The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  Sixty-six years old when he took over Sony, Calley needed a team of young, energetic executives to handle the day-to-day business of developing and making movies. One of his first hires was Amy Pascal.

  A rarity in the upper echelons of Hollywood, Pascal is a Los Angeles native who had spent her entire career in entertainment but didn’t come from an industry family. The daughter of an economist at a prominent think tank and a librarian who later owned a feminist bookstore, Pascal was born in 1958 and described her upbringing as middle-class Jewish intellectual.

  She was interested in human nature as revealed in books, like J. D. Salinger’s short stories featuring the Glass family, a septet of precocious children and their parents, who live in New York. Film was the hometown industry, however, and after earning a degree in international relations at UCLA, Pascal answered an ad in the trade paper Variety in 1979 and followed a tried-and-true career path: starting at the bottom of the food chain as a producer’s assistant, answering phones and fetching coffee. “Movies defined what was possible for a young ambitious girl growing up in Southern California,” she would later say.

  At the time, motion pictures were a booming business, and anyone with taste and tenacity could rise quickly. Pascal had both, combining an offbeat fashion sense and a rapid-fire speaking style with off-the-charts emotional intelligence and a tireless work ethic. Nobody read more scripts or charmed more creative talent. Her unusual combination of traits—His Girl Friday spunk, 1960s flower-child funk, and motherly concern for the filmmakers and actors she adored—gave Pascal the determination to succeed in male-dominated work environments while maintaining her own distinct personality.

  It wasn’t long until she rose from assistant to “d-girl,” a condescending term used in the industry at the time for junior development executives, many of them young women, who scoured piles of script and book submissions in search of the next hit film (today, of course, they’d be scouring Comic-Con and toy shelves). Pascal’s first find to make it to the big screen was the comedy Earth Girls Are Easy, starring Geena Davis, in 1989. Earth Girls garnered attention in the industry as a hot script, though it later flopped at the box office.

  Pascal assumed she would one day have the same job as her boss. “Eventually, I want to produce,” she said in an interview. “That’s where the fun is. That’s always been the plan.”

  It made total sense. Producing was the up-close, get-your-hands-dirty job of making movies, while running a studio was an increasingly bureaucratic job that was more about managing bottom lines and pleasing corporate overlords. With her lack of background in business or in anything, really, besides developing and making films, Pascal seemed ill-suited to such a task.

  But in 1985, Scott Rudin, her friend and mentor, and the president of production at Fox, convinced her that she would benefit from some time working at a studio. So Pascal joined him at Fox as a vice president of production. That sent her on a trajectory that would keep her in the studio-executive ranks for more than three decades. By 1989, she had left Fox to take a similar role at Columbia. In 1994, at just thirty-six, she was running her own mini-studio, Turner Pictures, a startup with the backing of CNN and the TBS mogul Ted Turner. There, she oversaw forty people and an annual budget of $100 million.

  This remarkable rise put Pascal at the head of the class among her contemporaries. Still, many in Hollywood viewed the bubble-gum-chewing woman who at meetings sat with legs folded under her on a couch, rather than behind an imposing desk, as an odd creature. Her detractors—anyone who reached her level of success in Hollywood was sure to have some—liked to describe her as “crazy.”

  The moody, insecure, right-brain types who make and star in movies, however, thought she fit right in. “Her self-deprecating thing is charming,” said the director James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good As It Gets). “You tend to trust someone more when they have a degree of self-loathing . . . they’re more like you.” Ron Howard described her as “the greatest studio boss out there.” George Clooney, who’s known for being opinionated but not a brownnose, told her, “I adore you, Amy. You are literally the only person running a studio that loves film.” “Amy has the heart and mind of an artist,” Jonah Hill once gushed. “I could say I actually love her.”

  Creative talent didn’t fall for just her personality. They also loved Pascal’s passion to make the kind of movies they preferred: mid-budget, star-driven, with original ideas. Not necessarily highbrow (though she didn’t mind that), but definitely not much “branded entertainment.”

  She was also widely admired for rising so high and so fast despite rampant sexism in Hollywood and the media that covered it. For example, in a 2002 profile, Time magazine reported that “you can gauge her mood by whether her hair is straight (foul) or curly (ebullient).” In interviews, she was constantly asked whether she made too many “chick flicks,” like A League of Their Own and Single White Female. Nobody seemed to ask executives at the studios behind Die Hard and Independence Day if they made too many movies for dudes.

  At Columbia, she had worked on an adaptation of Little Women and the still-heralded Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day. The slate she put together at Turner included a Jackie Robinson biopic to star Denzel Washington and to be directed by Spike Lee, an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead by Oliver Stone, and original projects about the CIA, women in the space program, and a world in which women disappear.

  But in 1995 Time Warner acquired Ted Turner’s media empire, and in 1996 it shut down Turner Pictures, deemed redundant at a company that already owned Warner Bros. Only a few movies developed at Turner ever made it into theaters, including the comedy Michael, starring John Travolta as an angel, and the Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan hit You’ve Got Mail. “The unfortunate thing about this experience is that it ended before it really had a chance to begin,” she said.

  Pascal considered becoming a producer or an executive at the startup studio DreamWorks before landing another big job: president of Columbia Pictures under Calley. He paired her with two other top creative executives, vice-chairman Lucy Fisher and co-vice-chairman Gareth Wigan (Sony has a long tradition of lofty, confusing job titles and a multitude of senior production executives, who sometimes butt heads). Nonetheless, the studio’s output started to reflect Pascal’s taste for midsize interesting movies.

  The corporate drama at Sony Pictures ratcheted down considerably in the late 1990s, but the box-office track record was spotty. Some midsize films, such as Jerry Maguire, Big Daddy, and As Good As It Gets, broke out, but others, like Nicolas Cage’s 8 MM, Robin Williams’s Jakob the Liar, and the Mike Nichols comedy What Planet Are You From?, were major flops. A few were unbelievably expensive, considering the result, including the $100-million-plus biopic Ali, a box-office disappointment of 2001 starring Will Smith as the boxer.

  And when Sony did swing for the fences, the results didn’t impress. Consider the 1998 bomb Godzilla and the medieval adventure A Knight’s Tale, starring Heath Ledger in 2001, another flop.

  Other studios were succeeding with original and interesting movies at all budget levels. DreamWorks had Saving Private Ryan, Disney The Sixth Sense, and Paramount and Fox Titanic. Sony’s strategy wasn’t off; its execution simply wasn’t good enough. The studio ranked a disappointing number four at the box office in 1998, and an embarrassing number six or seven every year from 1999 through 2001, until Spider-Man not only turned around Sony’s fortune but marked a turning point for Hollywood, in 2002.

  Amid all this, Pascal remained a survivor, outlasting Fisher, Wigan, and other executives to become Calley’s seemingly designated successor. In 1999 she was promoted to chairman of Columbia Pictures (“chairman” being the loftiest title anyone in Hollywood can think of, even though there is never actually a board to chair). And by 2003, when Calley announced he would retire, she seemed poised to take over.

  But Sony’s U.S. chief, Howard Stringer, and his bosses in Tokyo weren’t ready to put her in charge, concerned about her business a
cumen and her habit of overspending on action movies like Charlie’s Angels 2 (budget: $130 million) and dramas like Brooks’s Spanglish ($80 million) when they wanted to bring down costs and grow profits, not just box office.

  In 2003, Sony had been number two at the box office, with hits like Bad Boys II, Anger Management, and S.W.A.T. But profits for the motion picture group in the fiscal year that ended March 2004 (the best measure of performance in the prior calendar year) were only $60 million, down 88 percent from the prior year and 75 percent below the company’s target, a clear sign that fiscal discipline was needed.

  Rumors swirled that Joe Roth, the former Disney film chief who now ran a Sony partner, Revolution Studios, might take over. But instead, Sony shocked Hollywood by turning to an outsider and Pascal’s polar opposite.

  The Unlikely Mogul

  After he left Hollywood in 1997, nobody thought Michael Lynton would return.

  A European-born intellectual who fell into the entertainment industry by happenstance, Lynton could seemingly be deployed to run any company or, thanks to his family wealth, never work at all. People who have known him at all stages of his professional life describe the lanky, lackadaisical Lynton as incredibly smart, extremely decent, and never outwardly excited about what he’s doing. Worldly but mild-mannered, he seemed like the type of guy who could say “aw, shucks” in each of the four languages he spoke.

  Born in London in 1960 to Jews who fled Germany during the Holocaust, Lynton spent his early youth in the New York suburb of Scarsdale before the family settled in the Netherlands in 1969. There, his father worked as an executive at the window coverings giant Hunter Douglas, which Lynton’s maternal grandfather had founded.

  Always educated at the best schools, he returned to the United States to attend Phillips Exeter Academy for his last year of high school and then went to Harvard College, where he studied history and literature. After a few years on Wall Street, he decided to return to Harvard to attend business school. Lynton earned his MBA the year that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street hit theaters, but you could never imagine him standing in front of a room like Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, promoting the virtues of greed. He didn’t need money, and he had no burning ambition to be a power player or work his way into the 1 percent, since he already belonged to it.

  What Lynton wanted was intellectual challenge. The best one to present itself came from Steve Burke, who had graduated from Harvard Business School five years earlier and met Lynton via his former boss at the Wall Street bank Credit Suisse First Boston. Burke, who would later become chief executive of the media conglomerate NBCUniversal, recruited Lynton to work at a company that seemed as un-European and anti-intellectual as they come: Disney.

  Under the newly appointed CEO, Michael Eisner, the staid Disney organization had hired a cadre of young MBAs to experiment and expand the company into new businesses. Lynton was assigned to the company’s publishing business in New York, and though his first task, licensing coloring books, wasn’t too thrilling, he soon launched the magazine Disney Adventures and book lines for both children and adults.

  Colleagues were certain Lynton would go far—not just because of his acumen and smarts, but because of how easily he seemed to fit in among the elite. “He was in a different world,” recalled a Disney coworker. “He always seemed charmed, like he was destined to become a CEO.” That prediction seemed well on its way to coming true by 1994, when out of the blue, Lynton was tapped to run Hollywood Pictures, a division of Disney’s studio that made films for adults. Calling him a controversial choice would be an understatement. Lynton had no experience making movies and few relationships in a business that ran entirely on them.

  Supporters argued that Lynton’s background in publishing gave him knowledge of the creative process, along with an outsider’s perspective. But in insular Hollywood, he was by his own admission a “stranger in a strange land.”

  Though he made a goodhearted effort, Lynton never really fit in. He didn’t much care for the Hollywood social scene, where connections lead to relationships and then deals. And with a young family, he had other priorities. In an industry full of huge personalities, Lynton was the opposite—an awkward match with the powerful position he inhabited. “It is perhaps true that people like me make the world a less interesting place,” he said of himself. Many agents, producers, and other lifelong creatures of the entertainment industry viewed the outsider with mistrust, if not disdain. They considered him an arrogant and unworthy interloper, an opinion that some would hold across his entire career, particularly when he worked alongside the Hollywood native Pascal.

  Lynton was the kind of guy who, while CEO of Sony Pictures, could stand awkwardly alone in a corner, dressed in a sweater, hair uncombed, at the Oscars party put on by the super-agent Ari Emanuel. The only reason he even came, he would admit, was because he lived next door and heard the noise.

  Pascal herself captured the view of many in the film industry when she described her boss to a management consultant: “he is a very east coast (actually from holland) super brain . . . very non California and proud of it . . . the kind of guy who wears the same pair of shoes every day but what you wouldn’t know is that they were made by the poshest most expensive cobbler in switzerland. he will be the first to tell you he flys coach (yeah sure) but if you check out the pencil holder on his desk its actually a henry miller sculpter.”

  Though Lynton had a few friends in Hollywood, the people he was closest to were outside the entertainment industry and unsurprisingly, given his background, drawn from the most elite circles. Even in 2013 and 2014, after a decade of running Sony, he only infrequently exchanged e-mails with power players in his own industry.

  The people he regularly spoke to were a who’s-who of the 1 percent: The New Yorker editor David Remnick, the writer Malcolm Gladwell, ABC’s anchor Diane Sawyer, CNN’s host Fareed Zakaria, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, and the Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. When Lynton traveled to Tokyo for work, the pal he tried to catch up with for drinks was the daughter of a president and the ambassador to Japan: Caroline Kennedy. He spent summer vacations with the East Coast elite on Martha’s Vineyard, where he dined with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

  “Michael is probably the only media guy you’ll meet who reads The New Yorker before he reads Variety (if he reads Variety . . . . . . ?),” said Michael Ryan, a powerful New York attorney and Lynton’s brother-in-law.

  Lynton’s stint running Hollywood Pictures ended ignominiously, though not because of any failure on his part. The division was founded in 1988 to keep the Disney executive who ran it before Lynton from leaving, but it was always duplicative with the studio’s other adult live-action label, Touchstone. Joe Roth replaced Jeffrey Katzenberg as chairman of Disney’s movie studio just three months after Lynton started, and in 1996 he shut down Hollywood Pictures, ending Lynton’s two-year run before the executive had seen a single movie from development to release. If Lynton had any impact, it was his successful bid of $3 million for movie rights to the then-unpublished book The Horse Whisperer, which went on to become a bestseller and, in 1998, a hit film for Touchstone, directed by Robert Redford.

  “He’s a wonderful guy, but I don’t think this town embraced him,” Jim Wiatt, then head of the agency ICM, said politely about Lynton’s departure.

  For his part, Lynton seemed glad to be gone.

  “For as long as I lived in L.A. I was never entirely comfortable there,” he said in 1998. “Imagine living in a town where everything is about movies—where there is no other conversation. That is a horror.”

  Lynton then headed back to New York for his first job as a CEO, running the book publisher Penguin. The post perfectly combined his European background (Penguin’s corporate owner was British), his highbrow education (at Harvard he wrote a dissertation on the author E. M. Forster), and his knowledge of middlebrow tastes and brand marketing from Disney.

  Much as he would later do at Sony, Lynton largely left the creative work to
subordinates and focused on business strategy. He did get involved in crises, however, including an accounting scandal and Penguin’s publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1999. This book provoked the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa against the author, which led to threats against bookstores and even bombings.

  In 2000, Lynton left publishing for America Online, which was then red-hot. He became president of its international businesses just days before the company merged with Time Warner. The ugly corporate politics that followed, along with the dot-com crash of 2001, quickly made AOL a less exciting place to work. And though Lynton succeeded in turning around AOL’s European operations, by 2003 he publicly mused about finding a new position in the more traditional entertainment world.

  The opportunity came when he was introduced to Sony’s Howard Stringer. Once again, Lynton impressed with his stellar résumé and intelligence, and later that year Stringer settled on him to replace Calley as CEO and chairman of Sony Pictures, convinced he could run the business more efficiently and also use his AOL background to bring the studio into the digital age.

  There was one problem: Pascal. Convinced that the studio’s top job should go to an experienced creative executive and that she had earned it, she expected Stringer to name her as the new boss. When Sony USA’s CEO called her at the eleventh hour to inform her that an outsider was about to be hired instead, she threatened to quit rather than report to him.

  But Pascal, reluctantly, agreed to fly to New York to meet Lynton. Over dinner in the glass-walled executive dining room atop the Sony Building, she was impressed. The studio’s low-key new chief had no intention of horning in on her creative territory. His plan, in fact, was to handle all of the business responsibilities that didn’t interest her.