die For and the multibillion-dollar Spider-Man franchise, the third installment of which opens in May. Three years ago, while she was hospitalized with late-stage breast cancer, Ziskin, 56, was fairly certain that her career highlights were behind her. But at her office today, as she rushes around in jeans, black work boots, and a cashmere sweater while making calls to Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres and director George Miller (Happy Feet) about contributing to the show's opening number, it's the future—particularly Oscar night, February 25—that's on her mind.
Ziskin is particularly excited about DeGeneres, an Academy Awards first-timer who apparently harbors aspirations that go well beyond this year's broadcast. "I don't want to speak for her, but I will," Ziskin says, settling into a sofa with an oversize mug of green tea. "I think she'd love to be the perennial host. She'd love to own it." For Ziskin, the main goal is to avoid a repeat of 2002, when three honorary Oscar tributes ate up about 45 minutes and the acceptance speeches dragged on while she sat in the control room ignoring everyone's pleas to cue the orchestra. "I hate cutting people off," she says. "It's humiliating for them, and I'm a wuss." This year she has challenged DeGeneres to come up with creative ways to ease people away from the podium once they start thanking their lawyers, publicists and dog groomers. She's also installing a "thank-you cam" backstage, giving the winners the option of elaborating upon their speeches, with the results permanently archived on oscar.com. "For the winners, it's one of the most exciting nights of their lives," Ziskin explains. "For me, it's a show. So I'm going to get on my knees and beg them to make it interesting and spontaneous." In addition, she's figuring out a way to make some of the technical awards more compelling to viewers, perhaps by including some "up-close and personal" profiles of unknown cinematographers and editors. "Everybody has a story," she says.
Ziskin's own story is unique in Hollywood, where she was one of the first successful female producers. The daughter of Burbank psychologists, she studied acting at USC but realized she didn't possess an aspiring actor's most crucial tool—denial—during her first meeting with a talent agent. "He took me into a room that had hundreds of head shots in slats along the wall, and he went around and pulled out 25 pictures of girls who looked exactly like me," she recalls. "I gave up." Later she began working for The Newlywed Game and then wrote her own program, a highbrow quiz show called Split Second. When a contestant won a car and subsequently had to give it back, due to an error in one of the questions that Ziskin had written, she knew what to do: quit, before anyone could fire her. Eventually she got a job working for Jon Peters and Barbra Streisand as they shot A Star Is Born, Peters's first film. (Streisand was a notorious perfectionist even then—"Oh, yeah, born that way," Ziskin says. For many years afterward, whenever Ziskin would complete a project, she'd wonder, Would this pass muster if I were doing it for Barbra?)
After scoring her first hit as a full-fledged producer with No Way Out, for which she hired newcomer Kevin Costner, Ziskin executive-produced Pretty Woman in 1990. Made for $18 million, the movie went on to earn $463 million worldwide—"a miracle," says Ziskin, who attributes the film's success almost entirely to the pairing of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. (Gere, then considered past his prime, was a fallback choice; Ziskin couldn't convince any A-list actors to ride shotgun in what was clearly Roberts's movie.) "You cannot underestimate the power of chemistry between two actors," says Ziskin, adding that the stars' rapport wasn't even apparent on the set; she only became aware of it during the early test screenings, when "audiences started flipping out." Still, throughout Ziskin's career, one of her hallmarks has been savvy casting choices, particularly when it comes to superstars-to-be: In addition to Costner, she gave early leading roles to Nicole Kidman (To Die For) and, of course, to Spider-Man's Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.
After a five-year interlude running the mini studio Fox 2000, where she put together a solid slate that included Fight Club and Courage Under Fire, Ziskin went back to producing and secured a deal at Columbia Pictures. Hungry for a big project to start on right away, she walked into studio chief Amy Pascal's office and pleaded, "Just give me the biggest motherf---er you have." Pascal put her in charge of Spider-Man. Several other producers were lobbying for the movie, but Ziskin offered to cut her fee. "Frankly, I think that's why I got the job," she says. Still, her deal included a percentage of the gross—$404 million domestically.
Though Ziskin might not have been an obvious choice for the franchise, Pascal says she didn't hesitate. "Laura is incredibly responsible, incredibly creative and knows every aspect of filmmaking, which is very rare," Pascal says. "Above all what we needed was great storytelling, which Laura excels at."
The day after the L.A. premiere of Spider-Man 2 in 2004, Ziskin, whose breast cancer was diagnosed very late despite regular checkups, was admitted to UCLA Medical Center and underwent a stem cell transplant, an intensely debilitating procedure that prepares the body for high-dose chemotherapy. At the hospital, she kept track of the opening box-office reports with a computer at her bedside. "All these staffers were coming in in haz-mat suits to inject this toxic crap into my body," she remembers, "and they'd be saying, 'The movie's a hit! You had the biggest opening weekend!'"
Her recovery dragged on through 2006, while production was under way on Spider-Man 3. "A lot of people say that cancer is the best thing that happened to them because it taught them to change their lives," Ziskin observes. "I certainly do not feel that way. It sucked." When she started feeling better, Ziskin, who says she was pretty satisfied with her life before the illness, opted to live as if she'd never been sick, to the degree that that's possible. (She has a 23-year-old daughter, Julia Barry, from her marriage to screenwriter Julian Barry, and for the past two decades she has lived with Alvin Sargent, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Ordinary People and, more recently, Spider-Man 2 and 3.) "Obviously I'm an altered human being, and I'm missing some body parts," she says. "And when you've had cancer, a minute doesn't go by that you're not in fear of it coming back. But part of doing the Oscars again was a statement to myself that I'm okay. My life is back, sort of."
Ziskin can't reveal much about the top-secret plot of Spider-Man 3, though she offers this: "Peter Parker's got the girl and people like him, and everything is good. But there's a little bit of hubris, and he realizes that there are other lessons yet to be learned." On the set, she says, cast and crew, now reunited for the third time, felt more pressure than ever: "Everyone's a little more tired. Maybe it's just that we're older, but it's harder physically." It's also pricier. With a budget that looks likely to exceed $250 million, Spider-Man 3 is on track to become one of the most expensive movies ever made. Ziskin resignedly points to the usual suspects: ballooning special-effects costs and increasing star salaries. But with the confidence of a proud mother whose child always wins the spelling bee, she shrugs. "The studio obviously believes they can make money, or they wouldn't do it," she says. "So we're not going to cry any tears for them."
Ziskin, whose future projects include a Katharine Graham biopic for HBO, scripted by Joan Didion, still finds it rather amusing that her name has become synonymous with a comic-book blockbuster. Yet her commercial credibility has made it easier to push forward some of the smaller projects she has always favored, including a new one that marks her third collaboration with Stephen Frears, the director of The Queen. (The first two were Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman, and the Cold War drama Fail Safe for CBS.) "I got lucky to be working on Spider-Man," she says. "It certainly isn't what I ever expected or aspired to. If it had not come along, I would probably be really struggling to make the kinds of movies that I was accustomed to making."
Back in the early 1990s, when magazines started writing glowing articles about women who were finally breaking Hollywood's glass ceiling, Ziskin was often cited as one of the few who'd figured out how to balance family and career. Still, she has never claimed much expertise on the subject. "You have to compromise on all fronts," she says. "If you are 100 percent dedicated to any one endeavor, then by definition you can't have anything else in the way." Once, during her stint at Fox, Rupert Murdoch called a mandatory conference in Australia that conflicted with Julia's 12th birthday. Overwhelmed with guilt about the prospect of missing it, Ziskin took her daughter to New York the week before: They saw Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet, then dined out together with the actor. "It was total overkill—you know, the mother who's afraid her kid is going to hate her," she recalls. And sure enough, when Ziskin called from Australia to find out how her daughter had spent her day, Julia, with impeccable timing, announced that she'd gotten her period. Ziskin broke down in tears.
If the knickknacks in Ziskin's office are anything to judge by, her passions are still pretty evenly balanced between work and family: For every Hollywood keepsake there's a personal memento or family photograph. On a side table is one of those furry, battery-operated Spider-Man dolls that talks and does a herky-jerky dance. Ziskin reaches over to turn it on and seems startled when it launches into its clamorous spiel: "Hi, I'm your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man! Would you like to have some fun? Okay!" As it repeats itself a second, then a third time, Ziskin shakes it, holds it upside down and laughs, then runs out of the office to leave it on her assistant's desk. She can't figure out how to turn it off.
"The Producer," photographed by Elinor Carucci, has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the February 2007 issue of W.
t: Spidey's soooo hawt.:heart: 
). I think there were a couple of new pictures in there as well. I remember seeing one of Gwen Stacy hanging on to something whilst dangling from a skyscraper, which looked very cool.
