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

by Stephen Galloway

  Lansing rarely paused to reflect on such matters.

  “I certainly experienced prejudice in my life,” she said. “But by the time I got to Paramount, things really had changed. I didn’t experience any sexism there. How could I say I did? I was getting fair pay, and I was running the place, and whenever we came to hire a writer or producer or executive or director, we never thought about whether it should be a man or a woman. We hired the best person for the job, man or woman, pink or green.”

  —

  With Lansing in place, a new sense of urgency coursed through the studio.

  From day one, she was on the phone, in meetings, reading scripts, studying budgets, cutting trailers, attending screenings. Her decisiveness contrasted with Tartikoff’s lack of it.

  She had developed a style of her own, with a gracious manner that did little to hide the firmness. She knew that each person and situation had to be handled differently. “Some people respond to cajoling, others need emotion and still others need strength,” she said.

  She drew deeply on her instincts as an actress. The same intuition that had propelled her to be curious about her characters made her wish to understand the men and women she worked with, knowing that few people were as complicated as artists. At the same time, some inner force kept pushing her to make things better.

  “I had a need to make everything as good as it could be,” she said. “It was something I was born with, a desire, a compulsion.”

  In luring her to the studio, Jaffe had promised the work would be easy. This would be a year of sequels, he said, a time when Paramount could cruise to victory simply by winding up the mechanical toys in its box and letting them chug to the finish line. Then Lansing met Tartikoff to discuss the transition, and he opened a binder revealing the status of the studio’s projects.

  “It wasn’t that Brandon had left bad stuff,” she said. “He’d hardly left anything.”

  She summoned the senior production team to a meeting. These were the men and women charged with shepherding pictures from inception to completion, from the faintest wisp of an idea through to the finished, multimillion-dollar product. They were a motley crew, mostly in their twenties and thirties.

  There was Goldwyn, the president of production, a tall and lean scion of Hollywood whose ferocious ambition was fueled by his need to escape the shadow of his legendary family. There was Karen Rosenfelt, the daughter of a former MGM chairman, whose rumpled presence and squeaky voice belied her intellect. There was the solid, down-to-earth Don Granger. And there was Manning, a film buff and USC film school graduate who had worked for Coppola and Tanen and directed a film of her own, 1986’s Blue City. She was the only one who did not know Lansing. “I’d never met her,” she said. “I was a worker bee doing my job.”

  Lansing offered words of support. “I said none of them were going to lose their jobs,” she recalled. “I wanted to assess everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. I thought they were good and believed they could be better.”

  —

  It was crucial to get at least one franchise film out of the gate this first year, but Lansing hit a wall.

  Mike Myers’s debut feature, Wayne’s World, had come as a bolt from the blue, an unexpected hit that earned $183 million around the world when it was released in early 1992, far more than Paramount had expected from a low-budget riff on the character he had created for Saturday Night Live, a metal head with a cable-access show.

  On-screen, Myers was an endearing personality, but offscreen he was more nettlesome. He trusted only his wife and alienated some of his strongest supporters, including his agents, who would bemoan his unerring ability to call them at the worst possible time, usually minutes before they were due to leave the office. He had rubbed his fellow SNL cast members the wrong way by creating a backstage character named Fucky, who would moon them and dry-hump some of the women. He was insecure, introverted and often insensitive, as phobic about physical contact as he was about the emotional kind. Fans loved him, Paramount did not.

  Lansing was willing to overlook his flaws until a legal affairs executive told her about an act of carelessness in the creation of Wayne’s World 2.

  “He had based his script on a classic English movie from 1949, Passport to Pimlico,” she said, referring to the Ealing comedy in which a group of British citizens declare their own tiny country. “One of our lawyers discovered weeks before the movie was scheduled to go into production that nobody had ever bought the rights.”

  “Mike had always wanted to do Passport to Pimlico as the basis of Wayne’s World,” said Lorne Michaels, the SNL executive producer who also produced Wayne and its sequel. “We toyed with that in the first go-around. So he went and wrote it. I think he believed the studio understood that, and I think he even believed they had bought the rights to the other movie so that he was free to use it.”

  It would take months to acquire those rights, assuming Paramount was able to buy them at all, and the discovery threatened to topple the project. If the film had been shot, the Pimlico rights holders could easily have gotten an injunction to stop its release. And yet the studio was moving full steam ahead, with promotional materials in place, a release date, and a massive campaign under way.

  Myers blamed Michaels, who was also the movie’s producer, for failing to obtain the Pimlico rights; others pointed a finger at Myers himself.

  “Whoever was at fault,” said Lansing, “it was clear we had a problem. There was only one person who could solve it, and that was him.”

  Calling an immediate halt to work on the film, she summoned Myers to her office, along with his managers and Goldwyn.

  “Going into that meeting was like the Bataan Death March,” said one participant. “It started fine, and then she went crazy. She said, ‘How dare you? How dare you put us in this position?’ She turned to Mike and said, ‘We’ll sue you. We’ll take your fucking house. You won’t even own a fucking home.’ ”

  “Mike came in wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes and sat on a couch, looking forlorn,” said one of the others present. “He said: ‘This is the movie I want to make. If I can’t do this script, I’m not doing the film.’ Then she let him have it. She said, ‘Let me tell you something. As we’re sitting here, there’s a team of lawyers assembled in Stanley Jaffe’s office that has nothing better to do than figure out how to sue you for everything you’re worth.’ ”

  “She made up this fabulous story about all of the lawyers sitting with Stanley Jaffe,” said Goldwyn. “She said, ‘As I’m sitting here with you, there’s a team figuring out how they can take every single thing away from you.’ The guy literally went into a fetal position. Then she got Lorne on the phone and said, ‘I want that script even if you have to write it yourself.’ He said, ‘Sherry, I’m on your side. I get it. You’re absolutely right.’ ”

  Lansing turned to Myers. “He muttered, but nothing came out,” said one source. “She said, ‘If I were you, Mike, I’d go to Lorne’s office right now, and stay there until you come up with a new script. We’ll slide food under the door.’ ”

  Myers did as he was told, and Lansing got her film shot and edited in time for a December 1993 opening. It did well enough to cover its cost, but was far from the blockbuster she needed.

  —

  Nor did things fare better with another promising sequel, Beverly Hills Cop III. The first in the series had taken in a gigantic $235 million domestically, solidifying Eddie Murphy as a superstar. The sequel had also done well, but now the third iteration, which placed Murphy’s character, Axel Foley, in a theme park, was in trouble.

  Jaffe had refused to give the series’ original producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, final cut, and so they left the project. So did the next producer, Joel Silver, an extravagant bear of a man who specialized in action films such as Lethal Weapon, who walked away when Jaffe insisted Cop III be made for under $55 million. The picture had a problematic script and a reluctant star, and was rudderless when Lansing took char
ge. Then Murphy said he did not plan to play it as a comedy.

  “At the eleventh hour, a memo comes in: ‘Eddie doesn’t want to be funny,’ ” said Steven E. de Souza, one of the writers. “Yes, believe that or not. He was looking at some other actors getting big, dramatic roles, like Denzel Washington, and suddenly he doesn’t want to be funny. [He said] ‘Take all the jokes out.’ ”

  Lansing had an action movie with no action, a comedy with no comedy. She knew she needed the right producer to salvage this wreck.

  In her first week as chairman, she asked Robert Rehme and Mace Neufeld to have lunch with her in the studio commissary. They were strong producers, whose hits included The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, but they were reluctant to take on another picture, as they were about to start a new Tom Clancy adaptation, Clear and Present Danger. Lansing insisted. She promised them latitude and authority, their pick of other films, and above all her gratitude.

  “Sherry’s the greatest diplomat in the world,” said Rehme. “It was hard to say no.”

  The partners agreed that Rehme would concentrate on Danger, while Neufeld focused on Cop.

  “It wasn’t particularly the kind of script I liked,” said Neufeld, “but there was very little we could do about changing it at that point. All we had to do was reduce the budget.”

  Lansing’s hopes sagged when Murphy’s The Distinguished Gentleman opened in December and sank like a stone, giving the comedian a fourth consecutive flop, following Harlem Nights, Another 48 Hrs. and Boomerang. Convinced that neither the budget nor the screenplay was in good shape, she halted production a month before shooting. This was the second picture she had shut down in less than two months.

  “The script wasn’t working,” she said, “and they all realized it. There weren’t any fights. This was about saying, ‘We need more time.’ ”

  The movie resumed several weeks later, after four separate writers were hired simultaneously to fix the screenplay. It failed to restore Murphy’s box office sheen or the studio’s reputation.

  —

  These were bold and even brazen moves, not just because they involved putting pictures on ice after millions of dollars had been spent, but also because Paramount’s gaping distribution maw needed to be fed.

  Hundreds of staff were tucked in offices around the country, and even more around the world, all forced to put their professional lives on hold until these films could be completed, when they would embark on the long, slow process of overseeing their release. Lansing knew they would be anxious and that there would be pressure from below as well as above for her to green-light a slate of movies in no time at all. But she stood firm in the belief that it was better to proceed with caution than rush something forward that inevitably would fail.

  Reports spread that the studio had so little in the works it might as well shut down for a year. Phone calls came pouring in, as insiders demanded to know what was happening. And still she bided her time.

  “We were dealing with everything from a lack of development to budgets that were out of control,” she said, “and in a situation like that, all you can do is keep calm.”

  —

  A third stumbling feature was in the works. Sliver, a psychosexual thriller based on Ira Levin’s 1991 novel, had been brought to Paramount by Robert Evans, a flamboyant former production chief who had resuscitated the studio in the 1970s with films such as The Godfather and Chinatown before descending into a haze of drugs and accusations of drug peddling. After leaving his post in 1974, he had been convicted of cocaine trafficking and was in such a bad state that he had contemplated suicide, until Jaffe revived his career by bringing him back to Paramount as a producer.

  “I’d met Bob when I auditioned for Goodbye, Columbus,” said Lansing. “He was a legend. I remember seeing pictures of him and his then wife, Ali MacGraw, and they were the most beautiful couple you could imagine.”

  Now, however, Evans was a shadow of his former self, as charismatic as ever but no longer the gimlet-eyed filmmaker he had once been.

  “He’d gone through horrible things, but there wasn’t a mean bone in his body,” said Lansing. “I expected someone who was bitter, someone who was manipulative, someone who was tough; instead I met a very kind man. All he wanted was to have a hit movie. He was still hopeful, and he still loved films.”

  Sliver showed none of the taste he had brought to his more celebrated work. Rather, this was a sensationalist story about a beautiful young woman and the Peeping Tom who stalks her, who may or may not be a murderer.

  By the time Lansing got involved, the film was sinking fast. Its stars, Sharon Stone and Billy Baldwin, loathed each other, and one would refuse to act in a scene when the other was shooting a close-up. Stone, reveling in her newfound stardom following 1992’s Basic Instinct, despised Evans as well as Baldwin. Believing the producer had kept one of her girlfriends locked up in his house, she had him banned from the set.

  “Bob would say things like, ‘Why wouldn’t you just fuck [Baldwin]?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Why don’t you just fuck the kid? Back when I was doing that bullfighting movie with Ava Gardner [1957’s The Sun Also Rises], I tried to seduce her. That’s how I came in the business. I would fuck people.’ Sherry would look at me and put her arm around me and walk me away from it. She’d say, ‘Sharon, just come to work and do your job.’ She was never invested in continuing to dramatize [a situation].”

  Three weeks into Lansing’s tenure, things almost turned deadly when a helicopter carrying a cameraman vanished inside a Hawaiian volcano, where he was shooting backdrops for the movie’s conclusion. “As an ultimate dare, the [protagonists] fly into the lava,” said director Phillip Noyce, noting that test audiences later rejected that ending “because it was so nihilistic.”

  The director was in Los Angeles when he got a call from the production office telling him, “We’ve lost the bird,” he remembered. “That was the beginning of a forty-eight-hour nightmare. There’d been a malfunction and the pilot had to crash-land the helicopter inside the volcano. The pilot stayed with the helicopter, which was sheared in half. The cloud and sulfur cover closed in, and the cameraman and camera operator decided to try and climb out, but they became enveloped in the vapor and couldn’t see. It was a hellish situation.”

  Lansing waited on tenterhooks to see if every producer and executive’s nightmare would come true: the loss of human life. “Sherry was very much in support of us sitting down in the morning, where we wanted, to have prayer and meditation circles for them,” said Stone, “because we wanted to send them all our thoughts and prayers.”

  It took two days before the men were rescued, when a helicopter trawled a net inside the volcano, picking them up and carrying them to safety. Lansing’s relief was palpable, but after that filming proceeded at a glacial pace thanks to the time it took to light Stone and a soundstage that creaked during every shot, the result of being built over a swimming pool. Noyce, who had been battling a six-pack-a-day smoking habit, was so exhausted from all the difficulties, he almost collapsed and needed vitamin shots just to drag himself off the floor.

  When the shoot was over, he and Evans clashed during the editing, and Lansing was forced to intercede. In usual circumstances, given her background, she would have sided with the producer; but Noyce was reliable, his judgment sound, and Evans was no longer the life force he had been at his peak. She conducted shuttle diplomacy between the two men, while making sure Noyce had the freedom to work.

  “Bob at one point asked for an editing room and wanted to take over the cut,” said Jaffe. “We said, ‘We’ll give you an editing room for four weeks.’ ” Evans spent that entire time cutting two scenes. “We said, ‘We’ve got to see the film.’ We [saw the scenes and] they were terrible, terrible.”

  Meanwhile, the production was thrown into turmoil by the news that Stone was having an affair with Sliver’s coproducer, Bill MacDonald. If this had been just one illicit relationship more or less, it would have b
een manageable, but Stone, Hollywood’s resident femme fatale, was caught up in a game of dominoes with some of the movie’s other key players. When MacDonald left his wife for Stone, writer Joe Eszterhas left his own wife for MacDonald’s and the tabloids had a field day.

  “My engagement with Bill MacDonald was very, very brief,” said Stone. “Then the team of geniuses came over to my house—Joe Eszterhas and [his agent] Guy McElwaine and others—to tell me what they thought I should do. My thoughts were that I should get very far and very quickly away from all of them. After Basic Instinct, the thrill of that success and the greed of that success were really driving people. I wasn’t as invested in all of their shenanigans as they were. But I was getting a ton of pressure from everyone. It was very, very hard.”

  “I felt I was in a David Lynch film,” said Lansing. “I’d go into my office like this studious little girl, with my book bag and my scripts. No one would tell me anything. I used to get angry and say, ‘How come I’m the last to know?’ They’d say, ‘Well, you never ask. You come and go, boom-boom, like a machine.’ I was so consumed with my checklist of stuff that I’d be exhausted by the time I got home. If someone had stopped and said, ‘Do you want to hear some dish?’ I probably would have said, ‘Let me finish what I’m doing first.’ I only found out about the affair late, when Bob told me.”

  One crisis seemed to follow another, leaving Lansing with no room to breathe, let alone do things the way she wanted. “That’s what it’s like when you start a job like this,” she said. “You’re so overwhelmed, you hardly leave your office. There are no movies in place, no marketing plans, no deals, nothing. You just try to keep your head above water.”

  The first screening of Sliver was a disaster; the audience was confused by the murders and turned off by the sex. Lansing ordered the ending to be reshot—replacing the volcano scene with one inside Baldwin’s den, where Stone shoots out each TV screen in his high-tech voyeur’s hub and tells him to “get a life”—only to find the sets had been scrapped and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Knowing this would add millions to the budget, she nonetheless gave the go-ahead, believing it was her only chance to save the movie.