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

by Stephen Galloway

  Goldwyn turned pale. “He said, ‘You’re right. I should never have done that. I’m sorry,’ ” Lansing recalled. “Tom said, ‘Will you take care of it?’ And John said, ‘Yes.’ And Tom said, ‘Then we’re fine.’ ”

  —

  In 2003, after years of success with CW Productions, Lansing learned from a rival studio executive that Cruise was in talks to relocate his company to Warner Bros., where he had just made The Last Samurai.

  “I called Jon Dolgen,” she said. “His take was that the Warner deal must already be done or the executive would never have said anything. I was upset. It was so personal, because Tom was like my younger brother and I really trusted him. We’d had our ups and downs, and disappointments as well as successes, but he was always my partner.”

  She asked to meet with Wagner. “Paula walked across the lot, and we ended up meeting outside my office. I said, ‘I don’t understand. You guys are like family.’ ”

  “Sherry got teary-eyed,” said Wagner. “She said, ‘I want to hear everything you have to say, all your issues, what we can do to change this.’ She was very embracing. I said: ‘We want more involvement with the studio. Let’s develop more things together.’ We talked it out. We all had a heart, and everybody realized there was a real, human, personal connection and it transcended business. That was one of the wonderful things about that studio: there was vitality and life, and we aired any grievances we had, and became more collaborative after that meeting.”

  When Wagner relayed the conversation to Cruise, he put an end to the Warner talks, she recalled: “He said, ‘This isn’t right. We’re staying with Sherry.’ ”

  —

  The last major picture Cruise and Wagner produced for Lansing was Mission: Impossible III, which was planned as Paramount’s summer “tentpole” for July 2005.

  That term had only recently come into being to describe the monumentally expensive and massively promoted films that could dominate an entire season, sucking up much of a studio’s budget and, if all went well, an equivalent portion of the box office.

  This latest Mission was initially developed by director David Fincher (Fight Club), who had in mind a more violent and bloody film than either Paramount or Cruise might have liked, possibly one that would earn an R rating. When he left the project, Joe Carnahan stepped in. A relative newcomer whose rough and rugged second feature, 2002’s low-budget Narc, had impressed Cruise, he seemed to fit the grittier approach Paramount wanted for this third outing in the series. But after months of work, something was not jelling.

  “I was very interested in what I’d pitched him: the punk rock version of that franchise, going more toward where the Bourne films were heading and getting some dirt under your nails,” said Carnahan. “I wanted it to be less glossy than the De Palma and John Woo versions.”

  After working with three different writers for more than a year, “The frustrations mounted,” he continued. “I was a much younger man, more rash and hotheaded. We just saw very different films. I think I was about a week from being fired when I called Tom. It was a terrifying phone call to make. I actually videotaped myself when I did it. I thought, ‘I’m never going to be more terrified than now. If my career is going to crater, why not commemorate it?’ So I said to Tom, ‘Listen, I’m going to pack my stuff.’ He was a total gentleman. He understood. And Sherry was always remarkably supportive.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” said Lansing. “I thought, ‘This is Mission: Impossible. We have Tom Cruise. We’ll get any director we want.’ ”

  As expected, agents started calling immediately, telling her that almost every director of stature and commercial worth, including some Oscar winners, wanted to take over the project. Lansing sent a list of candidates to Cruise and Wagner, anticipating a quick reply—“and there was no response,” she said.

  Never happy living in uncertainty, she left her office and walked the few hundred yards to the CW base to discuss it with Wagner and Cruise, taking a chair at a table beside them in the suite where she had once produced her films.

  “We were sitting in Tom’s office, at a little table, and Tom said, ‘I don’t think any of these people are right,’ ” Lansing recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘None of them are right.’ I said, ‘Well, who do you think is?’ And he said, ‘J. J. Abrams.’ ”

  Abrams at that point was a near-unknown in the film world. But Cruise had been impressed by what he had seen.

  “Tom and Paula had met with me about writing a script, and ultimately I was not available because I was going off to direct the pilot for Lost,” said Abrams. “As Tom was leaving, my assistant gave him the first two seasons of Alias on DVD. While I was shooting the pilot, I got a call from Tom, who had watched these two seasons and was very complimentary.”

  When Abrams got back from the shoot in Hawaii, “We got together and he was talking about his work on Mission: III and what they were trying to do,” he continued. “But this was never a discussion about my directing that movie—it was just about which stories he was going to tell. If anything, I thought he might want to discuss my working on the script, but that wasn’t clear. A couple of months later, I got a call from my agent saying that Tom wanted me to direct.”

  It was 2004, well before the thirty-seven-year-old had reached the pinnacle of his fame. He had contributed to the Armageddon screenplay, spent four years producing the WB’s television series Felicity, executive-produced Alias and now was working on Lost. But Lansing struggled to remember who he was.

  “Have you seen Alias?” asked Cruise. “What about Lost?”

  Lost had not yet debuted (its pilot would be broadcast in September), and although Lansing would later become an avid consumer of television, she came from a world where it was very separate from film. She brushed the thought aside.

  “I said, ‘What about this big director who’s won two Academy Awards? What about that one who’s just been nominated?’ ” she insisted. “Tom listened, and said, ‘They’re good. But I don’t think they’re right.’ ”

  Back and forth they went, dissecting this name and that, and each time Lansing mentioned a strong contender the response was the same: Cruise said no. He was his usual impeccably mannered self, and yet she could not move him. She left the meeting trying to control her frustration.

  “My whole year was resting on this picture, and it was meant to start shooting any week,” she said. “But I couldn’t get him to budge. I went back to my office and called [Disney-ABC chairman] Michael Eisner to see if we could get J.J., and he said, ‘He isn’t available for eighteen months.’ I was relieved. Now I could get one of my choices. So I called Tom and said, ‘I’d yield, but he’s not free.’ And Tom said, ‘Then we’ll just have to wait.’ ”

  The behemoth that Lansing had envisioned as a lock for summer 2005 was starting to look shaky. “Perhaps I should have thrown myself on his mercy and said, ‘I have nothing else,’ but I couldn’t get those words out of my mouth,” she observed. “I was afraid it would sound like he was just a piece of merchandise and this film was another widget we had to get down the production line. So instead I said: ‘The franchise will grow old and the audience will get tired of it.’ Tom said, ‘I don’t agree.’ Then I pleaded with him, ‘Meet some of the other directors.’ But he wanted to wait. Finally, I lost it. I said, ‘You’re going to be too old to do it in two years!’ I can’t believe I said that. He was only forty-two at the time. But he just smiled and said, ‘You think so?’ ”

  Over the following weeks, one meeting took place after another, and each time the pattern would be repeated.

  “There was a rhythm,” said Lansing. “Tom would look at me and say, ‘You seem so depressed.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I am.’ And he’d take my hand and put his own over it and say, ‘Sherry, you’re like my sister. Trust me. You know I’d never hurt you,’ always very tenderly. Each time we met, the same thing. He’d take my hand and say the same reassuring words. But he’d never give
in.”

  Summer was barreling down on them, and Lansing’s movie was failing to fall into place. She felt trapped.

  “I was calling every other studio, looking to buy something—anything—to fill the hole on July 4, 2005, when Mission: Impossible was meant to open,” she said. “I’d ask, ‘Does anyone want to co-finance? Does anyone have a big picture where we can jump in and split the rights?’ But nobody said yes. We read all these scripts in development, and nothing was close to being ready.”

  Lansing met with Abrams and Cruise in the latter’s home office, hoping she might find a way to pry the director free of his TV deal.

  “Tom, to his credit, was clear about why he thought I would do the job that he needed,” said Abrams. “It was a very awkward position for all of us. Sherry handled it with this incredible kindness and ultimately agreed that I could do this movie.”

  “The first thing J.J. said was, ‘I’m so sorry I put you in this position,’ ” she recalled. “He understood that I was being asked to take a leap of faith on him with our biggest franchise. Then he said he wanted to rewrite the screenplay. So not only was I going to have to wait a year and a half before he could shoot, but now he was saying he hated the script.”

  “It didn’t feel like something I could do justice to,” said Abrams. “It was very well written, incredibly gritty and cool, and I liked it. But I knew it wasn’t the version that I could get inside of.”

  Three weeks from what should have been the start of production, Lansing realized her tentpole was doomed. Paramount would have no summer blockbuster in 2005. She would have to deal with the fallout, in the press and the industry, and possibly among the shareholders, too.

  Days later, her secretary told her Spielberg was on the line.

  “He said, ‘You know, Tom and I have been working on this project, War of the Worlds. We’ve got a pretty interesting script and I’d like you to read it,’ ” Lansing remembered. “I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

  War of the Worlds was an updated rendering, replete with expensive effects, of H. G. Wells’s classic science fiction novel of 1898, an adventure about a widowed father who witnesses an alien attack and fights to save his family. Lansing read it that night, knowing just how hard such an undertaking would be. Spielberg was offering a great joint venture, but it would take forever to make.

  “My first thought was, ‘This movie will earn a fortune,’ ” she said, “and my second was, ‘It will take three years to complete.’ ”

  She called Spielberg the next day.

  “I said, ‘Steven, this is great. When will it come out?’ ”

  “July fourth,” he replied.

  “2006?” she asked.

  “No,” said Spielberg. “2005.”

  Lansing could not believe what she was hearing. Suddenly, she had her summer tentpole, and it would pair Cruise with the most successful director in history. The actor had had this in the works even as he was holding her hand, promising everything would be OK.

  “Tom must have known all along,” she said. “He always denied it, but I was sure he’d been keeping it in his back pocket. I laughed until I cried. When he told me to trust him, he meant it.”

  Lansing’s most important bonds were not just with men like Cruise and Spielberg; she was also drawing closer to some of the industry’s notable women.

  “For many years, people had pitted women against women, and I’d bought into that,” she said. “We thought there was only room for one of us, so there was a guardedness between us. You weren’t going to say, ‘Oh God, I read the best script,’ because you knew that other person might buy it or get the job that might have been yours. But the times had changed, and those feelings didn’t exist anymore.”

  In the mid-1990s, Lansing began to form a bond with the only woman who had ever rivaled her for power, Dawn Steel. The two could not have been more different—one a natural diplomat, the other a brawler.

  Born in the Bronx in 1946, the daughter of a semi-professional weight-lifter, Steel had dropped out of Boston University and then become a secretary and sportswriter before running marketing for Penthouse. As head of her own marketing company, she subsequently became infamous for selling toilet paper with the Gucci logo. She joined Paramount as a merchandising executive, then switched to production and became president of production in 1985. She knew just as well as Lansing how brutal studio politics could be, and was fired from Paramount while in the hospital, having just given birth to her first child. Later, she joined Columbia Pictures and was forced out with equal bluntness.

  In 1995, she and Lansing were invited to the same party and sat together on a couch. For the first time, said Lansing, “we really talked.”

  Steel, who had turned to producing after leaving Columbia, had mellowed somewhat in the years since, partly because she was happily married to producer Charles Roven, partly because she had become a mother. She was approaching fifty—she was just two years younger than Lansing—and there on the couch, she spoke about her life: how she had enjoyed the success of 1993’s Cool Runnings, been hurt by the failure of 1995’s Angus and stung by the public humiliation of losing her job at Columbia.

  “She said she felt so smothered by Hollywood she’d taken a few weeks and traveled across the country to clear her head,” recalled Lansing. “She had only just got back, and was in a reflective mood. For two hours, we talked about everything except the movies, and especially about her young daughter, Rebecca, and how worried she was that growing up privileged might hurt her growth. I was dealing with a similar situation with Jack and Cedric. The conversation was easy and we just clicked.”

  Over the next few months, the two women got into a routine of having lunch every third weekend. “We’d meet on Saturday afternoons in our sweats, with our hair tied back, and talk for hours,” said Lansing.

  The better she got to know Steel, the more she liked her funny, fiery personality. And then, six months into their budding friendship, Steel was diagnosed with brain cancer.

  “I called everyone I’d ever met in cancer research about treatment,” said Lansing. “I thought Dawn was going to pull through. But she didn’t.”

  Lansing had to face losing Steel just as they were beginning to repair the damage inflicted on them by the industry and their own misconceptions. Watching her friend decline, she witnessed the horror her mother had gone through all over again, her emotions swept up in a vortex that mixed memory and mortality, nostalgia and regret.

  “I’d had this feeling ever since the death of my father,” she said, “but it was never clearer to me than now: when you die, all you’ll remember are the moments of intimacy, the moments of human contact. I visited Dawn near the end of her life when she was very sick. It took all my strength to see such a force of nature so subdued. She could barely speak. She couldn’t move. It was horrible. The last thing I said to her was, I was honored she was my friend.”

  In December 1997, a year and a half after Steel’s initial diagnosis, she died at the age of fifty-one. Lansing was one of her pallbearers. Several of the women who had risen alongside them were there, and it struck Lansing as ineffably sad that only now, at this wake, were they meeting as comrades-in-arms.

  “In her eulogy, Lucy Fisher spoke about the end, when Dawn was in the hospital and her daughter crawled into her bed,” said Lansing. “Her husband was there, too, and Dawn realized that everything she’d been searching for her whole life was in that room.”

  —

  Steel’s death forced Lansing to look at her life anew.

  For such a long time, she had been so immersed in the day-to-day activities of running a business with three thousand employees, extinguishing fires before they could spread, that she’d had little freedom to contemplate her broader goals. But increasingly she was turning toward the outside world. In addition to her work fighting cancer, she had raised money for underprivileged girls to go to college, and had been more active in her efforts to improve education.

  When Gray
Davis was elected governor of California in late 1998, she asked to be appointed to the University of California’s board of regents, the twenty-six-member body that oversaw the ten-campus organization, with its quarter of a million students, five medical centers and three federal laboratories. Davis named her as one of his choices, but that was only the first sally in the battle.

  “There are literally thousands of appointments to advisory boards and councils in a state the size and complexity of California,” said Barry Munitz, then head of the governor’s transition team. “Ironically, the two most desirable slots are on the UC board of regents and the state horse-racing commission. These require confirmation from the Senate, and the hearings are pretty intense.”

  Lansing prepared obsessively, taking home piles of books and stacks of papers, all heaped on top of her regular pile of scripts. “I had books that went from one end of the room to the other,” she said. “I had to steep myself in information. What’s the rule on this? How do they handle that? I didn’t want anything to catch me by surprise.”

  In early 1999, she flew to Sacramento and took a seat inside the Senate building, where her confirmation hearing was about to take place, then waited nervously until John Burton, the Democratic leader of the California Senate, entered the room.

  “He comes in, looks at a man sitting there, and yells ‘What the hell are you doing in my seat?’ and storms out,” said Lansing. “I was sitting there, ready to read a statement, with a pile of cards in front of me with all the statistics, and he was gone. I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m collateral damage.’ ”

  Her fears proved unfounded. She won approval from Burton’s committee and later the full Senate.

  As a regent, she was a consensus builder who drew the respect of friends and opponents alike. Even those who vehemently disagreed with her generally liberal point of view expressed their admiration—among them Ward Connerly, an African American libertarian who had led the fight for Proposition 209, a California ballot initiative passed in 1996 that forbade the use of affirmative action in state-funded institutions, creating problems for those who believed the state should do more to boost higher learning for minorities.