Lindsay Doran (born 22 June 1948) is an American film producer and studio executive who has worked on such films as This Is Spinal Tap, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sense and Sensibility, Stranger Than Fiction, and Nanny McPhee.
Early life
Much of Doran's family has worked in the Hollywood film industry. She was born to D. A. Doran, a 55-year-old veteran Hollywood executive producer. Her mother, Marion Avery, began her career in film as a script typewriter for Preston Sturges before marrying D.A., and later became head of the play department at Columbia Pictures. Doran also has a brother, Daniel, a publicist whose work includes the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. She recalled, "[Film] was all around me and what I saw was people who loved it and people who did not have to compromise who they were to be successful in the movie business." D.A. used to provide his daughter with screenplays and short stories, asking her opinion on whether they could be adapted into good films.
In 1967 Doran began attending Barnard College, an all-women liberal arts college in New York City. There, she studied English literature but due to financial constraints she transferred after her first year to University of California, Los Angeles. After three semesters, Doran then transferred to University of California, Santa Cruz, taking "courses in dance, art history, music and architecture." Upon graduating, she moved to London in 1971. She explained of the experience, "I thought I wanted to live there forever, but I couldn't get a visa. I did some writing for film encyclopedias. I had a flat with no heat in Earl's Court and a lot of free time, so I spent most of it in the Brompton Road library. I'd pick an author and read everything." It was in London that she acquired a love of Jane Austen and her works, especially Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility.
Career in film industry
Doran moved to State College, Pennsylvania upon returning from London, where she worked for seven years with public television, first as a secretary and later as a producer and writer. She met her husband, architectural designer Rodney Kemerer, there before returning to Los Angeles, despite her previous desire to not live in the city or work in the film business. Having to begin anew in a new place, Doran found that her "skills writing for public television were completely useless," forcing her to again take work as a secretary. She worked at the Screen Actors Guild, where she "learned a lot" and soon received another job at Hollywood studio Avco Embassy Pictures, working her way up. When Doran was approximately 30 years old, she became an executive at Embassy. There, she worked on comedy films directed by Rob Reiner, including This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing. In 1985, she became the vice president of production for Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles. Her early work as a studio executive at Paramount saw her supervising five films simultaneously. She stated that it was "a 12-hour-a-day job. It was difficult to get involved on a line-by-line basis in a screenplay and I did it anyway because that's what I love to do." There, she oversaw the development of Ghost, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Naked Gun, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, among other films. She developed the script for the 1991 film Dead Again, beginning a professional relationship with actress Emma Thompson that would last more than five films and 20 years.