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

by Stephen Galloway

  “Forrest Gump is one of those movies, like The Graduate or Rocky, that taps into a deeper public mood than anyone imagined, its creators no doubt included,” critic Frank Rich observed in the New York Times. He attributed this to “the audience’s identification with the title character—a man so blank we can project our own dreams onto him—that turns a clever, manipulative entertainment into something more.”

  The picture became one of the highest-grossing movies in history, earning $330 million domestically and another $347.7 million abroad. It won six Oscars, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adaptation and Best Actor.

  Redstone was pleased. Its success had vindicated his judgment. He knew that Lansing had not flinched in her belief in the material, and whatever doubts about her he might have had were dispelled.

  But a bitter taste remained from the battles, and when the filmmakers held a party just before the Academy Awards, they did not invite any of the Paramount executives. Later, when they arrived at Lansing’s own pre-Oscars party, they were worse for wear.

  “They were all so hungover that Bob, Tom, all of them, were throwing up,” said Manning. “Somehow Sherry found out. She goes, ‘Michelle, did you know they were having a party?’ I go, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t get to go.’ ”

  “It was rough,” said Zemeckis. “Sherry had these people above her, telling her, ‘This is never going to work.’ She was put in that horrible place executives are in, where she’s got to serve her masters and make sure the movie doesn’t get destroyed. But I do believe her heart was always in [it].”

  “I felt terrible,” said Lansing. “I feel terrible to this day that someone I admired and respected, who made one of the greatest films in the world, should resent me. But there’s a natural tension between a studio and a filmmaker: if you’re a filmmaker, you push for as much money as you can possibly get, and if you’re an executive, you try to manage it as responsibly as you can. In hindsight, I wish I’d had more time to go to the set and explain it. But I couldn’t, and it was painful, because I loved the dailies, I loved what I was seeing. I loved that movie from the first time I read the script to the very last screening.”

  After Gump opened, Viacom’s president, Biondi, flew to Los Angeles to address the studio’s employees. “When we got here, everybody was asking if we were going to keep Sherry,” he said. “Now the question is, will she agree to stay?”

  The picture not only solidified Lansing’s position but also marked the beginning of an extraordinary run of success, among the most impressive any executive had known. Thanks to Gump and the films that followed, Lansing was able to relax in her job, confident she had Redstone’s unwavering support.

  The same was not true for Biondi, who was fired in 1996. After years of working side by side with Redstone, his relationship with his boss had cooled, perhaps because he did not play Redstone’s game, refusing to arrive at his office first thing in the morning, and rarely wining and dining him as much as Redstone might have liked. One morning the Viacom chairman called Biondi into his office and handed him a press release announcing his resignation.

  It was a chilling warning for others that Redstone could turn against his most intimate associates. He also severed his relationship with his son, Brent, and for years was alienated from his daughter, Shari. Once, flying on his corporate jet, he unleashed such venom at his then-wife that she got up and moved away, only for him to unleash even more when she returned.

  “Boy, he could blister people,” said Biondi. “He wasn’t a guy who saw his own flaws easily.”

  Lansing was aware of this but chose to ignore it. While others trembled before Redstone, she barely noticed his rages; she did not so much defuse his anger—like that of some of her other colleagues—as fail to let it land on her. Just as she had dealt with sexism early in her career by turning a blind eye to it, so she deflected their fury by failing to truly notice it.

  “I never minded shouting,” she said. “For me, it was just a style. It didn’t mean anything at all.”

  Instead, she stressed Redstone’s loyalty, which became clear during the making of one of Paramount’s more troubled pictures, Congo, the studio’s big summer release of 1995.

  Lansing had always been high on the movie, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel about the search for diamonds in Zaire, and had bragged about it during a Viacom board meeting. She had even hired an actor to play an ape and interrupt the meeting, causing the board members to scatter in fear before they realized the ape was a fake. Now, months before the picture was due to open, she was confident enough in its prospects to leave the first test screening in Goldwyn’s hands while she flew to New York for a Wall Street presentation.

  “The plan was for John to fax me the results after the screening,” she said. “I’d have them before the presentation took place the next day.”

  That night she woke from a deep sleep and got up to see if the fax had been slipped under her door. But there was no sign of it, and when she called Goldwyn, he did not answer his phone. Assuming it would arrive in the morning, she went back to bed. When she got up, nothing had arrived.

  “I called John at home, and this time he picked up,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Where are the numbers?’ ”

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he replied. “It was one of the worst screenings we’ve ever had. It was so bad I decided not to do the cards, because half the audience was laughing and the other half walked out.”

  Lansing was shaken. “We had a disaster on our hands,” she said. “We were in a highly competitive business, and if news leaked that Congo was bad, another studio would quickly shift one of its films to our June ninth release date. Those dates were hard to find, and getting the right one, when no other big movie was going to open, was crucial for a summer hit.”

  Leaving her hotel, she headed to the auditorium where the presentation was about to take place and tracked down Redstone.

  “He said, ‘Just tell me what’s wrong. I can handle it,’ ” she recalled. “I told him the unvarnished truth. He wasn’t angry; he was stoic. He was completely supportive. He reassured me, ‘It’s a bestselling book. You got Frank Marshall and Kathy [Kathleen] Kennedy [two major producers] to produce. You did nothing wrong.’ ”

  Back in Los Angeles, she gave detailed notes to Marshall, who had also directed the film. While he believed the test results were skewed by the absence of effects shots, he accepted her argument that the movie should lean toward the scary rather than the lighthearted. “I’d wanted it to be more fun; she wanted it to be more of a thriller,” he said. “We reedited it with that in mind. And the test scores came up.”

  Lansing knew the picture was no classic, but her belief in its prospects rose when her son, Jack, and one of his friends saw it and expressed their enthusiasm. “Before that, we’d always thought the movie would only appeal to adults,” she said, “but afterward, we targeted a huge part of our ad buys to teenagers, too.”

  A critical drubbing did not sink the film at the box office: it opened to $24.6 million—“a huge number in those days,” said Lansing—and earned $152 million worldwide, less than she might have hoped for, but enough to make it profitable.

  Redstone called the day the film opened. “I knew you could do it,” he said. “In situations like this, it’s easy to lose faith in yourself, and that’s something I never want you to do.”

  —

  “Sherry understood how to deal with complicated men—angry, volatile, neurotic, insecure, dangerous men,” said Goldwyn.

  Few were as demanding as Lansing’s partner, Jonathan Dolgen, who was named chairman of the Viacom Entertainment Group right after Redstone bought the studio. Unknown to her, Redstone and his team had approached Dolgen while closing the deal for Paramount, and talks were already under way when they were dining her at the Ivy.

  A man of considerable financial acumen, Dolgen had built a reputation for imaginative deals and unrivaled attention to detail while at Columbia and Fox. But
with his glowering eyes and booming baritone, he unnerved his colleagues at Paramount.

  “He could be ferocious,” said Goldwyn. “He was always screaming. He used to smoke Winston menthols. He’d start smoking his cigarettes and his eyes would light up and the smoke would come out of his mouth and nose and eyes. These accountants would follow him into his office, and they had all these huge binders. They’d have spent months preparing the numbers, and Jon would point and go, ‘Is this right, this number here? That number doesn’t look right to me.’ The head accountant would go, ‘Oh, we’re actually off by ten grand.’ Meeting over. ‘Go back, do all the binders.’ Then everybody would file out. ‘Fucking morons. They can’t even get a fucking number. Do I look like a math teacher?’ It was just really, really intense.”

  Lansing formed a bond with Dolgen regardless, and their affinity was sealed on his first day at Paramount when he declined her offer to take her large office, insisting she keep it while he moved into a smaller space.

  It was Dolgen who took charge of the television wing of the studio, in which Lansing had no interest; it was he who carved out brilliant business deals that allowed her the freedom to make her films; and it was he whom she credited as the real architect of the studio’s co-financing strategy, which she had initiated before his appointment.

  That strategy protected Paramount in the event of failure, though it also limited its upside in success. As budgets spiraled ever higher, thanks to increased star salaries and the huge amounts needed to pay for television advertising, it became essential to survival, minimizing the damage that could be inflicted by a single gargantuan flop, though Paramount would later be criticized for being too cautious.

  “We had to be fiscally responsible, and that often meant bringing in partners, because we knew we weren’t going to be right all the time,” said Lansing. “But we were vilified for not taking the whole burden. People would say, ‘Are they crazy? What are they doing?’ even though costs were spinning out of control. And then other studios started to do the same thing, and sharing the risk became business as normal.”

  Within months of Dolgen’s arrival, the two executives became so close they started vacationing together, which baffled their staff no end.

  “I trusted Jon with my life,” said Lansing. “If you have a partner like that—and I was blessed to have two, along with Stanley—you’re not afraid to take chances. I can’t speak highly enough of what that does—in a corporate relationship, in a marriage, in anything. I know they were both demanding and had a way of raising their voices, but under that was real kindness, decency and loyalty. With Jon at my side, I felt free to take risks, and without taking risks you can never make a great picture.”

  —

  Lansing was prepared to risk a great deal on one of her first great bets, Braveheart.

  The story of an obscure, real-life thirteenth-century warrior who had led a Scottish rebellion against England, the film seemed to have everything going against it: it was a period piece whose hero spends most of his life in a kilt; a sprawling epic with a largely male cast, most of them speaking in an incomprehensible accent; and a tragedy that ended with the death of its hero, who’s disemboweled at the hands of the English. Throw in the fact that its director wanted to shoot the picture in Gaelic, and no executive in her right mind would have gone near it.

  And yet Lansing was passionate about the project. Unlike many of her peers, she had not succumbed to the growing ardor for superheroes and cartoon characters, for the effects-driven “event” films that would become a studio staple by the end of the decade. Rather, she sought stories that touched her in a deep and often personal way.

  “I don’t usually like classic period pieces,” she said. “It’s a flaw, but they seem arch to me, and I can’t relate to the way people move and talk in them. But there was something about this story, and the courage of a man sacrificing his life for a cause, that moved me. Stories like that always did, because they were about the highest kind of morality and giving it all up for something bigger than yourself.”

  The picture was the brainchild of a little-known writer named Randall Wallace, who had first heard of the man who shared his family name, William Wallace, during a visit to Scotland.

  “I knew nothing of my genealogy,” he said, “so I went to Edinburgh Castle, and I’m standing in the entrance and there’s a statue of a man named Wallace. I said to the Black Watch guard who was there in his kilt, ‘Who’s he?’ And the guard says, ‘He’s our greatest hero.’ ”

  The writer tucked William Wallace away in the back of his mind. But after losing his day job working on television action-adventures—and then selling a script for $900,000—he had the luxury to return to his dream project. After MGM commissioned a screenplay, Alan Ladd Jr. (then serving as the studio’s chairman) took it to Mel Gibson, who loved it and yet was reluctant to commit.

  “I decided to pass,” said Gibson. “There was a lot of stuff coming at me in those days, and it was a judicious process of just wending your way through the multitudes of scripts. I was in my late thirties, in that Bradley Cooper–Leo DiCaprio stage, right in the prime.”

  The film was relegated to the back burner, where it remained until Ladd left MGM after conflicting with the studio’s owner, Giancarlo Parretti, later to become an international fugitive. When Lansing asked him to come to Paramount as a producer, he agreed. His exit deal allowed him to take two screenplays, and Braveheart was one of them.

  By the mid-1990s, a year and a half had passed since Gibson first heard about the movie, and he had been unable to stop thinking about it.

  After finishing 1994’s Maverick, he recalled, “somebody asked me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ I said, ‘You know, there’s this script I can’t get out of my head. I’ve been constructing shot lists. I know how it’s supposed to look.’ So I told the story. And it was amazing—I’d maybe read it twice, but I remembered a fair bit. He said, ‘Let’s drag that one out of the cobwebs.’ ”

  Gibson got back in touch with Ladd, and Ladd arranged for him to meet Lansing over breakfast at Los Angeles’ Four Seasons Hotel, where they were joined by the actor’s business partner, Bruce Davey. It was yet another lopsided meeting of one woman and three men, but Lansing was not intimidated.

  “Mel lit a cigarette,” she said. “He was nervous and seemed uncomfortable, and didn’t look me in the eye. He had a lot of nervous energy. He was jittery.”

  Off camera, Gibson was one of the most high-strung actors she had met, but she warmed to him, and he to her, when he learned she was married to one of his directing heroes, Friedkin. As their conversation progressed, Lansing was relieved to find him deeper and more sensitive than she had expected.

  “He was intelligent, he was direct, and I liked him,” she said.

  She had hoped Gibson would agree to star, but on this he was adamant: if he did the film at all, it would be as a director, not an actor. Reluctant to take both roles on his second feature as a director—vastly bigger in scope than his previous endeavor, 1993’s The Man Without a Face—he suggested that Brad Pitt play Wallace.

  “I thought, directing this thing is going to be a big, epic deal and I have to get somebody else to be in it,” he said. “Everybody was going, ‘Be in it, you idiot.’ I thought I was a little old at that time to be William Wallace, because he was like twenty-eight when he bit the dust, though no one knew [for sure].”

  Months went by, however, without Pitt or any other star signing on, and the project appeared to be stuck when Ladd called Gibson again. Somewhere he had read that Wallace was thirty-eight, the same age as the actor.

  “I said, ‘The fates are saying you’ve got to play the part,’ ” said Ladd.

  Gibson agreed. Now he and Paramount had to come to terms on the picture’s cost. A preliminary budget came in between $65 million and $70 million, which was way too steep for Paramount to take on alone, and Lansing insisted on finding a partner.

  “Sherry wanted to pay $20 m
illion or $30 million all in,” noted Ladd. “I went down to her office and said, ‘Sherry, the battle scenes alone are going to cost that.’ But she said, ‘That’s all I’ll put up.’ ”

  Warners said it would join in, on the condition that Gibson make another Lethal Weapon for the studio, but he demurred. Then 20th Century Fox said it would take foreign rights and would provide two-thirds of the budget, leaving Paramount with one-third of the total outlay and the right to handle the domestic release. Still, the budget was frighteningly high.

  Gibson came to the studio to negotiate a deal and met with Bill Bernstein, its head of business affairs. Perhaps the actor-director had expected the talks would be simple; if so, he was disappointed. Bernstein told him Paramount would pay no more than $15 million, and would take a distribution fee of 25 percent—that is, Paramount would get 25 percent of the money received from movie theaters.

  Gibson was furious. In a fit of anger, he picked up an ashtray and hurled it across the room.

  “He felt he wasn’t being respected, and he felt he was bringing something of considerable value,” said agent Jeff Berg, who was present at the meeting. “So he grabbed a large glass ashtray and threw it through the wall. He threw the ashtray through the wall! We were stunned.”

  Years later, Gibson was penitent. He even called Bernstein to apologize, though Bernstein discreetly pretended not to remember a thing.

  “We were right up to the moment of [shooting], and I’d turned a whole bunch of other jobs down,” said Gibson. “I was loud. I was like, ‘What the fuck do you people mean? I turned down three jobs—blah, blah, blah.’ I was kind of upset, probably a little over the top. It was all posturing bullshit.”

  A week later, Gibson and Davey accepted a slightly revised offer, with Paramount agreeing to put up a third of the $54 million budget and take a lower distribution fee. The movie was a go.

  —

  Production got under way in Scotland, where atrocious weather forced the filmmakers to call off the shoot, and the entire project—cast, crew, sets and all—had to relocate to Ireland.