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

by Stephen Galloway

  “I frequently found myself sitting next to Sherry at regents’ meetings, and we would chat about various issues that were on the agenda,” he recalled. “She was a very clear-thinking person, and always had a lighthearted demeanor that greatly impressed me. One of the contentious issues was about providing instate tuition to what some call ‘undocumented’ students. Sherry and I talked about that. I voted against it, she voted in favor. But that did not diminish my respect for her in any way.”

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  Lansing’s interest in education dovetailed with her desire to improve how women were portrayed in films.

  “She didn’t have the luxury of being overtly political or overtly outspoken about the role of women,” said CAA’s Bryan Lourd, “but in her own very powerful way she handled it by making movies that featured strong women when other people weren’t doing that.”

  Lansing found it strange—even as women were rising through the industry ranks, with two named to run other studios in the late 1990s (Amy Pascal at Sony and Stacey Snider at Universal)—that Hollywood still seemed to keep women at a remove from leading roles. Occasional female-driven pictures would emerge, more by luck than strategy, but no studio had made a practice of initiating movies with women at their core. Instead, executives largely bought into the conventional wisdom that it was men who chose which movies to see, not women, and while women would go with the men, the reverse was not true. Lansing was sure this was wrong.

  “Nobody was making movies for women, in particular women over twenty-five,” she said. “That group—which included women like me—had almost been forgotten. I kept thinking, ‘Why? We still go to the movies.’ ”

  She began to green-light a series of films with this audience in mind. What were known in the industry as “Sherry movies”—pictures that cost anywhere from $12 million to $30 million, often thrillers, always with female leads—became a staple of Paramount’s product line. Frequently skewing older (which in Hollywood meant audiences over the age of twenty-five), they included comedies and dramas, and explored such issues as growing up, aging and even interracial relationships.

  “I still use the shorthand of ‘a Sherry Lansing thriller,’ ” said Snider, almost two decades later. “Gone Girl and Girl on the Train [from 2014 and 2016] are part of the continuum that started under Sherry’s guidance. They weren’t all hers, but she made them part of the film industry’s steady diet.”

  No subject resonated with Lansing more than revenge, partly because it was a plot device that gave her heroines a clear motivation, but also because it tapped into something deeper—a loathing of being seen as a victim, a recollection of how her mother had stood up for herself.

  “I never wanted to be a victim, just as my mother didn’t,” she said. “I wanted to be an equal—an equal with my friends, an equal in my marriage, an equal in my work. I wanted to have an equal voice, and so did every woman.”

  Lansing’s films about women tapped into the deep pool of emotion she had repressed as a child; the anger and fury she had held back so long were unleashed through her heroines.

  “There’s nobody who understood the animus of the American female better than Sherry Lansing,” said Goldwyn, referring to Jung’s notion of a masculine inner personality that lies inside a woman (in contrast to the feminine inner personality Jung found within each man). “She gets it. Not the sexuality—the animus.”

  Lansing was as hands-on with these pictures as she was with Paramount’s tentpoles and awards-oriented films, dipping into the casting as well as the scripts, and reserving the right to make the final decision on whoever would star. On 1997’s Kiss the Girls, a thriller about a woman who has been kidnapped and joins a forensic psychologist (Morgan Freeman) to track down her assailant, she insisted on vetting the actress being considered for the lead, the near-unknown Ashley Judd.

  “Who do I have to please to get this part?” Judd asked when they met.

  “Me,” said Lansing.

  Judd’s coolness under fire was one of the factors that impressed Lansing enough for her to give the actress the role, and the movie earned a rich $60 million when it opened in October 1997, justifying a sequel, Along Came a Spider.

  Lansing again cast Judd, by now one of her favorite actresses, in 1999’s Double Jeopardy after Jodie Foster pulled out because of pregnancy. She was captivated by Jeopardy’s premise: if a woman is framed and sentenced to prison for a murder she did not commit, years later she can commit that murder and never be put on trial.

  “I loved these films,” said Lansing, “because they came from my gut. I knew those women. I knew what they felt like, not being equal. I wanted to be heard, and so did they.”

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  The First Wives Club was a case in point. Lansing had bought the rights to Olivia Goldsmith’s 1992 novel about three middle-aged women bent on revenge against their philandering ex-husbands when she was still a producer, but had trouble getting the script right. When she became studio chief, she handed it over to Scott Rudin.

  “Scott said: ‘The problem is, you’re making it as a drama. We have to make this funny,’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘Really? But I want its message to be clear.’ He said, ‘It will be.’ ”

  He was right: there was no doubt where the film stood with regard to its heroines or the foolishness of the men who had ditched them for younger, prettier versions of themselves, and when he had finished developing the screenplay, he and Lansing signed three gifted comediennes to star: Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton. And then, days from principal photography, Hawn told Rudin she was quitting.

  “Scott said, ‘Goldie wants to drop out,’ ” Lansing remembered. “I couldn’t believe it. I called her, and she said she had issues with the script.”

  Losing Hawn meant Lansing would also likely lose the other leads, who had signed a “favored nations” deal whereby each took the same salary, largely agreeing to do the film because they wanted to work with the other stars. Christmas was looming, the industry would soon shut down for its holiday break, and Lansing was in no mood to risk having one of her highest-profile pictures collapse while everyone was away. She called Hawn.

  “I have two words for you,” she said bluntly. “Kim Basinger.”

  Basinger had been sued after withdrawing from the 1993 indie drama Boxing Helena, even though no contract had been signed, and a jury had awarded the plaintiffs $8.1 million in a case that pushed Basinger into bankruptcy. There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “There was no question that Paramount was so deep in this movie that they were going to press this legally and make life very unpleasant,” said Hawn’s agent, Jeff Berg. “Sherry was tough. She wasn’t threatening; she was just saying, ‘This is what’s going to happen. Because if you’re not in it, we either have to close down, recast, or delay the film.’ ”

  Twenty-four hours later, the actress agreed to shoot the picture. It opened number one in September 1996.

  “Sherry wasn’t known to be brutal, so when she was, it had a massive effect,” said Rudin. “She was a person of enormous will. It was pretty incredible, really. She got what she wanted.”

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  Lansing was keen to make movies for younger females as well as those in the older “quadrant” (Hollywood typically categorized audiences as male or female, and above or below age twenty-five). She identified just as much with the heroines of such pictures as 1995’s Clueless and 2004’s Mean Girls as with Forrest Gump or Titanic’s Rose.

  Clueless had been developed as a pilot for Fox by its writer-director, Amy Heckerling, who had based the story on Jane Austen’s Emma. When Fox decided not to make it (“They were worried about something so female-oriented,” said Heckerling), Lansing bought the script, then titled I Was a Teenage Teenager, and made it for $9 million. The movie earned $56.6 million in the United States alone.

  Mean Girls was one of the few Paramount pictures that flowed without a hitch. It began when writer-actress Tina Fey read Rosalind Wi
seman’s 2002 self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes and mentioned it to Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, who asked the studio to buy the rights. The resulting script—about an innocent teenager who falls in (and then out) with the mean girls at a public high school—was one of the few Lansing read that required next to no changes.

  “We had about ten drafts before we took it to Sherry,” said Fey. “She was so trusting and proceeded with confidence. I was a first-time screenwriter, and it’s very common in film that you give it to seven other writers, and she didn’t do that. She let me do the rewrites, and it helped the movie to have one voice as opposed to a mishmash.”

  Fey was struck by Lansing’s eye for casting. She was convinced Rachel McAdams would be perfect as the leader of the mean girls, even though she was then twenty-four years old and there were discussions about having the younger and tougher Lindsay Lohan in the role. Lohan, seventeen, took the lead instead.

  “Sherry and Lorne felt you needed an actress who could [grow from innocent to tough],” said Fey, “and she also felt that, because Rachel was older, Lindsay would be intimidated by her, which was right for the film.”

  When Harvey Weinstein threatened to sue on the grounds that the movie’s title was too close to his upcoming Jersey Girl, Lansing never flinched.

  “It seemed like it was going to be a real problem,” Fey recalled. “But Sherry was so easygoing and gracious about it: ‘Oh, honey, I’ll handle it.’ She was very unflustered, while I was like, ‘What’s happening?!’ ”

  Lansing loved both Mean Girls and Clueless because they tapped into a side of her that others failed to see.

  “All of us still have a part of our soul that’s twelve years old and insecure,” she acknowledged. “That twelve-year-old girl is still in me today. You don’t get rid of her, you just control her. There are days when my insecurity is massive, and it doesn’t go away, and you remember when you felt most vulnerable and the memories that go with it. If you’re in tune with that side of you, the twelve-year-old girl will never die.”

  —

  Among Lansing’s favorite female-oriented films was a low-budget interracial love story that faced rejection at every stage of its production.

  Save the Last Dance told the story of a white girl and aspiring dancer whose mother’s death leads her to move in with her father and attend an all-black school. She becomes romantically involved with an African American student who teaches her how to dance to hip-hop and helps her get into Juilliard.

  “We were at Paramount,” said producer Robert Cort, Lansing’s former Columbia and Fox colleague, “and we said, ‘You know, Paramount has done the dance genre really well, but they haven’t done it in a long time.’ We wanted to do an interracial love story, too, so we combined them and that was the basis of the picture. We showed the script to Sherry, and she said, ‘I’m making the movie.’ She had a lot of notes and a very clear point of view. We had a much rougher movie in mind, and she had a more audience-friendly version in her head.”

  “It took me back to [1967’s] Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with its exploration of an interracial relationship,” said Lansing. “It was time for another, and this was wrapped up in a great dance movie. The genre had faded, and I felt it was time to bring it back.”

  Thomas Carter was hired to direct and a budget was set at $19 million, but when Lansing approached other studios to share the cost, most of them passed. Even Paramount’s sister company, the youth-targeting MTV Films, declined. “I heard the same objection everywhere: that young audiences would never accept an interracial romance.”

  She had seen from her own sons that change was in the air and was emphatic that a social revolution was under way, which the studios had failed to acknowledge. Harvey Weinstein agreed and the Miramax Films chief agreed to split the cost, on one condition—that singer-songwriter Usher play the lead. He told Lansing he had an option on the performer’s services, though Lansing doubted that was true.

  There was a problem: Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas not only had been cast but had already begun to rehearse. Lansing was placed in the impossible position of having to choose between a cast in which she believed and the financial safety net that Weinstein offered. Reluctantly, she accepted Weinstein’s demands. It was one of the few decisions she truly regretted.

  “Usher was brand-new,” said Cort. “He had just made his first movie and was very good in it, but then his mother [who served as his manager] wanted like $6 million or $9 million—some insane number. I said, ‘Sherry, you don’t even know who Usher is, do you?’ She said, ‘No, not really,’ and we laughed about it. So that died.”

  Without Usher, Weinstein pulled out. “[That] was the only reason we didn’t continue on with the project,” said Weinstein. “Sherry completely understood and knew it was a big risk.”

  Lansing went back to her original cast, a pyrrhic victory that left her with a sense of shame as well as relief. “I felt guilty about that young actor and what I’d almost done,” she said. “I’m not proud of it.”

  As shooting commenced, many Paramount executives were skeptical that the movie would ever make money, their doubts reinforced by the recent failure of another interracial story, the 1995 Halle Berry–Jessica Lange drama Losing Isaiah.

  “I said to [marketing chief] Arthur Cohen, ‘We’ll make $6 million or $7 million over the opening weekend,’ ” Cort recalled, predicting a modest number. “He looked at me like it was a rhetorical question, and said, ‘The distribution people think it’s un-releasable in Texas. They don’t even think we’ll do $3 million.’ ”

  When the studio tested the movie, nobody wanted to come to the screening. “Joe Farrell, the researcher, actually had to pay people to be there,” said Lansing. “He gave them $5 each, and our own marketing people wrote off the picture. They felt a black and white love story couldn’t work.’ ”

  Even with MTV finally on board to help market the film, everything looked bleak.

  “Four weeks before the movie opens, I get on a plane to India, and I’m certain it’s going to be a failure,” said Cort. “People were sure the interracial thing was a turnoff.”

  And then the downward trajectory began to turn around. “Ten days before it opened [in January 2001], Arthur Cohen said, ‘I think you can rest easy. It will do $7 million its opening weekend,’ ” continued Cort. “A few days later, he said, ‘It’s going to do $10 million.’ On the Friday it opened, he said: ‘I’ve never seen something pick up like this. It’s going to do between $12 million and $14 million.’ ”

  That weekend, the picture earned $23 million. “It was one of the most profitable ROI [return on investment] movies in the history of Paramount,” said Cort. “Sherry was vindicated. It was one of the last examples in my experience of an executive saying, ‘I want to do this. I believe in it.’ ”

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  Few of Paramount’s female-skewing films proved as complicated as 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

  A swashbuckling British aristocrat, the creation of the video game developer Core Design, Croft had debuted in 1996, and names of stars to play her had surfaced almost at once, from Elizabeth Hurley to Catherine Zeta-Jones to Jennifer Lopez, all pure conjecture until Paramount bought the rights in association with producer Lawrence Gordon.

  Those rights, however, came with a catch: if the studio did no work on the project for forty-five days, it would lose the option. That forced Paramount to move fast and pushed Lansing into the sort of territory she most disliked, hurtling forward at a breakneck pace, with all the attendant dangers of scripts that would be shoddily written, casts hastily assembled and budgets inadequately vetted.

  Concerned about the risk, she supported Dolgen’s desire to structure a beneficial deal, one as complex as he had ever negotiated, in which the movie was sold to a German company and then leased back to Paramount. By the time foreign subsidies and tax breaks were factored in, the studio had almost none of its own money at stake in the $94 million te
ntpole. But it did have its reputation on the line.

  One script came in after another, and still there was nothing usable. By mid-1999, the producers had plowed through at least eleven different writers, all struggling to craft a narrative that would engage audiences with a character who hitherto had existed only inside a video game.

  While the script was being written, Lansing and Gordon searched for a director and settled on Simon West. He was a craftsman rather than an auteur; his biggest successes had been the 1997 actioner Con Air (which, like many Jerry Bruckheimer films, bore the hallmark of its powerful producer just as much as its director) and the 1999 military thriller The General’s Daughter. But Lansing knew he could bring in a franchise film on time and on budget.

  At first West passed. “I didn’t necessarily believe it was possible to make a video game into a film, and I’d just done a standard summer blockbuster film with Con Air and didn’t want to do another [right away],” he said. “Having now done General’s Daughter, I said, ‘I’m interested.’ ”

  The director tried to untangle the thicket of scripts. His attempts infuriated at least one of the writers involved, Steven E. de Souza, the same man who had been bogged down in the chaos of Beverly Hills Cop III.

  “He comes in and almost immediately says, ‘This script is shit,’ even though it’s budget-and schedule-approved,” said de Souza. “He hires four writers to do four or five different drafts. At the end he declares, ‘They’re all shit; I’m going to have to write the script,’ and insists the studio pay him a very big number to write it.”

  “There was a long list of writers that would come and go, and so the script was in fluidity,” said West. “It was very hard for me to prep, because it was never a stationary target. But that happens on most of those summer blockbuster movies—there’s a long tradition of the draft never [being] finished. And [in this case] the risk of losing the rights meant there was no time to stand back and think. The train had left the station, and Sherry felt the pressure.”