Julia Phillips - Film Career

Film Career

In 1973, The Sting won the Academy Award for Best Picture and made Phillips the first woman to win an Oscar as a producer (an award shared by Tony Bill and Phillips' then-husband Michael Phillips). In 1977, Taxi Driver, produced by the Phillipses, was nominated for Best Picture. Her third major film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was produced with Michael Phillips and associate producer/production manager Clark Paylow. One of the film's stars, François Truffaut, publicly criticized Phillips as incompetent, a charge she rejected, writing that she had essentially nursed Truffaut through his self-created nightmare of implied hearing loss, sickness and chaos during the production. Phillips was also a notorious drug user (cocaine especially), which she herself chronicled in detail in her memoirs. The side-effects of cocaine addiction caused her to be fired from Close Encounters of the Third Kind during post-production. She worked very little in Hollywood after that, basically disappearing from public notice until she published her memoirs.

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