FOR CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

When Reese Witherspoon was 17, she had already appeared in four films. Still, she took an unlikely part-time job, as an intern in Disney’s post-production department. “I wanted to learn about editing, visual correction, and sound mixing,” she tells me 25 years later. Not long after, she worked as a production assistant on the 1995 Denzel Washington film Devil in a Blue Dress, helping with casting, among other things.

Also: “I parked Denzel’s Porsche!” That inquisitiveness, as well as nearly three decades in front of the camera, has made Witherspoon one of Hollywood’s most astute producers. She turned Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl into a $369 million worldwide hit in 2014 (that earned Rosamund Pike an Oscar nomination) and did it again, that same year, transforming Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild, into a breakout success ($52 million plus Oscar nods for Witherspoon and costar Laura Dern). Then came HBO’s Big Little Lies, executive produced with costar Nicole Kidman; the cultural bellwether about female relationships and domestic abuse, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, swept nearly every category it was nominated in at 2017’s Emmy Awards.

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After years of hearing from studio executives that there was no market for femaledriven films, Witherspoon had succeeded to a degree that proved a hunger was there. Her instinct for what women want is now being tested on multiple platforms through her 18-month-old storytelling company, Hello Sunshine. She and her team currently have shows in development at Hulu, NBC, and Apple TV (which has partnered on three projects, one rumored to be the biggest deal in history for a straight-to-series show), as well as a film at TriStar/Sony Pictures. But Witherspoon is also laying the foundation for a direct-to-consumer brand, one that is already  beginning to speak to women through a website, social media, YouTube and Facebook videos, audiobooks, podcasts, and newsletters—whichever platform she and Hello Sunshine execs think best honors the story being told. For all the company’s digital ambition, Hello Sunshine’s Santa Monica, California, headquarters have an old-fashioned feel.

The loftlike interior, with exposed wooden beams and pipes, is cheerfully decorated by Crate & Barrel (Witherspoon collaborates with the retailer). Vintage typewriters and hundreds of books make plain the company’s abiding passions: stories and the people who tell them. Sheets of paper with typewritten words to live by, tacked to a wall, gently rustle every time the front door opens. “I hope that you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there,” reads one, a line from Nora Ephron’s 1996 commencement address at Wellesley College. “And I also hope you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.” Fluorescent signs at the back of the room illuminate a five-word ethos: OPTIMISM, HUMOR, CURIOSITY, HONESTy, GENEROSITY. The space—which doubles as a set for interviews—is recognizable from videos on the Hello Sunshine website. Witherspoon’s glassed-in office is within shouting distance of her coworkers, who on a late March day sit or stand at a handful of desks or read books in armchairs. Witherspoon is wearing a navy blazer and a blue shirt with white hearts, both from Draper James, the apparel and housewares brand she launched online in 2015 as a “hey y’all!” celebration of her down-home roots. Her look is feminine, but not precious.

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Or, as her friend Kerry Washington describes it, “genteel Southern badass.” Witherspoon, in person, bears a distracting similitude to Elle Woods, the character she made famous with 2001’s Legally Blonde. Celeste Ng, whose novel Little Fires Everywhere is being adapted by Hello Sunshine for Hulu, had a similar first reaction: “She’s bubbly and perky and scarily smart. I thought, Oh my god, it’s Elle Woods! But there’s a kinship with [Election’s] Tracy Flick, too, in that people who underestimate her learn their mistake really fast.” Wherever Witherspoon goes—Asia, Europe, Africa, South America—she is stopped by Legally Blonde fans: “I went to law school because of you,” they’ll say, or, “You helped me believe in myself.” She gets teary talking about the film’s impact. “I didn’t even understand when I was making it that it was a bit of a modern feminist manifesto,” she says. “Seeing a woman who is interested in feminine attitudes—getting her nails done—but who is also interested in promoting herself and accomplishing things was a new idea of feminine. A lot of women related to that, and the feeling of being underestimated.” Cynics might wonder if Witherspoon’s production company was merely designed to capitalize on #MeToo’s momentum. But Hello Sunshine was founded in November 2016, nearly a year before the flood of 60-plus allegations against veteran Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein exposed just how endemic and toxic the industry’s gender imbalance has been. The outpouring of firsthand accounts of sexual abuse from fellow actors encouraged Witherspoon to reveal her own multiple experiences of harassment and assault, including by a director when she was just 16. She was among the Hollywood women who organized the all-black dress code for the Golden Globes this past January as part of the Time’s Up movement. “Part of me is incredulous,” says Witherspoon of Hollywood’s quick  “pivot to addressing gender disparity. “I can’t believe people are actually listening now. It’s also a relief,” she adds with a laugh, “not to have to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting talking about the lack of content for women. Now it’s, ‘Yeah, got it.’ ”

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At the same time, she says, “a lot of us are having to step up into leadership positions that we didn’t know we were capable of. I definitely feel that in my life.” Putting more women on screen is a Hello Sunshine mandate. But surfacing the voices of real—and diverse—women is the company’s true mission. There are many female-focused production companies, and several successful digital brands that produce social content directed at women, but no entity has yet tried to do what Witherspoon is attempting: to build a premium independent film and TV studio within a directto-consumer, female-led brand that operates on multiple platforms. “Fortunately,” Witherspoon says, “I like proving people wrong.”

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Hello Sunshine is Witherspoon’s third production company. At 25, she had an office and five employees to develop movies for Universal Studios. She called it Type A Films. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “In four years I produced one film, Penelope, with Christina Ricci. It was beautiful, and I loved it, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t ready to tell stories—because I didn’t know what stories I wanted to tell.” As she aged, substantial roles became harder to come by. “It was getting laughable how bad the parts were, particularly for women over 35,” says Witherspoon. “And that, of course, is when you become really interesting as a woman.” Suddenly, there were stories she wanted to tell. Witherspoon thought about partnering again with a studio to develop films. Her husband, Jim Toth, dissuaded her. Toth is a motion picture talent agent at Creative Artists Agency, and it was apparent to him that his wife was good at reading the zeitgeist and spotting promising authors. Toth told her, “ ‘Babe, do it yourself,’ ” Witherspoon recalls. “ ‘You read more books than anyone I know.

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You know what works as well as anyone.’ ” She also wanted to “further the evolution of women’s roles,” she says, and they both knew that partnering with a studio would mean satisfying a corporate mandate. “I’d be making products they like,” she says. Witherspoon joined forces in 2012 with another producer, Bruna Papandrea. They created a company called Pacific Standard, which went on to adapt two of that year’s hottest book properties, Crown Publishing Group’s Gone Girl and Alfred A. Knopf’s Wild (Strayed had personally sent an advance copy directly to Witherspoon in November 2011). Around the time that they were developing Big Little Lies, in 2014, Witherspoon began noting changes in consumer behavior. “Women weren’t going to movies,” she says. “They were streaming shows. They were on Instagram and Facebook. Digital was winning. The only way was to go where women are, instead of expecting them to come to us in theaters.” The digital imperative was underscored by her three children—Ava, 18, and Deacon, 14 (with first husband, actor Ryan Phillippe), and 5-year-old Tennessee (with Toth, whom she married in March 2011). For them, YouTube and streaming had replaced watching network TV and going to the movies.

Rather than moaning like so many in the industry about the tyranny of tiny screens, Witherspoon became excited by the creative potential of digital platforms and the relationships forged on social media. She joined Instagram in 2013 and started to build an audience (12.8 million followers to date). Draper James—which now has four brick-and-mortar stores—allowed her to become involved with consumers in a more intimate way. “I’d never had that before. I was always behind a screen. And I’m an extrovert,” adds Witherspoon, who remains creative director and the face of the retail company. Witherspoon’s second-ever Instagram post, in May 2013, was about J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel The Engagements (“I love this book! Has anyone else read?”).

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It got a big-enough reaction that other book recommendations followed. News she posted about Pacific Standard’s coming adaptations of Gone Girl and Wild gave both novels sales bumps. According to Amazon Books, Gone Girl sales tripled following the release of the first movie trailer, then doubled during the opening weekend. Witherspoon learned that she could personally build audiences for movies long before they were released. At the same time, she was also loving the conversations she was having with other women about literature. After starting an informal Instagram-led book club in 2015, Witherspoon grew even more interested in digital community building.

Papandrea preferred to stick with film and TV. The pair decided to dissolve Pacific Standard (though they continue to partner on Big Little Lies; season 2 is due in 2019), and Witherspoon began to think about who might help her build a consumer-facing brand.  If Witherspoon is the soul of Hello Sunshine, then CEO Sarah Harden, a fast-talking Australian, is the heart of the place, pumping life into the operation daily. I meet her in the company’s second office, in Beverly Hills, where the film and TV brainstorming happens.

Harden and Witherspoon met through Peter Chernin, who was head of 20th Century Fox when the studio produced 2005’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, for which Witherspoon won a Best Actress Oscar. When Chernin left the company, Witherspoon followed his career. “He is very smart,” she says, “and a good prognosticator.”

Chernin had gone on to found his own media company, the Chernin Group, and launch (with AT&T) a subsidiary called Otter Media, dedicated to acquiring and building media brands for niche audiences. One of them, Crunchyroll, is now the largest global distributor of anime. The executive overseeing Otter’s acquisitions was Harden, who helped turn digital media studio Rooster Teeth into an online mecca for gamers. “Sixty thousand people go to [the Rooster Teeth] convention in Austin every summer,” Harden says.

“I said, ‘We’ve got to find a female equivalent.’ ” She spent four years looking at existing female-driven brands. Most “were beauty- and fashion-focused, publishing-focused. They weren’t video storytelling at their core. And video is expensive,” she adds. “It takes incisive understanding to build full-scale, profitable businesses around that, and it requires creating a brand people love.” Witherspoon first brought her idea for Hello Sunshine to Chernin in the summer of 2016. One of her criteria: “I needed to have a woman run the company,” she says.

Chernin introduced her to Harden, and by November, Otter Media was Hello Sunshine’s only external seed investor (for an amount in the “single-digit millions,” says Harden), joining Witherspoon, Toth, and investor Seth Rodsky, who was Witherspoon’s partner in founding Draper James. The investment “had nothing to do with Reese being a movie star,” says Chernin. “She’s a great entrepreneur because of her willpower. And she had a remarkably clear idea of what she wanted to build.” He also saw a potentially lucrative white space for an underserved audience.

Unlike the millennial- and coastal-focused brands that dominate the digital landscape, Witherspoon is targeting literate women across America, spanning a strikingly wide age range of 20 to 60. Hello Sunshine now has 19 employees, with 20 more likely to join by year’s end—a workforce that, yes, includes men. It’s important, Witherspoon says, that men “feel they have an opportunity to create a new reality for the world too.” Underlying everything, says Harden, is books. Witherspoon’s book club picks—and, yes, she chooses each one (helpfully, she reads fast)—were an easy way to establish the company’s tone. One of Harden’s first moves after taking the helm of the company last June was to turn each selection into a monthly event, supported by video interviews with authors (usually conducted by Witherspoon), social posts on, say, a book’s inspiration, and giveaways—all in the service of community building.

Maintaining levity is important, says Harden: “You can go to earnest places very quickly, and Reese will say, ‘This is not funny! Nothing about this is funny!’ ” Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine, which counts upwards of 460,000 followers on Instagram, hasn’t reached Oprah book club heights (more than a million followers), but Hello Sunshine is already considered by the publishing industry to be a powerful marketing force. Two of her selections have been HarperCollins titles

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