The Sting At 50 - How Julia Phillips Weathered The Blizzard

She financed Taxi Driver, Close Encounters and The Sting. But overcoming drugs would provide Julian Phillips with an extraordinary story of her own.

The 1974 Academy Awards ceremony, and proceedings have been thrown into turmoil by the sudden appearance on stage of a man sporting a moustache, a peace sing and not a lot else. With co-host David Niven restoring some sense of decorum (“Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”), Elizabeth Taylor arrives at the dais to announce the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.

This is the cue for more chaos since it emerges that this victor is The Sting, the producers of which include the 29-year-old Julia Phillips. The first woman ever to raise the Best Picture Oscar, Phillips is understandably excited: “You can imagine what a trip this is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck, New York!” she exclaims, tears not far from here eyes. “I get to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor at the same time!”

Years later, it would emerge that Phillips wasn’t just high on life that evening. Indeed, when she listed the substances she was ‘enjoying’ during her date with Oscar in her autobiography, a huge dollop of pertinence was added to her use of the word ‘trip’.
“A diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium which makes three and a glass-and-a-half of wine” - with all that inside here, it was little wonder Julian Phillips felt rather giddy.