Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker

by Stephen Galloway

  After a falling-out with Columbia, Chayefsky had turned to MGM to make Network, the story of an aging news anchor who is about to be fired when he announces he will commit suicide on the air, sending ratings skyrocketing and the anchor, Howard Beale, on a downward spiral into madness.

  Lansing read the 160-page black comedy in July 1975, when it was first submitted to MGM’s story department. She was impressed with Chayefsky’s dialogue and his deft interweaving of Beale’s story with that of an ambitious young woman and an older, morally conflicted newsman. She was equally taken with the cast: Peter Finch as Beale, William Holden as the older newsman and Faye Dunaway as the young network executive with whom Holden has an affair.

  “I loved the fact that this career woman is shaking when the older man leaves her,” said Lansing, “and the cautionary tale that presents of building your whole life around your career, when you also need love.”

  “It was one of the most astonishing things I’d ever read,” added Merzbach. “It read on the page the way you saw it on the screen. It was daring. It was heartbreaking. It was gutsy. It was sentimental and ‘fuck you’ at the same time. There was concern about Holden: he was an alcoholic, and how would that work? And Faye was not easy. But we knew we were going to explode with it.”

  Entrusted to deliver MGM’s script notes, Lansing arrived at Chayefsky’s eleventh-floor office in midtown Manhattan to find him sitting near a piano and a pile of National Geographics, rumpled and weathered, but surprisingly sweet. He listened calmly and politely as she spoke, and never objected to any of her notes, though few—if any—made it into the finished film.

  “I sat in a chair, and he sat in a chair,” recalled Lansing. “He hunched forward and said, ‘Who sent you?’ I said, ‘Well, Danny Melnick.’ He listened, and went ‘Hm-hmm.’ When Danny told me to fly to New York, I didn’t think twice. Here I was, a ‘female’ story editor, giving notes to one of the greatest writers of our time. Obviously, he was thinking: ‘Melnick sent a story editor to give notes to Paddy Chayefsky? You sent a sacrificial lamb, because you ain’t got the balls to do it yourself!’ ”

  —

  Nor did he have the balls to stand up to Don Siegel when the director confronted Lansing in a story meeting with Melnick and other executives.

  Tough and anti-authoritarian, Siegel had made the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, and had worked frequently with Clint Eastwood on films including 1971’s The Beguiled and Dirty Harry. He was blunt and unpretentious, but became threatening when he met with MGM to discuss the Charles Bronson thriller Telefon.

  “Sherry Lansing was a most attractive girl in her late twenties,” he recounted in his autobiography, A Siegel Film. “She was very enthusiastic about a sequence in one of the earlier scripts, which took place in the lady’s [sic] restroom at a train station. The scene showed our leading lady combing her hair. While looking in the mirror, she notices one of the toilet doors slowly opening, revealing a filthy derelict holding a knife. As he tries to rape our leading lady, she badly beats him up.”

  Siegel outlined their conversation:

  ME: It’s difficult to shoot leading ladies in any type of physical encounter. Bronson could and should take care of all the physical encounters. I know he’ll want to. Also, we don’t need the scene.

  LANSING: (Voice filled with emotion) When she is attacked by this bum and fights him off, the audience will stand up and cheer!

  ME: Sherry, the script is very long now and this scene should be the first one to be cut out.

  LANSING: I feel very strongly that it should be left in.

  ME: When it comes to rape, you unquestionably know more than I do. I’m also quite sure that in karate you are much better than I. (Very businesslike, standing up.) Perhaps the committee might like to witness what would happen if I tried to rape you—without a knife, of course. (Walking towards her.) I think you should get to your feet with your back towards me. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

  Lansing did not move.

  After that, Siegel wrote: “Her face turned beet-red. She was glued to her chair. Having made my point, Dick [Shepherd] asked me to take my seat. Sherry’s face no longer looked flushed. Hatred filled it instead.”

  “I remember the final line he uttered as he returned to his seat,” said Lansing. “He looked at me and condescendingly remarked, ‘The point is, my child, I don’t have to take your notes.’ But I wasn’t afraid to argue with him or anyone else.”

  And yet neither was she prepared to blame him for his flagrant sexism, any more than she blamed other Hollywood men.

  “I dealt with sexism by denying it,” she said. “Did I hold grudges? Absolutely. But I felt I had two choices. Either I was going to quit my job, stand on a picket line and burn my bra, or I was going to have to find a way to navigate the system until I reached a position where my opinions would be heard.”

  In early 1977, Melnick left MGM to become Columbia’s head of production and spent the next few months urging his protégée to follow him.

  “I wouldn’t go,” said Lansing, “and he was furious, even though it was a much better position. I’d be overseeing films from beginning to end and not just working on scripts. But people thought I was attached to him, that I had no identity of my own. I had to break that tie.”

  “It was a problem for her, and it continued to be a problem,” said one Columbia executive. “She was perceived as Danny’s person, and Danny was very polarizing. He had such a sense of himself. He was so narcissistic and had such an overweening sense of his own power that it blinded him [to other things]. It was hard for her to create an identity away from that.”

  For months Melnick wooed Lansing, dangling his most coveted projects before her and convincing her she needed to ascend to the next level as a production executive.

  “You’ve learned how to work with writers, but you need to know how everything fits together,” he told her. “That means working on the casting, getting on the set, sitting through the editing.” The worst kind of executive, he believed, “was one who simply stayed in his office without ever getting closer to the movie than his phone. The best was one who knew how to roll up his sleeves and plunge in during the myriad crises that would rock a movie, from the script all the way to the release.”

  In November 1977, she succumbed to Melnick’s pleas and assumed her new post as vice president of production at Columbia.

  —

  She was now one of a tiny cadre of women to hold executive positions at the studios, including Marcia Nasatir at United Artists, Roz Heller at Columbia and Nessa Hyams and Paula Weinstein at Warner Bros. Soon there would be one fewer, when Heller was pushed out, partly to make room for Lansing. She blamed the sexism of the time, believing Melnick bought into the conventional wisdom that “it was inconvenient to have two women executives.”

  If he was guilty of such thinking, that would hardly have been unusual. Such attitudes toward women were omnipresent in Hollywood, which was still at a remove from the waves of feminist thought that were roiling the East Coast.

  “There was no feminism in Hollywood,” said Paula Weinstein, whose mother, Hannah, a pioneering producer, had fled to Europe to avoid the blacklist of the 1950s. “It had a half-asleep feeling. When they talked about ‘women’s pictures,’ it was as if each film starring a woman had to be some kind of deep meditation or a depressing, menopausal story. They didn’t see women in any complex, heroic way. And because we were competitive with each other, there wasn’t the atmosphere that I saw in New York, where you could draw women from other businesses to be in your support group.”

  Women had always had a voice in Hollywood, from the silent era on, but had never banded together to fight for equal rights. Individuals had made their mark—from Mary Pickford, an early star and powerful executive who co-founded United Artists; to Virginia Van Upp, a producer who supervised dozens of productions in the 1940s; to Dorothy Arzner, a prominent director from the 1920s on; to Frances Marion, who for yea
rs was Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter—but neither they nor the less prominent women in the studios had ever coalesced to demand change.

  Few women dared to challenge the system head-on. Those that did often paid a steep price—witness actresses Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis, who chafed under the studios’ suffocating grip, and then were forbidden to work when they rebelled. (De Havilland took Warners to court when it tried to extend her contract illegally, and won a landmark ruling.) Most women were too focused on their own careers to worry about anything else and thought of their female peers as rivals rather than friends.

  Lansing was no exception, and her contemporaries were as suspicious of her as she was of them, leaving little room for détente.

  “The truth is, I didn’t seek the friendship of the other women who’d reached my level, and they didn’t seek mine,” she said. “My only close woman friend in the industry was [ICM agent] Martha Luttrell. My mother’s generation always said that women couldn’t trust women, and I accepted that. We believed there was only room for one woman to succeed. It was only as I got older that I realized we could all succeed.”

  Among the few high-profile women whom she might have sought out, Julia Phillips, the first female producer to win an Oscar (for 1973’s The Sting), “was so tough she intimidated me.” There was also Sue Mengers, a formidable agent who represented everyone from Barbra Streisand to Tatum O’Neal and gave star-packed parties. “But I wasn’t invited.”

  Nasatir, the most senior of the women executives, was eighteen years older than Lansing, and their relationship was never warm, though they worked in the same building when Nasatir was a vice president at United Artists. She was bright and pugnacious, but her philosophy was diametrically opposed to the younger woman’s, and she was convinced the men around her saw women primarily as sexual objects. “Sexism doesn’t have to be about making a pass, but just an attitude about women,” she said. “Everyone is sexual prey.”

  Lansing’s point of view was different. No matter how the men behaved, she believed, ultimately she would be judged by her work. Later, she reconsidered that stance as she gradually came to embrace feminism—particularly through the writings of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem—but for now she gave the notion of institutional bias short shrift.

  “I should have spent more time thinking about that,” she said. “But instead I chose to do the job.”

  —

  After years in the doldrums, Columbia was enjoying a renaissance following the arrival of Alan J. Hirschfield as CEO in 1973.

  An émigré from Wall Street whose extroverted style and gregarious personality were well suited to the entertainment industry, he had hired David Begelman, a prominent agent, to run the film division, and together they had green-lit such hits as the Streisand movie Funny Lady, the rock musical Tommy, and the Warren Beatty satire Shampoo (all from 1975), along with the Martin Scorsese drama Taxi Driver (1976) and the ocean-bound thriller The Deep (1977).

  A sense of exhilaration filled the hallways when Lansing got down to work days after the mid-November opening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a colossus for Columbia, which had bet the house on it. Originally titled Watch the Skies and then retitled Kingdom Come before assuming its eventual name, the picture had cost $19.4 million at a time when the average studio release was around $3 million. It would earn a spectacular $300 million around the world—though not enough to dethrone the year’s biggest hit, Star Wars.

  These were not the kinds of pictures Lansing identified with the most—“I liked characters and people, and stories about real relationships and human dilemmas,” she said—but she recognized their importance.

  A sea change was taking place. Spielberg and his friend George Lucas were reforming the industry with huge, special-effects-driven films that were sucking up audiences in droves and pushing out the cutting-edge dramas that had ridden in with the 1970s, before they had time to lodge in America’s consciousness.

  These new movies did not just have bigger budgets and bigger ideas; they also had quite different marketing campaigns. Whereas studios had traditionally opened their films in a few theaters and then gradually unfurled them across the country—a process that could take months and often more than a year—pictures were beginning to open at the same time throughout the United States. That meant studios could no longer rely on critical buzz and word of mouth but had to think nationally, making a massive number of prints and investing heavily in TV advertising. Television ads in turn encouraged simple scripts and simple ideas that could be sold in thirty seconds.

  1975’s Jaws was among the first blockbusters to be marketed like this. Its success was a lightning bolt that prompted other studios to follow suit.

  “We were still years away from the time when a movie would open on three thousand or four thousand screens,” said Lansing, “but this was unmistakably different. I was coming in at the end of one era, just as another was beginning.”

  The China Syndrome, her first film at Columbia, straddled both.

  —

  A drama starring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, its title referred to what might happen in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, when a reactor could hypothetically burrow through the earth and all the way to China. It had been developed by Douglas, who did not yet have enough clout to get it off the ground on his name alone. At the same time, Fonda had been preparing her own nuclear project at Columbia about the life of activist Karen Silkwood, but had been struggling to obtain the rights. When the studio made it clear that only one of these two stories would reach the screen, the stars merged their projects, and the lead role, originally written for a man, was reworked for Fonda.

  The daughter of Henry Fonda, at her peak as one of the greatest stars of the screen, Jane was a serious “get” for the studio and carried the most clout on the film. But Douglas, another child of an industry icon, was the picture’s producer as well as its co-star.

  At thirty-three years old, he burned with the desire to escape the shadow of his father, Kirk. He had just won an Oscar for producing 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, having obtained the rights to the Ken Kesey novel on which it was based from his father, on the understanding that Kirk would star. In the end, Jack Nicholson played the part, much to Kirk’s disappointment.

  Douglas had the glow of success but was still trying to use his producing acumen to further his stardom when Lansing strolled down the hallway and into his office.

  “I poked my head in and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sherry,’ ” she recalled. “He was standing behind his desk, looking over some papers. His hair was combed back and he was wearing a dress shirt and slacks. He was unpretentious and just adorable, but he took one look at me and said, ‘Honey, casting doesn’t start until next week.’ ”

  When Lansing explained that she was the executive in charge of his movie and not some aspiring actress, “the color drained from his face,” she said.

  “We didn’t know anything about a woman named Sherry Lansing,” said Douglas, “and quite honestly, my jaw dropped. There was this absolutely stunning woman, in her high heels definitely over six feet tall. I had all these sexist thoughts and was ready to dismiss her simply based on how beautiful she looked.”

  The two were the same age, but Douglas was very much the senior in terms of experience. Still, if he expected to lord it over Lansing, he was wrong. He soon learned that she had strong convictions and great confidence in her judgment.

  A meeting was convened at Melnick’s home to discuss the script, and Lansing went over her notes with Douglas, Fonda, associate producer Bruce Gilbert and writer-director James Bridges. If she felt the slightest bit uncomfortable, it was only because Bridges remembered her from an audition a few years earlier, when he had been characteristically gracious, though he had not given her the role.

  “Jim was a very calm man with a rumpled look and a soft-spoken, almost academic demeanor,” she said, “but he must have wondered what I was doing there. I’d audition
ed for 1970’s The Baby Maker. In fact, I’d had two auditions, and I wasn’t nervous in either one—they were two of the few where I wasn’t terrible. He was so kind and had such an open, gentle face and treated people with such respect that I knew I’d never forget him.”

  The others in the room were less welcoming. Gilbert, who was beginning his career as Fonda’s partner, seemed skeptical. “He just assumed I was Melnick’s spy,” said Lansing. “Maybe the others did, too. I could feel their eyes rolling.”

  “I was the young punk with one credit,” said Gilbert. “The truth is, David Begelman [the movie division president] had tried to kill our movie. My best guess is it had been green-lit by [former studio executive] Stanley Jaffe, and Begelman wanted to kill anything Stanley laid his hands on. But Sherry really listened, and when she brought notes to the table they were clearly thought out.”

  With the script running at 160 pages, or forty pages longer than average, Lansing suggested trimming the first act by fifteen pages, pointing to scenes that could be eliminated and others that could be consolidated. She also pushed hard for the screenplay’s dense thicket of nuclear information to be made simple and clear, allowing an audience to understand what was going on.

  “All of them were well versed in the nuclear debate, and I had only a layman’s knowledge,” she said. “In many ways, I was the best and worst person to work on that script, because I knew enough to care but not so much that it would clutter the story. They were so obsessed with the issue, they couldn’t comprehend that another person might not be. I’d say, ‘I don’t understand. Help me.’ I wanted the underlying science to be clear to me, so that it would be clear to anybody.”

  Bridges and Douglas were impressed, and it helped that Lansing strongly connected with Fonda’s character, a frustrated local TV news reporter whose bosses refuse to give her any meaningful assignments. “I identified with her,” said Lansing. “To avoid being seen as a token, she has to work twice as hard and dig three times as deep.”