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

by Stephen Galloway

  Scared that Fox would dismiss his movie as too small-scale, Puttnam shrewdly shot one of its biggest scenes, in which Cambridge students gather inside a hall, at the very beginning of production and quickly cut together shots of the runners racing on a beach, all designed to win over studio skeptics.

  Once the film had wrapped, Lansing flew to London for a screening, where Puttnam met her, winded. He had gotten stuck in the subway when the train ground to a halt and had raced through the city’s streets, lugging heavy film cans under his arms, terrified he’d be late. “It almost killed me,” he said.

  Lansing was enthralled by what she saw, even without the movie’s celebrated Vangelis theme, which was added later. She fully expected Levy to love the movie as much as she did when Puttnam flew to Los Angeles to show them the completed version. But twenty minutes into the screening, the executive raised himself heavily from his seat and stumbled out of the room, never to return.

  “Norman walks out, smokes a cigar and decides not to do the movie because he thinks it’s not commercial,” said Lansing. “I was so angry. I begged Hirschfield to pick up the U.S. rights, but he deferred to Norman, who refused to release it.”

  “Sherry was very, very embarrassed,” said Puttnam. “We then had a series of extraordinary conversations [with Levy], who wanted to sell the picture to another company. He even showed it to ABC Sports to see if they’d buy it as a movie-of-the week. But they turned it down.”

  Instead, the film’s North American rights went to Warner Bros. and the newly formed Ladd Company, which jointly paid a negligible $1.2 million, while Fox retained the foreign release. The following year, Chariots won the Oscar for Best Picture in an upset over the two favorites, Reds and Atlantic City, giving the Ladd Co. an Academy Award and rubbing salt in Lansing’s wound.

  At this point, even Levy realized he had made a mistake and openly acknowledged it.

  “The wonderful thing,” said Puttnam, “was that the morning after we won the Oscar, Norman walked into a staff meeting, rolled up Daily Variety with the headline about it, did a [mock] hara-kiri on himself, and slumped over the table.”

  —

  Lansing’s relationship with Levy took another hit when Fox was given the chance to pick up a low-budget comedy named Porky’s, a raunchy coming-of-age story that had been financed independently, with just a little money from the studio. The movie—about a group of Florida high-school students who go to a nightclub in the hope of finding a prostitute to relieve them of their virginity—may have been crass, but it was also funny, and Lansing felt sure it would appeal to the audience she most needed to reach: the teenage boys and young men who were increasingly dominating ticket sales. Porky’s seemed to fit neatly into the mold established by 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House, which had earned more than $142 million and made Belushi a movie star. But Levy was appalled.

  “It’s disgusting,” he said. “It goes against everything Fox stands for.”

  “It’s hysterical and it’s sweet,” Lansing maintained, “and it’ll make a fortune.”

  Reluctantly, Levy agreed to give the picture a trial run in a few provincial theaters before going on to a wider release.

  “I lobbied Norman like crazy to release the picture at Christmas,” said one of its producers, Don Carmody, “which of course he refused to do. He was like, ‘Get rid of this dirty movie!’ ”

  Lansing waited to see how it performed. “I knew nothing about distribution or how theaters were booked,” she said, “so I believed Norman was genuinely testing the marketplace. But all he was trying to do was bury the movie.”

  When Porky’s debuted in two cities in 1981 without any promotion, it sold out every show. Local audiences somehow heard about it and flocked to see it, giving Lansing a huge boost, only for Levy to take the credit. “He told the press that his limited-release strategy had worked,” she said. “It showed there was an audience for Porky’s, and now he was going wide.”

  The picture opened across the nation in March 1982 and stayed number one for nine weeks, making a fortune in relation to its cost. But it laid bare a fundamental flaw at the top of the studio, apparent to all its staff: not only were the marketing and production heads at loggerheads, but neither was able to make any important decision without the other’s agreement. King and queen were frozen in place, each checked by the other.

  “If I’d known how important marketing and distribution were, and how little power I’d have if I couldn’t control that,” said Lansing, “I would never have accepted the job.”

  She soon found Levy angling to control production as well. Unknown to her, his contract stated that he would be promoted over Lansing within eighteen months, and he would be given the job of running the whole movie division. It was an agreement Hirschfield had arranged and kept secret, just as he had secretly agreed to promote Frank Price without telling Melnick. But this was in complete violation of Lansing’s contract, which guaranteed that nobody could be promoted above her and that she would report to Hirschfield alone. It was the kind of contractual quagmire that could have led to a lawsuit.

  For more than a year, Lansing and Levy worked together in ignorance of Hirschfield’s duplicity, until the truth came out.

  “I was in Norman’s office,” recalled Lansing. “We were arguing about a movie. He said, ‘Why are you always so difficult? You know you’re going to be reporting to me in a year.’ I said, ‘What? I’m going to be reporting to you?’ He got it right away. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘I can’t report to anybody but Alan. That’s in my contract.’ He was so angry. He went to his desk and picked up the phone. He said, ‘Tell Alan Hirshfield to come into my office. It’s urgent.’ Alan walked in the door and we were both standing there. Norman said, ‘You never told her that she was going to report to me?’ Alan shrugged and smiled. He went, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ”

  Added Lansing: “My relationship with Norman was terrible, and the fact that Alan had lied to both of us, and signed two contracts giving each of us the same power—telling me I was the head of the studio and couldn’t report to anyone but him, and telling Norman he’d have complete authority—was unethical beyond belief.”

  For once they were united in anger. “Norman was furious,” she continued. “He said, ‘What does her contract say? What does it say?’ And Alan just grinned and said, ‘So sue me.’ We couldn’t do anything except live with it—unless we really did sue, and then we’d be hurting ourselves.”

  Even as Hirschfield’s subordinates were clamoring for more authority, he was fighting to gain authority of his own. Like Ladd, he bristled under Stanfill’s leadership, and the tension between them was mounting.

  “It was a sea of dysfunction,” said John Davis, a young executive whose father would later buy the company. “Stanfill hated Hirschfield, and they all hated Stanfill.”

  As Stanfill struggled to maintain order, his troops chafed under his leadership. Then he had a brainwave: he would hire Theodore Levitt, a professor at the Harvard Business School, to develop a strategy for success. The economist had proved brilliant in many arenas, but “his ideas were amateurish,” said Davis. “Basically, it all came down to ‘Make more blockbusters.’ ”

  After weeks of work and thousands spent on developing this economic theory, Levitt was dismissed and his suggestions tossed aside, useless to a group of executives whose every thought was about how to make blockbusters.

  Then Stanfill drew howls of derision when he hired a therapist to broker the peace. “The psychologist would sit in everybody’s office,” said Davis. “They all thought he was an idiot. He’d talk to the executives and do sessions [with them] and try to figure out how to get these warring people to get along. It could never work and it never did. It was the Keystone Kops.”

  —

  The Keystone Kops ended their run when Davis’s father, Marvin, bought the studio from its shareholders in June 1981.

  He had purchased it for $725 million, a
long with financier Marc Rich, who would soon flee the country to avoid charges of tax evasion, leaving Davis on the hook for the fugitive’s share of the money. (Rich was infamously pardoned by President Clinton many years later.) But Davis was nothing if not shrewd: he had spent only $50 million of his own money, the rest coming from bank loans.

  A six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Denver oilman whose country-boy bonhomie masked his toughness, he was an odd fit with Hollywood. He could be immune to social niceties: the Los Angeles Times reported that he once hired a group of African Americans to sit on cotton bales and eat watermelons at his birthday party, to enhance its Old South theme. He was also said to have added Rolls-Royce grilles to his two golf carts (one for himself, the other for his clubs). But he was as rich as he was large, and had amassed a fortune estimated at anything from $300 million to $1 billion, earning his money as a wildcatter who would gamble by digging for oil on untried land, operating on his “third for a quarter” rule: for every three investors, he would get one-fourth of the profits.

  Days after Lansing’s new boss arrived, he summoned his production chief to meet him for the first time. She walked down the hall to his cavernous office and his secretary motioned for her to enter. The man was immense, with a great booming voice to match his girth.

  “Hi, I’m Sherry Lansing,” she said.

  “No, no, honey,” he said. “I don’t want any coffee.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Davis,” she replied. “I’m Sherry Lansing.”

  “I want Jerry Lansing,” he said, “the person who’s running the studio.”

  “I’m Sherry Lansing,” she hit back, “and I’m the person running the studio.”

  “A girl?” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “A girl.”

  Despite his reaction, Davis raised no objection, though he called her “doll face” from then on. “Perhaps I should have been offended,” said Lansing, “but it was a term of affection, and he seemed willing for me to do the job.”

  He was brash, but could be generous, too. When he gave his “doll face” a huge gold watch for Christmas, she thanked him politely, then left his office. “Because I don’t know anything about jewelry, I just thought, ‘Oh, it’s really nice,’ ” she said. Then she ran into Hirschfield. “He said, ‘Do you know what that is?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s a watch.’ He said, ‘No, It’s a Piaget! And it’s worth $20,000.’ ” Lansing went running back into Davis’s office, almost tripping over herself in her hurry to thank him. “I said, ‘Oh my God! I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know how to respond.’ ”

  Davis wanted her to invest in his oil wells, but she had used all her extra cash to buy a small house in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon, and refused. She was financially risk-averse in the best of circumstances, and would have hidden what she earned in her mattress if not for the counsel of her boyfriend, Rogers.

  “A guy was suing Marvin because he had taken his money and put it in what was already a dry hole,” said Rogers. “I said, ‘You don’t need to do this, Sherry. Put the money in the goddamn bank.’ ”

  “Marvin would call us in and say, ‘Give me your money, and I’ll invest it in my wells, and you’ll double it,’ ” said Lansing. “And everyone invested with him, except for one other executive and me. He kept saying, ‘Why won’t you give me your money? I’ll make you rich.’ I’d say, ‘Well, Marvin, I really don’t want to lose it.’ He’d say, ‘Lose it? You’ll never lose it!’ ” But many of her colleagues did.

  Her relationship with her patron was warm, but professional differences soon emerged. Davis had his own ideas about the movies his studio should be making.

  “Some of them were completely unrealistic,” said Lansing. “He said, ‘Let’s make a sequel to The Sound of Music.’ I tried to explain that the composers were dead. But he didn’t want to hear a word.”

  On another occasion, he became incensed about changes he believed Lansing had made to the ending of Taps, her first Fox production. An antiwar tale about a group of cadets who seize control of their military academy to prevent its closure, the picture was produced by Jaffe and starred George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn and a then-unknown Tom Cruise. Davis loved it, at least the first time he saw it.

  “Norman was nervous about its commercial prospects and said we should sell off half to a third party,” said Lansing, “but Marvin wouldn’t think of it. He said, ‘I’m a wildcatter. I dig holes in the ground. I put my money where my mouth is, and I hit gushers. I love this movie and I want all of it.’ ”

  Then the first reviews came out and were scathing, particularly about the ending in which the cadets die. “They were terrible,” said Lansing, “and Marvin calls me into his office with cold eyes and says, ‘Why did you change the ending?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘When I saw the movie, the kids all lived.’ ‘I said, ‘Marvin, they all died.’ He said, ‘Don’t lie to me. You changed the ending.’ I said, ‘The kids were dead six weeks ago. They were dead then and they are still dead now.’ But he refused to back down.”

  His anger continued to simmer during the film’s glittering New York premiere. He was mortified that his first movie would be a flop, the very movie he had invited all his friends to see. In fact, it turned out to be a hit, but the experience soured him on Lansing, she believed. “I don’t think he ever forgave me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, even a guy who’s worth $1 billion can’t stand being wrong.’ ”

  Davis also blamed her for one of the riskier films she had backed: Making Love, the gay-themed story that starred Harry Hamlin, Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean. When Lansing screened it for him, he reacted badly.

  “He was this conservative oilman, just learning to deal with a female division head, and here he was in a Fox screening room having to watch two men kiss,” she said. The movie tanked.

  One failure alone could be forgiven, but Lansing was unable to make up for it with any blockbusters. Films such as Monsignor (a Vatican drama starring Christopher Reeve) and Omen III: The Final Conflict (a horror film) came and went without notice, while even successes such as Taps and Cannonball Run did less well than she might have hoped. She prayed for the kind of breakout hits that rival studios were enjoying—like Paramount, which was enjoying a storied run under the leadership of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and which seemingly could do no wrong thanks to movies such as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Friday the 13th, Airplane! and Raiders of the Lost Ark—just a few of the pictures it released between mid-1980 and mid-1981.

  Perhaps her taste was too genteel, people whispered, or perhaps she was not strong enough to impose her will. Maybe a woman simply was not right for this job.

  As Lansing entered her third year, the industry was awash in speculation that she would soon be gone, and that the whole Fox executive team was on its way out. When a publicity release of July 1982 announced that Lansing’s contract was being extended “for an indefinite period,” few believed it, and the New York Times leaped to the conclusion that “such wording is usually a tipoff in Hollywood not of strength but of weakness….Miss Lansing has had to take the blame for making pictures that are considered too ‘soft.’ ”

  Compounding everything, on August 18, 1982, Lansing learned that Norman Garey, her lawyer, had committed suicide.

  A wise counsel and father figure to his clients, he had been under strain after spending heavily to set up a new law firm, and had become obsessed with the idea that Melnick was going to sue him for malpractice over a minor mistake. In the days before his death, he had fretted about this and about his lack of money. Already under a doctor’s care for depression, he was taking a prescription medication that later was found to have major negative side effects, and had begun to suffer from fainting spells. He blacked out twice within several weeks before shooting himself in the head.

  “The day before he died, he phoned me to say that a client of mine owed his firm $5,000,” an agent, Melinda Jason, said at the time. �
��He sounded distraught and terribly nervous. I checked and the bill was less than a week old. It hadn’t even gotten to the accountant yet.”

  Garey discussed all this with his wife and casually mentioned that maybe “he should shoot himself.” But nobody expected him to do so.

  “We thought he had it all,” Lansing told the New York Times. “When we heard how he died, we were sure someone must have killed him. Suicide would mean none of us knew Norman Garey. It would mean that our father, in a sense, [had] betrayed us. Why? Because none of us could accept not knowing the answer. We started looking for one.”

  Rumors began to spread that she and Garey had conspired with Melnick to embezzle money from Fox. “That led to talk that I was the ‘bag lady’ who was taking the money on my trips to Europe for work, and depositing it in a bank,” said Lansing. “It was ludicrous, but it just grew.”

  “An inquiry by the Los Angeles District Attorney precipitated by the suicide of Norman Garey, a lawyer for Daniel Melnick, the movie producer, is focusing on a contract between Mr. Melnick and the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation that was terminated last August,” the New York Times reported in October 1982. “Mr. Garey shot himself Aug. 18, in the midst of negotiations to dissolve the contract. Shortly before, he had told his wife and others that he was concerned about a ‘mistake’ he had made during the negotiations, according to Robert K. Wrede, another of Mr. Melnick’s attorneys. Both Mr. Melnick and Fox deny any financial irregularities or wrongdoing.”

  The article noted: “Investigations by members of the District Attorney’s staff dealing with white-collar crime in the entertainment industry, who are handling the inquiry into the Melnick-Fox contract, had resulted in criminal cases in the past.”

  Even the usually circumspect trade press floated the rumors, as people began to whisper that Lansing had siphoned money from Fox and given it to Melnick, allegations later believed to have originated with a disgruntled former Melnick employee. Melnick, Lansing and Garey had allegedly been complicit in a deal to split $500,000, the difference between what Fox had authorized Melnick to pay one of his writers and the money the writer had received. When the Hollywood Reporter printed Melnick’s denials, some fifty or sixty people called him to commiserate. “Probably half of them were secretly gloating,” he said.