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

by Stephen Galloway

  She sat in the editing room with Noyce, working to fix the film even as the Motion Picture Association of America screened a rough cut and came back insisting on dozens of changes if Paramount wanted to avoid an NC-17 rating. When Lansing called the principal players into her office to discuss alterations, Evans exploded.

  “Fuck ’em!” he said, hammering his fist on the table.

  He refused to listen, and in a fit of anger stormed out of Lansing’s office and strode away across the lot. Suddenly he collapsed with what looked like a heart attack. A studio nurse was called and found his blood pressure registered 215/110. The producer was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a case of extreme anxiety.

  The filmmakers moved forward with the changes the MPAA wanted, along with the revised ending. “We shot the new ending about a week and a half before the movie came out,” said Noyce. “We started making prints of the film on a Tuesday, and they had to be in all the cinemas on the Friday.”

  Throughout, Lansing clung to the belief that the picture was salvageable. Her experience in editing rooms had convinced her that a movie’s problems could almost always be repaired, regardless of their scope. But critics savaged the film and it did dismally at the domestic box office, though it performed strongly abroad, an early indication of the burgeoning international market that would transform the entertainment business.

  Despite that disappointment, Lansing stuck to her core belief. “You can never give up,” she said. “You have to keep working to make it the best it can be.”

  —

  The first sign of a turnaround did not come until June 1993, when Paramount had a smash hit with Tom Cruise’s The Firm, a big-budget legal thriller adapted from John Grisham’s novel, though that was largely set in motion before Lansing joined the studio.

  Whatever credit she might have received was undermined by a New York Times article that slammed her for lavishing gifts on The Firm’s filmmakers just when the country was going through a prolonged recession that would cost America 1.6 million jobs. Ironically, Lansing had attempted to emulate the strategy of another studio, Warner Bros., which was famous for bestowing perks on its stars. Anxious to retain their loyalty when her regime was brand-new, she had been too generous, without considering the implications.

  “The studio bought new $100,000 Mercedes-Benz 500 SL convertible two-seaters for the film makers and star,” wrote the Times, which quoted Lansing as saying, “We just wanted to say: ‘Hey, thank you. You’ve worked tremendously hard. You’re special to us. You’ve gone that extra distance.’ ” Those who went the extra distance “were Tom Cruise, the star of the film, who also received about $12 million and will make millions more from his share of the gross receipts; Sydney Pollack, the director, who hauled in about $5.5 million and will also make a few million more from the grosses, and Scott Rudin, a producer, one of the most prolific and successful in town.” Even by the town’s “wacky standards,” the article concluded, “the cars bought by Paramount left many executives and agents in Hollywood amazed.”

  It was the last time Lansing would copy others. From this point on, she said, “I had to do things my way.”

  —

  Just as Lansing was beginning to feel settled in, on the morning of September 12, 1993, Jaffe called with important news.

  “He said our board of directors had voted to merge with Viacom,” she recalled. “Viacom’s chairman, Sumner Redstone, and Paramount’s chairman, Martin Davis, would head the new entity, and Stanley would be their first lieutenant, sharing the job with Viacom’s president, Frank Biondi Jr.”

  She listened skeptically. She had been around money men long enough to know it made little sense that Redstone would allow his right-hand man, Biondi, to share the job with Jaffe. This was not a merger but a takeover.

  “It sounds like we’re being bought,” she said.

  Paramount’s would-be purchaser, Redstone, then seventy, was a shrewd, driven businessman whose Brooks Brothers suits and Boston accent might easily have led others to underestimate his skill. A man whose temper matched his flaming red hair, he had inherited his father’s theater business and built it into an empire, but was most famous for having survived a 1979 Boston hotel fire by dangling from a windowsill until his fingers were burned raw; he had then spent months in a hospital, enduring agonizing skin grafts, until he emerged even more ruthless and ambitious than before. He was willful and capricious, volatile and egotistical, and singularly determined to win.

  “All the way back, when Sumner just had a few drive-ins and the multiplexes were getting started, everybody in the [other] studios gave him the back of their hand,” said Biondi. “But [Paramount executives] Bob Evans and Barry Diller didn’t. They’d speak to him personally. They’d take him out to dinner. So Sumner had a warm spot in his heart for Paramount. This is like the Yankee bat boy in the 1930s who grows up and becomes wealthy and has the opportunity to buy the team.”

  Paramount’s Davis had none of Redstone’s vision and only a fraction of his zeal. He had spent too many years toiling at the feet of his late boss, Charles Bluhdorn, to have enough energy left for his own dreams. Instead of thinking big, he had started to manage small, nitpicking at his employees in a way that inspired loathing rather than loyalty.

  At first he rebuffed Redstone, and early talks to merge their companies fell through. But in spring 1993 he heard that other raiders were turning their sights on Paramount, and decided to go with the devil he knew.

  Redstone had thought the deal was never going to happen, and had already begun talks to buy NBC instead. He was sitting in his office, waiting to hear from Biondi, who was returning from a meeting about buying that network, when his phone rang, and it was Davis.

  “We were coming back from [the NBC talks], really excited, thinking, ‘God, we potentially have the steal of the year,’ ” said Biondi, when “Redstone called and said, ‘Get back here as fast as you can!’ [He said] ‘Marty Davis called me, and the deal is back on.’ ”

  The two parties entered into secret talks. Back and forth they went for weeks, until in early September they closed a deal. Redstone’s company, Viacom, agreed to pay $8.28 billion to buy Paramount Communications, putting Redstone at the top of one of the biggest media companies on earth. He was about to join the ranks of the true moguls, alongside News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and TCI’s John Malone, the place he had dreamed of being for years.

  It was “an act of destiny,” he declared.

  —

  But not if Barry Diller could help it. Nine years had passed since a clash with Davis had led to his exit from Paramount, and his luster only gleamed brighter.

  He had stunned Hollywood by leaving Fox and betting heavily on a shopping network, QVC. Anyone who thought that would keep him happy, however, was wrong; insiders guessed he was biding his time, waiting to assert his place at the top of the Hollywood pyramid.

  Lansing knew he was circling Paramount, and knew it would be wrong to underestimate him. She remembered his brilliance. Each time she had asked for more money for a film, he had asked incisive questions about the budget that no one else would have thought of. But his need for control was scary.

  “I went into a meeting once when he was still running Paramount,” she recalled. “As I was waiting for him, I noticed one of his assistants had pulled a cigarette halfway out of the pack. It was on the edge of the table, ready for him. Everything was so controlled.”

  Davis, sniffing the danger “Killer Diller” posed, decided to confront him when Diller dropped by his office one day. Was it true, he asked, that Diller was going after Paramount? Diller tried to dodge the question, but Davis was convinced the answer was yes.

  A week after Viacom went public, Diller announced he would top Redstone’s bid by more than $1 billion, offering $9.5 billion, money he would have to cobble together through a series of loans and partnerships. In doing so, he unleashed a bidding war that would have Hollywood and Wall Street watching amazed for mo
nths.

  Lansing observed from the sidelines as the bidders played financial ping-pong with her studio and her life. Each week, one would raise his bid, only for the other to go higher.

  Financially, this could not have been better for her. “I’d negotiated for the most possible stock in lieu of a large salary, thinking this might happen,” she said, “but I never dreamed the numbers would go so high.”

  Professionally, her life was in upheaval, and so were the lives of her staffers, many of whom were frightened about what this would mean for their careers. They were inundated by calls from friends and sometimes enemies, all whispering the latest gossip.

  “You’d be on the phone with an agent and hear him say, ‘I heard it’s Diller,’ ” said Manning. “Then someone would say, ‘No, it’s Viacom.’ You’d find the vultures that are in Hollywood. Sherry said, ‘Look, one of these guys, or maybe somebody else we’ve never even heard of, is going to buy us. The best thing we can all do is put our nose down, stop engaging in rumors, and when people want to stir this up, just say, “I’m calling to cast my movie.” Let’s do our job and everybody will be fine.’ ”

  “I told them, ‘Other people’s lives are at stake, as well as ours,’ ” said Lansing. “I said, ‘The filmmakers didn’t ask for this war. And what will happen is, you’ll get distracted and the movies will suffer, and that’s the only legacy you have.’ ”

  As Diller gained an edge, both sides did everything they could to line up allies, aware they would need extra funds to close a deal. The price rose so high—above $100 per share—that some of Redstone’s advisers begged him to back off, arguing that the stratospheric numbers made no sense. But he was as immovable as the Paramount mountain.

  “Sumner said, basically, ‘I’m doing it,’ pretty much the way he does business, and ‘If you don’t like it, you can leave,’ ” Biondi recalled. “It got to the low $108s or $109s [per share], and we were literally out of money because the price had gone up so much.”

  Diller raised Redstone once again. He was on the brink of winning.

  Then Redstone made one of the deftest boardroom maneuvers any of his colleagues had seen, persuading Blockbuster’s Wayne Huizenga to merge their two companies, thereby adding enough value that Viacom could raise its tender one last time. He made his final offer—just under $10 billion.

  “Diller said, ‘I’m done,’ ” noted Biondi.

  If Diller had gone up even the tiniest amount, just $1 per share, Redstone would have been forced to pull out, as he had no more money. But he had won, and Diller had no choice but to withdraw.

  “Our current position demands brevity,” he said in a February 1994 statement. “They won. We lost. Next.”

  —

  The deal had brought Lansing millions, but it also cast a shadow over her future, and her staff laid grim bets on how long she would survive.

  “She was very vulnerable,” said Goldwyn. “We were all vulnerable. But Sherry was very matter-of-fact about it. She said, ‘I could get a call saying I’m fired. It’s not my company, it’s theirs. I’m an employee. If they don’t want to keep me, they don’t want to keep me.’ ”

  Martin Davis was edged aside, and Jaffe was pushed out soon after, in the beginning of what seemed like a mass exodus of Paramount’s top players.

  “There was a house-of-cards theory,” said Rosenfelt, the production executive. “Would Sherry follow Stanley? And would she want to stay without him?”

  Days after the deal closed, Redstone flew to Los Angeles to address the troops. Gathering them in one of the studio’s theaters, he spoke about his business philosophy.

  “He said, ‘I’m going to prove that synergy works,’ ” recalled Goldwyn. Mentioning the different Paramount and Viacom divisions, “he said, ‘I want to see MTV and Paramount working together. I want to see Nickelodeon and Paramount working together. We’re the Viacom family.’ ”

  That night, Redstone invited Lansing to a private dinner at the Ivy, the fashionable West Hollywood restaurant where insiders went to see and be seen. It was hardly the best place for a private meeting, but perhaps that was what Redstone wanted. He was flaunting his new role as a Hollywood boss. Here, Lansing knew, all of Hollywood would be watching, her body language dissected by the seemingly casual crowd whose impressions would soon cascade through the industry.

  Arriving early, as always, she navigated her way through the tables, meeting and greeting the dozens of men and women for whom the Ivy functioned as a second office, until she found herself sitting with Redstone and his colleagues. She was the sole woman among this tight-knit group of men, all dark-suited strangers.

  There was the pale and beady-eyed Redstone, his red hair glowing demonically in the candlelight; Biondi, the most laid-back of his adjutants; and two top Viacom executives, Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley, corporate insiders to the core. Lansing barely knew them, though she had met Redstone recently when both were honored by the American Academy of Achievement, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit.

  Still, she knew what she wanted to say.

  Weeks earlier, she had attended a company-wide retreat at the San Ysidro Ranch, near Santa Barbara, California, where she gave an elaborate presentation about her filmmaking philosophy. Now she explained this to Redstone and his team.

  “I told them about the four points we were following,” she said. “First, we were a producer-based company. We truly believed that producers mattered and should be treated with respect, as they brought in the best material. That’s why one of the first things I did when I joined Paramount was ask John Goldwyn to create a list of the most talented producers and see who could be wooed.”

  Second, she said, “scripts mattered above all else. You had to spend time to get the material right before you green-lit a movie, regardless of who was in it, and if the screenplay wasn’t working, I didn’t believe we should move forward. That was the opposite thinking to some studios that believed stars were the key.”

  Third, she said, “I felt there was an opening for the sort of midbudget movie that studios increasingly were veering away from, the kind of character-driven dramas that could be made for a reasonable price and would still find an audience”—pictures that were fast becoming anachronisms in a Hollywood that believed bigger was always better.

  And fourth, most radically, Lansing said she was beginning to explore a relatively new financial strategy of sharing the cost of individual films with other studios—a break in Hollywood’s tradition of pitting one studio against another.

  “Because the cost of movies was getting so high, thanks in part to the spiraling expense of marketing,” she said, “we believed we could partner with others and share some of the risk. That meant we’d divide the profits, but we’d also protect our downside.”

  On a personal level, she added that she was used to maintaining close contact with New York, that she enjoyed having a partner and hoped to find one in Redstone.

  All this he listened to carefully, nodding but never revealing his cards. Lansing felt his response was positive, but she also knew he was far too wily to tell her everything he was thinking.

  Nothing interested him as much as the films themselves. As they spoke, Lansing was pleased to learn how much he knew about them. She did not know that Redstone was a master of due diligence and would routinely call industry insiders—even people he had never met—just to pick their brains on Hollywood.

  One film intrigued him more than any other, far from the most high-profile of Paramount’s projects. Over and over, he kept asking about the movie, the talent and the marketing plan, and the more they spoke, the more Lansing realized her future was riding on its success.

  Its name was Forrest Gump.

  One night early in her tenure at Paramount, Lansing lay in bed reading, transfixed. When Friedkin asked what was so special, she answered, “The most beautiful script I’ve ever read.”

  This most beautiful script was hardly obvious commercial fare. It lacked a c
onventional protagonist and antagonist; its structure was rambling and even episodic; and it featured touches of magical realism that seemed to belong to a different realm than the quasi-historical world in which it was set, including a trip into space with an orangutan, and animated characters that accompanied the hero on his journey like so many disembodied souls. But Lansing was enthralled.

  “I remember how it progressed through time, and finding that fascinating,” she said. “And I remember how moving the love story was. This was my generation’s story, going back through our history, and we were looking at it through one very unusual man’s eyes.”

  Forrest Gump was the brainchild of Winston Groom, a southern novelist who divided his time between New York and Point Clear, Alabama, where he had grown up. His 1986 novel told the story of a decent but simple-minded fellow with peculiar abilities, and followed him through a series of adventures that took him from Washington to Vietnam, from a fishing boat to the moon.

  In the hands of screenwriter Eric Roth, the book’s more whimsical elements had been expunged, and the script Lansing read was richer and altogether more ambitious than the novel: a voyage through the second half of the twentieth century that was wry, witty and deeply emotional, if also sentimental.

  “The book had its charms, but it was a little more farcical than my taste,” said Roth. “[Forrest] weighed 240 pounds and went to the moon with a monkey, and there were all sorts of things like that.”

  The screenplay he hewed was an exploration of what it meant to be American in a country that had endured a major war (Vietnam), a presidential assassination (Kennedy), a battle for civil rights (Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. both appeared in this draft) and the onslaught of AIDS.