IF THEY EVER make a movie about the Hollywood producer Amy Pascal, the 9,000-square-foot ranch house that she shares with her husband, the playwright and retired Times journalist Bernard Weinraub, set back on a leafy acre in the hills of Brentwood, Los Angeles, deserves top billing. In 1996, the couple moved into what was then a 6,000-square-foot bungalow, built in 1956 by the American designer Cliff May. They got married in the backyard some months later. Their son, Anthony, now 24 and studying law in New York, celebrated his bar mitzvah there. Over the years, the three-bedroom home has been a place to sit shiva, observe holidays and throw awards season after-parties. And in February 2015, when Pascal was pushed out after nearly a decade as a co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment — one of the many consequences of the Sony cyberattack involving leaked company data and employee emails — it also became a refuge. “The house is a part of our family,” says Pascal, 66, on a December morning in their sun-dappled living room, which overlooks a fragrant tangle of peach, kumquat and plumeria trees and a swimming pool lined with green slate tiles. “You look forward to coming back here for serenity,” says Weinraub, 86, as the couple’s dogs lounge next to them on a sofa upholstered in gold velvet.
Although much of the current décor reflects their travels — there are Turkish rugs; hundreds of lanterns from Italy, Japan and Mexico; a Buddha statue from their honeymoon in Bali; a 10-foot dining table carved from a tree trunk that they brought back from Chiang Mai, Thailand — what initially drew Pascal and Weinraub to the building was its West Coast vernacular. The work of May, who was recognized beginning in the 1930s for designing low-slung, pitched-roof houses that blur the difference between indoor and outdoor areas, represents “everything that is great about California,” says Pascal. She recalls walking in and thinking, “This is ours.”
But in 2002, after living there for six years, Pascal and Weinraub decided it was time to renovate. The existing speckled drywall ceilings had, according to Pascal, “that awful cottage cheese texture that was all the rage in the ’50s”; they were replaced with exposed wooden beams and grape-stake battens. The couple expanded the skylit kitchen, which holds Pascal’s large collection of teapots (her mother’s influence) and cookbooks (“I’m not much of a chef, but I love food writing”). At the center of the room, an ebonized oak table by the French furniture designer Christian Liaigre is illuminated from above by ceiling lamps made of old cowbells and West African fish traps. Down the hall in the primary bathroom, a towering bamboo garden conceals a sunken rainbow sandstone tub. “The house is sort of a made-up idea,” she’ll later concede. “It’s just, like, stuff.”
To realize their more ambitious goals — the addition of an office, a movie theater and a gym — the pair relied on the California-based design-build practice Marmol Radziner, which had previously overseen the restoration of a few other May projects and a 1946 Richard Neutra house in Palm Springs. “As you drive up to their place, you can see that new section of the home cascading down the hill,” says Ron Radziner, 63, a founding partner at the firm. “The trick was to try to do it as carefully as we could so we weren’t upstaging what was already there.” For Radziner, who says that Pascal insisted on maintaining “the soul of this house” — which had been conceived as a single-story dwelling wrapped around a central patio and pool area — that meant building out and down rather than up. Pascal’s office, a cozy space with walls of framed magazine clippings, a wood-burning fireplace and a brass-plated copper bathtub that peers over a canyon, extends from the main floor. The gym is one level below, along with an 18-seat movie theater.
Pascal, who grew up in Brentwood — the daughter of Anthony H. Pascal, an economist, and his wife, Barbara, the owner of the Los Angeles bookstore and gallery ArtWorks — always knew she’d go into show business, despite studying international relations at U.C.L.A. Almost all of the personal objects in the house, whether a mug from the “You Must Remember This” film podcast or her Golden Globe for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), reflect that passion. To the right of the main entrance, a display case contains a painted wood-and-foam model of the Santa Monica pier in the 1940s, built by her father, who died in 2017. (The year before, when Pascal started her own production company, Pascal Pictures, she used that miniature as an inspiration for the logo.)
THE EXPANSION WAS completed in 2006, but it hasn’t always been easy to preserve the integrity of the original structure. When the radiant floor heating broke a few years ago, the couple discovered that the only way to fix it was to tear up the original terra-cotta tiles, which they couldn’t bring themselves to do. Instead, Weinraub says, “we bundle up.” Pascal, who seems used to defending this choice, adds, “You can’t make new things look old in the way that old things look old.” Because there’s no air-conditioning — portable units would have been eyesores, central air an intervention too far — Weinraub drags electric fans out of storage every summer. “Amy,” he says, “gets very upset” and hides them. “She’d rather sweat.” And even though Pascal concedes that lighting the home almost entirely with lanterns has made reading at night next to impossible, “it’s really good for beauty.”
For as long as Pascal can remember, this sort of resolve has served her well at home and at work. “Moviemaking, like this house, is about a bunch of tiny decisions,” she says. “If you’re not a part of those decisions, you’re not making the movie.” As a studio head, Pascal felt pressured to come up with hits. (Under her leadership, Sony made billions from the “Spider-Man” franchise and several James Bond films, among other blockbusters.) But in her new role as an independent producer — the transition to which she describes as “humiliating” and “scary” and that has since become “a [reminder] of why I love doing this” — she’s been reawakened to the value of artistic collaboration. “If you work with really talented people, everything you do looks good,” she says.
Pascal was a producer on Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” released last April and starring Zendaya, about a love triangle set in the world of competitive tennis. Up next, she’ll reunite with Christopher Miller and Phil Lord — the co-writers of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (2023) — on an adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 sci-fi novel, “Project Hail Mary.” But she becomes most enthusiastic while talking about the movie she recently shot in London and New York with Noah Baumbach and a cast including George Clooney and Adam Sandler. “It’s about an actor’s journey into himself,” she says. “It’s about the second part of your life.” She understands what that journey is like. “Getting fired didn’t seem like a gift in the moment but, in the end, it was,” says Pascal, who just finished restoring a new home, Gloria Vanderbilt’s former apartment in Midtown Manhattan, with Marmol Radziner. The things that have felt humbling, she says, “those are the things that make you remember who you were in the first place.”
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