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

by Stephen Galloway

  —

  Her producers were not always any easier than her stars. Rudin, in particular, could be a handful.

  A rumpled and bearded former wunderkind, he was obsessive in his perfectionism, which Lansing found out on her first day at the studio when he left four phone messages for her before she could return a single one. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—for years they were ideally matched.

  In their early days, reveling in each other’s company, they perfected a one-two punch to lock in talent and projects that resulted in such hits as The Addams Family, Clueless, Zoolander and School of Rock.

  “Scott was exceptional at finding material and remarkable at developing it,” said Lansing. “He was one of the most gifted producers I knew.”

  Who else could have turned an accidental slip in an Oscar speech (Tom Hanks’s revelation that his high school acting coach was gay) into an acclaimed comedy (In & Out)? Who else could have shifted so easily from the cerebral (The Reader) to the scatological (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut)?

  At his best, Rudin would use charm to bend others to his will; at his worst, he would promise to kill them. His tantrums were legendary. Once he left a voicemail threatening to burn down the house of Paramount’s Robert Friedman. Another time, furious at a Lansing staffer for the way she had handled a premiere, he wrote her: “Be aware that the only thing separating my hands from your neck is the fact that there are 3,000 miles between us. Be aware that in 15 years of producing movies and running companies, I have never been treated so disrespectfully, rudely, insolently or been dismissed…by any low-level flunky as I have by you this afternoon.”

  Rudin’s rage was fueled by the same passion as his talent, which Lansing admired enormously, even though he could drive her to distraction—not least during the making of 1998’s The Truman Show.

  Paramount had paid $1.5 million for Andrew Niccol’s satirical script about a man who is trapped inside the bubble of a TV series, not realizing his whole life is being watched on television. Lansing liked the script so much that she agreed to wait a whole year for Jim Carrey to star, despite reservations. “Carrey brought little insurance,” she said, “because this wasn’t a mainstream comedy.”

  Shooting began in Florida in 1997, and days into filming, Rudin called Manning, the studio’s point person.

  “I got a call very early in the morning, saying, ‘Mich, we’ve got to get rid of Dennis Hopper,’ ” said Manning. “I go, ‘Well, I’m going to go see dailies today.’ He said, ‘No, you can’t see them. They’re too embarrassing. We need to protect him.’ ”

  Manning watched the dailies, regardless, and realized Hopper, cast as the godlike television guru who oversees the Truman show, could not remember his lines, probably following years of drug and alcohol abuse. He had to be replaced, but by whom? Peter Weir, the director, suggested himself.

  “Crazy idea,” said Rudin. “I said, ‘I am not doing this movie. Let’s just shut it down and go home.’ He kept going to Sherry. But she was very smart. She said: ‘All right, shut this movie down for a year if you have to. When you both agree, go finish it.’ ”

  Weir backed off, but the casting issue remained unresolved until both he and Rudin united behind Alan Arkin. Lansing demurred, saying she wanted a bigger star (she eventually opted for Ed Harris), and the producer went on the warpath.

  “He was blowing up my phone,” said Manning. “He had every one of his assistants calling, saying, ‘Martin Scorsese on line one about Alan Arkin,’ ‘Sydney Pollack on line two.’ He was desperate.”

  When Lansing stood firm, a letter came to Manning, purportedly from Arkin.

  “I write to you because a grave injustice has been committed,” it began, “and as we both know, you are the perpetrator. You have denied me personally and artistically, and I am mortified and disgusted. For reasons unknown to myself and others, you have marked me as your enemy, or more appropriately your prey. For the moment my suffering has satiated your appetite for destruction. How could you? How dare you direct such an atrocity at me? Are my years, my blood, my flesh, my sacrifice a fair trade for the work of your evil hands? Is all that I have done so unremarkable in your eyes? Are you so corrupted, your mind so polluted, that my work is beyond you? It is painfully clear that your cantankerous hand and wicked deeds [extend] far and wide but I know even you cannot poison every cup. Despite your efforts to sabotage my work, [it] will survive and vengeance will be mine.”

  “It was Scott’s writing,” said Manning, “but written with his left hand instead of his right hand.”

  Both Rudin and Arkin denied writing the letter.

  —

  Dealing with the egos and excesses of producers and stars was only one element of Lansing’s working life as she oversaw a city-state with dozens of soundstages, hundreds of offices and thousands of employees.

  “People don’t understand what a studio is like,” she said. “There’s a clinic, doctor’s office, shops, a commissary. You can get your shoes shined. You can get your hair done. You’re managing a city. And I wanted to instill a good culture in that city, a really warm culture. So we had a Christmas tree, we had a volunteer day, we went to a school and gave them computers, we had the AIDS walk, and we redesigned the studio, adding areas for sitting and a whole new walkway. We also did everything to minimize studio politics: anyone could call me or come by my office, no matter who they reported to.”

  She did her best not to be too removed from her employees or the outside world. On Saturdays, she and Friedkin would buy tickets to the pictures just like regular moviegoers, many of whom would have been stunned to know who was in line with them. Whenever possible, she wanted to see the latest releases at a local theater, avoiding the hermetic bubble of industry screenings. Then on Sundays, almost religiously, she would go to the studio and run parts of the films she had missed, searching for an actor here, an editor there. Few other studio chiefs conducted their business like this.

  She wanted her audience to be as swept up by their emotions as she was. “I wanted to make films about people that you cared for,” she said. “They could be twisted, they could be dark, but if they evoked an emotional response, the films were worth making. Sometimes a script would take years of work, but it was only after it was right and a producer was in place that we’d search for a director and cast.”

  Having erred in failing to visit the set of Forrest Gump, Lansing did a course correction and made sure to spend time on location with her other pictures, partly to support the filmmakers and partly to escape the claustrophobia of her office. She loved nothing more than sitting in an editing room, weighing in on a movie’s progress.

  “I was completely invested in these movies,” she said. “I read every script, gave notes on each draft, saw all the dailies. I went to every test screening, joined in the marketing meetings. When a picture didn’t work, I knew how that felt. I remembered when Fatal Attraction was going through hell. I knew how much it hurt when The Accused had to be reedited. Whenever there was bad news, I’d say to the filmmakers, ‘I’m really sorry. I know this is tough.’ And I always tried to share the blame, because ultimately I was the one who’d green-lit their movie. I bled with each picture that failed and I bled with it on the way to success.”

  —

  While other studio chiefs allowed their subordinates to oversee each project’s development, Lansing waded waist deep into all of them, just as she attended every test screening. She believed executives’ failure to do so added to the widening gulf between studios and filmmakers.

  She orchestrated these test screenings in her own special way, trying to ensure that her position would not influence those around her.

  “Sherry had a specific method for how she would handle the post-screening conversation,” said Don Granger, one of her production executives. “We’d leave the studio theater—the producers and director and executives—and walk a very short distance to her office. Nobody was allowed to speak. You couldn’t huddle a
side and rehearse what you were going to say. We’d go in the back door and sit down on couches and Sherry would sit in her chair, and we’d start talking about how we thought the movie played. And at some point [market researcher] Joe Farrell would come in with a sheet of paper that had the test scores on it. And Sherry would take the paper and not allow anybody to look at it—including herself—and put it facedown on the coffee table. You’d be sitting there with that piece of paper holding your fate in its hands for maybe an hour. She’d say, ‘This is useful, but that’s all it is. We don’t have to go with everything it says.’ And at the end Sherry would give her opinion, and it was only then we’d see the score.”

  Lansing wanted to be able to express her opinion uninfluenced by the test results, and she wanted her staff to do the same, though that might have been wishful thinking. Granger recalled feeling a cold sweat as he and the others in the room discussed the merits of 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact.

  “It seemed clear the movie had tested well,” he said, “but you never know. So we start to talk and Sherry says, ‘The scores don’t matter. They shouldn’t sway any of our reactions. They’re only a tool.’ The junior person in the room starts talking—that’s me—and you knew you were dead if you said, ‘The movie’s great, don’t change a thing’ and the scores were terrible. So I mentioned a few things that [director] Jonathan Frakes and [producer] Rick Berman had left out of the movie, and Goldwyn picked up on them, and there was a lull. Then Sherry says, ‘Well, I thought the movie was just great.’ And she turns over the piece of paper and the movie scored an 84. The highest score in Paramount history was an 88, which Forrest Gump got. And she says, ‘See! Don’t change a thing!’ ” Granger laughed. “We all looked at her like, ‘Uh, what about that ‘scores don’t matter…’?”

  —

  The Star Trek franchise, which had been launched as a film series with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was of prime importance for Lansing, though at first she was flummoxed by its terminology. “What’s ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ mean?” she asked Berman, much to his amusement. “What’s the bridge? What’s warp drive?”

  Aware that she was an outsider to the Star Trek ecosystem, Lansing gave the producer more room to maneuver than she might otherwise have done.

  “He was the keeper of the flame, and I knew I had a steep learning curve,” she said, noting that Berman had taken over the brand created by Gene Roddenberry and ran the Star Trek TV spin-offs as well as the movies. “I was nervous, because when you’re given an important franchise like Star Trek, it’s a huge responsibility, and in this case it’s one where I had no history with the material. I was terrified I might damage it.”

  She was eager to hire Leonard Nimoy as the director of 1994’s Star Trek: Generations, the first of the film series released on her watch, but he declined.

  “When I brought it to Leonard, his attitude was, ‘There’s a great deal of rewriting needed on the script,’ ” said Berman. “And our attitude was, ‘Well, we really don’t have time for that.’ ” Berman was used to the television world, where directors were guns for hire, not auteurs—as opposed to film, where they were the be-all and end-all behind every decision. “It was my naïveté. Leonard probably had every right to do that. But we ended up parting ways.”

  Lansing was disappointed, and so was Berman when she passed on the chance to sign Marlon Brando as the villain.

  “I got a call one day that Brando was interested,” he remembered. “I went to Sherry and said, ‘Marlon Brando wants to play Soran.’ But he wanted a huge amount of money. It was numerous millions of dollars, much more than she had any interest in paying. This was also at a point when he was quite overweight, and it was an action-hero type of role. My feeling was, ‘We’re talking about Marlon Brando here!’ But Sherry had remarkable experience in the motion picture business and said: ‘Brando’s presence is not going to justify the expenditure.’ ”

  When the movie opened in November 1994, the producer got flak from die-hard fans, who learned that their beloved Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was dead.

  “There was a lot of controversy,” he noted. “Yes, we did kill him—but we’d brought him back to life prior to doing that, because it was a hundred years [since the original Star Trek adventures] and he would have been two hundred years old if he hadn’t been stuck in this nexus for a century. We thought he died a noble death saving the lives of millions or perhaps billions of people. Sherry did not have the slightest problem with that.”

  On the next Star Trek picture, First Contact, when Brent Spiner’s agents started playing hardball during negotiations, Lansing told Berman to cut him loose. The actor played the android Data and was a pillar of the modern-day franchise, second only to Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Berman was afraid she really meant it, while Lansing said she wanted to call the agents’ bluff. The strategy worked. They capitulated, as she had expected, and Spiner returned to the role.

  “Brent and I are close,” said Berman, “and he knew he was not going to win this battle.”

  —

  Such battles were par for the course on almost any major film, except Lansing’s first collaboration with Steven Spielberg.

  She was driving home one evening, fully anticipating a quiet night with her husband and sons, when CAA agent Richard Lovett called her in her car. The line crackled as she passed through the hills, and his words floated in and out of hearing.

  “Sherry,” he said, “how would you feel about Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg doing Saving Private Ryan?”

  Paramount had been developing the screenplay for Ryan for a while; it was one of three World War II movies the studio had in the works, and earlier that week Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) had committed to direct. Now Lovett was telling her that Spielberg wanted to do it. Was this a prank, some kind of elaborate hoax? Nobody had ever called out of the blue to offer her the biggest director in Hollywood and one of its biggest stars. The contrast between Lovett’s monotone voice and the news he was imparting made the whole thing seemed surreal.

  “There was no drama, no typical agent build-up,” said Lansing. “He might as well have been asking if I wanted cream in my coffee. I said, ‘I’d feel just fine.’ ”

  “DreamWorks would have to be your partner,” the agent resumed, referring to Spielberg’s production and financing company, “and you’d have to split the budget and the rights. Is that OK?”

  “Of course,” said Lansing.

  “Then they want to do the picture,” said Lovett.

  And with that he hung up, leaving her too stunned to know what to do next.

  “I told myself it was ludicrous,” she said. “Nothing like this had ever happened, because anytime I got to that point it was after months of chasing the talent or begging them to do it. I thought, ‘What’s he been smoking?’ ”

  That night she called the film’s producer, Mark Gordon, who assured her it was true. And then Dolgen called to say that he, too, had spoken to Lovett.

  “Jon was ecstatic,” she said. “He told me [DreamWorks partner] David Geffen had just called about working out the rights split. He wanted to flip a coin to see who would get the domestic release and who would get foreign.” That seemed no stranger a solution to the problem than anything else in this weird experience.

  “We agreed that Sumner and Steven would represent their respective companies,” she said. “The winner would take Ryan domestically and the loser would take it internationally, with all the costs and revenues divided equally.”

  Spielberg and Redstone met for the coin toss.

  Spielberg won.

  —

  Saving Private Ryan was the unlikely brainchild of Robert Rodat, a Harvard Business School and USC film school graduate best known for romantic comedies and for the 1996 family drama Fly Away Home. But the writer was also a history buff, and had begun to think about World War II when an avalanche of books and articles appeared in June 1994, in anticipation of the fiftie
th anniversary of D-Day.

  Rodat had been mesmerized by a memorial to the war dead in the small New Hampshire town where he and his wife had spent their summer.

  “There were multiple last names that were the same, with the same year of death,” he said. “One family had lost five sons in the Civil War, and another had lost three in the American Revolution. All the guys from a town would enlist, and they would keep those guys together because it was good for unit cohesion. Unfortunately, that meant the entire town’s young men could be wiped out in a moment.”

  He knew of the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, all killed in action following the sinking of the USS Juneau in 1942. He began to wonder, would it be possible to tell a story centered on a small group of soldiers out to find the sole surviving sibling before he is killed?

  Rodat took his idea to Gordon, the producer of Speed, and they went out to present it. “We pitched the story to pretty much every studio in town, and nobody wanted it,” said Gordon. “The only place that was even a little interested was Paramount.”

  There was a hitch. The studio had two other war movies chugging along at various stages of development: a Randall Wallace screenplay, With Wings of Eagles, designed to star Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Nazi officer who saves escaping prisoners of war; and Combat!, based on the 1960s television series about a U.S. platoon fighting in France, which had attracted the attention of Bruce Willis. Both stars were nibbling at the edges, but neither had bitten, and Lansing knew that only one of these pictures would get a green light, very likely the one whose star committed first.

  “They all had things about them that I liked,” she said. “But we weren’t going to make all three. We were going to make the one that came together the best.”

  She offered to help each project in any way she could, and when Gordon got Cohen interested, true to her word, she arranged a meeting with him, designed to lock him in. Over breakfast, she discovered the director was more passionate than she had realized: his father had served in the war, and he wanted to make a movie that would honor him. He pushed her to make Ryan, arguing that it was far better than either of its rivals. “You can’t seriously make a script with an SS officer and just pretend he didn’t go around murdering Jews,” he said, demolishing the Schwarzenegger film. “This one’s going to be a masterpiece.”