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

by Stephen Galloway

  While searching for another senior executive, she did everything she could to solidify her relationships with Fox’s in-house producers, who served as a de facto second bench of executives, culling story ideas and pushing them up the ladder. She had observed two masters at work: Douglas, as he fought for The China Syndrome, and Jaffe, who had used every trick in the book to persuade Hoffman to star in Kramer, even flying to England to convince him. Jaffe was now at Fox, and so was Melnick, appropriately ensconced in lavish, black-marble offices, and soon to savor victory at the Cannes film festival, where his cherished All That Jazz would share the Palme d’Or with Kurosawa’s Kagemusha.

  With these men at her side, along with three other major producers—Frank Yablans, and partners David Brown and Richard Zanuck—Lansing was confident in her team. But it would take months, if not years, for them to develop a steady stream of pictures, and Fox had a pipeline that needed to be filled.

  Starting work, she began to read two dozen scripts a week, held countless meetings and fielded more than a hundred calls a day. During her lunch break she would watch the rushes of any movie in production. She was lucid and logical, never shouted or made unreasonable demands, and yet there was no mistaking who was in charge. She insisted her staff join her for mandatory Friday-night dinners, because the workweek was so packed there was little face time. None of them dared to refuse.

  “Nobody was thrilled,” she admitted. “I overworked, which I felt I had to do as a woman. I never missed meetings, dailies or screenings, and I saw virtually every movie that was released.”

  Despite her elevated position, she was kept at a remove from the studio’s innermost circle, which remained a boys’ club headed by the cool, reserved Stanfill—“the ultimate WASP,” in Robert Cort’s words—and the affable but slippery Hirschfield. All key decision-making centered on them, and even if they rarely saw eye to eye, Lansing was at best a high-level functionary, valuable but not irreplaceable.

  “I wasn’t angry about it,” she said. “I was more anxious about what I didn’t know, because I’d never done the job before. There was no handbook to show me how to do it.”

  Condescension was routine, derision a fact of life. One agent took pleasure in peppering his talk with abstruse terminology, purely to torment her. “You do know what a ‘rolling break’ is, don’t you?” he asked, referring to the profit point of a movie, which recedes farther from view the longer a movie is in theaters, as a studio has to spend more and more money to keep the picture in circulation.

  “I bluffed my way through,” said Lansing. “There was no one to ask. If I called business affairs, some lawyer would inevitably spread the word that I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Sometimes she would catch faint squibs of conversation as her colleagues whispered about her behind her back—not just men, but women, too. “I often showed up at parties looking bedraggled from working all day,” she said. “I never had time to shop for clothes, and I didn’t care. Once I looked so bad that a woman pulled me aside and whispered, ‘Darling, let me take you out to buy some clothes.’ ”

  Reports of her nocturnal activities stung her to the quick, especially when she heard she was having an affair with a man she barely knew. There was always talk of women sleeping their way to the top, but the same was never true of men; a double standard was at play, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  One producer, asked how he felt about submitting his projects to a woman, said it was a win-win situation: if she did not like his ideas, she might at least sleep with him.

  “I’d have been happy to turn him down, and his movie with him,” said Lansing.

  —

  Outsiders used her inexperience to their benefit. When Lansing passed on a screenplay by Larry Gelbart, the distinguished writer of the TV series M*A*S*H, agency operatives began a whispering campaign about her mistake. Neighbors was a black comedy about an obnoxious couple that moves next door to a traditional family and wreaks havoc, “but I didn’t think the script was funny,” said Lansing, “so I put it in turnaround,” the industry term for selling a project to another studio.

  Weeks later, CAA’s Ovitz called with the news that two top comedy stars had agreed to make the film, which, naturally, he represented. “I want you to be the first to know that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd are doing it,” he said. They were joined by John Avildsen, the Oscar-winning director of Rocky.

  “For the next six months, I lived in fear that the movie would open to a huge number,” said Lansing. She need not have worried: the picture fizzled when it debuted in December 1981 and was notable only for being Belushi’s last film before his death from a drug overdose the following year.

  If Neighbors was not in her wheelhouse, she nonetheless backed an impressive range of movies across the spectrum of both genre and sensibility, from the visually sumptuous Quest for Fire (which followed three Cro-Magnon warriors searching for the origins of fire) to the Burt Reynolds action comedy Cannonball Run to the George Hamilton spoof Zorro: The Gay Blade to the Al Pacino dramedy Author! Author!

  Her job was to usher in a broad slate of pictures for all audiences, not just ones that reflected her personal taste. “That’s what a production chief does,” she said. “It’s his or her role to keep the product flowing and make commercial movies, not to be the producer.”

  —

  Weeks into her job, Lansing flew to New York for a screening of Brubaker, a prison drama starring Robert Redford that was due to come out in June 1980.

  “Everybody was there except him,” she said. “After waiting twenty-five minutes, I told the projectionist to start the movie. People were surprised, but I had a day full of meetings and had no time to lose.” The picture screened, Lansing gave her notes to its producer and director, and all three were just stepping out of an elevator and into the building’s lobby when Redford strolled in.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “No problem,” said Lansing, unaware that the actor was notorious for his lack of punctuality. “Take a look at the movie and let me know what you think.”

  She left him to watch the film while she went about the rest of her day. She did not know that the movie, initiated before her arrival, had been riddled with problems, and that Redford was even more nervous about the result than most stars normally are. There had been fights during the drug-infested shoot, both verbal and physical: one of the studio’s executives had gone to the set to sort out the mess and had gotten into a tussle with director Bob Rafelson, who was replaced by Stuart Rosenberg. Redford, shaken after Rafelson was fired, had grown still more concerned when Fox decided to position the picture as a summer blockbuster, though it was hardly obvious summer fare. “It wasn’t a classic June movie,” said one of the executives who worked on the film. “It was a dark prison drama.”

  As the picture headed toward its release, an article came out arguing that this was the end of the movie star era, lumping Redford with two other seemingly failed stars, Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood. Redford was furious. “He demanded we intervene to differentiate him from Eastwood and Reynolds,” the executive continued. “He had a very thin skin.”

  When a studio publicist tried to counterbalance the previous article by planting a positive item about Redford’s appeal, New York Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith saw through the ruse. “What she went with was, ‘Robert Redford is concerned about his image,’ ” said the executive. “Then Redford called the studio, insane, really just insane. He said, ‘I want this guy fired. I’m never working at Fox again unless you fire him.’ Sherry said, ‘Let me handle Bob.’ She was very good about it. But he was furious. He kept saying, ‘I won’t work at Fox.’ ”

  The low-level publicist was shunted off to a different division, but Lansing was unable to mollify Redford further. It was her first taste of the limits to an executive’s power, and especially to her power at Fox.

  —

  Sometime later, Lansing circled back to Redford with
another project.

  Zanuck and Brown had optioned Barry Reed’s 1980 novel The Verdict—a drama about a washed-up, alcoholic lawyer and the medical malpractice case he brings to court—for a substantial $150,000, and attached Arthur Hiller (Love Story) to direct. David Mamet, the young playwright who had established his reputation as a major force in the theater with Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo, was hired to adapt, and the producers were thrilled—until they read his script and found it ended with no verdict.

  “They told me the script was so bad they wouldn’t even show it to me,” said Lansing.

  Zanuck hired a new writer, Jay Presson Allen, while Hiller, stuck in a holding pattern, jumped ship to direct a different Fox picture, Making Love, a controversial gay-themed drama in which a husband leaves his wife for a man.

  “When Dick [Zanuck] found out, he was furious,” said Lansing. “He called me and read me the riot act. But I told him I couldn’t control Hiller’s creative choices. The life of a studio executive is all about putting out fires, and you rarely have time to handle individual problems, although I’d have done anything to keep The Verdict together.”

  While the group was trying to salvage the picture, which now had no director or script, Redford happened to visit Presson Allen at her Connecticut home, where he saw a draft of her screenplay lying around and asked if he could read it.

  Out of the blue, Lansing got a call from the actor’s agent, telling her Redford wished to play the leading role. Under normal circumstances, an executive would go through hoops to land a star of his stature; here the star was chasing her. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

  But Redford had his own ideas for the script. Like most A-list stars, his commitment came with a string of contingencies, and he insisted on bringing in another writer. Lansing and the producers suggested China Syndrome’s Bridges, who had known Redford since their early acting days, and the star agreed.

  The two sat down to talk and their initial meeting went well. Redford said he wanted this to be the darkest role he had ever played, and Bridges, who would also direct, embraced that notion. Neither he nor Lansing paid heed to Melnick’s warning that, whatever Redford said, in the end he would only play safe.

  A second meeting did not go so well. “He doesn’t want to play a Southie or a man with wife + children or a drunk,” Bridges wrote in his diary, referring to the character’s South Boston roots. “My hard-on goes down.”

  The filmmaker was especially taken aback when Redford told him he could not possibly play someone whose wife had left him, because nobody would believe that a woman would leave Redford, according to Bridges’s partner, Jack Larson. “Jim was stunned and didn’t know what to do,” he said.

  Then Redford started to get cold feet, and Lansing watched with ever-increasing concern as her highest-profile project began to implode. The more Bridges struggled with the script, the more Redford resisted discussing it, until things reached a point where he would not even return Bridges’s calls.

  When the filmmaker flew to Boston to meet his star, having agreed that they would spend several days hunting for locations together, Redford never materialized. Bridges hung around, and Redford failed to appear.

  “Redford’s assistant would call and say, ‘Bobby will be there in two days,’ and ‘Bobby will be there tomorrow,’ and he never showed up,” said Larson. “Jim waited. And [the assistant] called again and said, ‘Bobby will be there on Thursday.’ And Jim said, ‘Well, I won’t. I’m going back to Los Angeles.’ ”

  After multiple conference calls were set up, only to be canceled by Redford at the last minute, Bridges had had it. A final meeting was arranged, only to turn sour when the star came armed with two separate, seemingly contradictory sets of notes, neither of which made the least sense to Bridges. He asked to be released from the picture.

  Lansing refused and told him if he quit she would pull the plug on his dream project, Manhattan Melody, a biography of George Gershwin.

  “Sherry said, ‘If you don’t do The Verdict, Redford won’t either,’ ” recalled Larson. “She said, ‘You are contractually committed to do the film.’ She was very tough.”

  On August 26, 1981, an exasperated Bridges met with Zanuck over lunch and begged to leave the picture, bewildered that the producer—given all his years at his father’s feet—would put up with the actor.

  “I ask him how much [shit] will he eat?” Bridges wrote. “He says he’ll eat it all.”

  Days later, Bridges withdrew, defying Fox to sue him. The studio never did.

  Redford brought in his frequent collaborator Sydney Pollack (The Way We Were), with whom he holed up on a mountaintop to rework the script, according to press reports at the time, but Zanuck had reached the end of his rope. Lansing was scrambling to find another director when he blindsided her and fired Redford, an unheard-of move by a producer who had one of the world’s top stars attached to his film. The firing was so unusual that the story made the local news and spread across the country.

  “Robert Redford has been booted out of The Verdict, by producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown,” gossip columnist Marilyn Beck reported in September 1981, adding that they had “accused the star of being difficult and high-handed—and more.”

  “Without Redford,” Zanuck told Beck, “there’s every chance The Verdict will never get made. But you reach a point where you’ve got to look in the mirror. My partner and I looked, and decided no star was worth the aggravation Redford was putting us through. He was kidnapping our property—and we had to regain control.”

  Lansing was horrified. “The biggest producer on our lot had just fired our biggest star,” she said. “Dick didn’t ask my opinion. He just called and gave me an update. Our movie had fallen apart. And there was nothing I could do.”

  She considered asking Fonda to star, repeating the China Syndrome strategy of casting a woman in a man’s part; but before she could make a move, Zanuck called. Network’s Sidney Lumet wanted to direct, he said, and Paul Newman had agreed to play the lead role of the alcoholic lawyer, Frank Galvin.

  This meant one of Lansing’s favorite filmmakers, whose 1964 post-Holocaust drama The Pawnbroker had been a seminal movie for her as a young woman, had boarded her project, along with one of her screen idols. There was only one condition: Lumet wanted to go back to the original Mamet script—the one without an ending, which Lansing still had not read.

  “I told Dick, ‘I thought you hated it,’ ” she said. “ ‘But I have to read it before I meet with Lumet.’ ”

  When Zanuck gave it to her, she found the script excellent, though still lacking a jury’s resolution. After flying to New York to meet Lumet, she said, “I sat there biting my lip for twenty minutes, thinking, ‘Without an ending, I can’t make this movie.’ But I was afraid if I dictated to him, the whole thing would collapse. I said, ‘Look, I don’t know how we make this without a verdict.’ ”

  “Of course there’s going to be a verdict,” Lumet assured her. “I’m working on it with Mamet right now.”

  —

  While Lansing was waging an external war over The Verdict, she was fighting an internal battle with a fellow executive, Norman Levy.

  A large, red-faced man who had worked with her at Columbia before being named to his current position as Fox’s head of marketing and distribution, he was as old-school as Lansing was new, “a man of appetites, a big man who demanded a certain fealty,” said story editor Merzbach, who had joined them at Fox. “He’d been around a thousand years and this was his venue. He knew every distribution guy, every exhibition guy. I don’t think he expected the adoration that accompanied Sherry to the top. He was jealous.”

  It was Levy’s job to get movies out to theaters, the least glamorous part of the business but nonetheless crucial, given that landing the right venues could determine a film’s success. It was also his job to oversee the marketing and make sure the posters, billboards, television commercials, radio ads and unpaid pub
licity were all functioning to maximum effect. But his opinion carried greater weight than his title suggested, because Lansing did not have the authority to overrule him; neither one had green-light authority, which rested with Hirschfield, their boss. This meant Lansing had to win over both men to make any movie she loved, effectively triangulating the green-light process, with its committee of three members all tugging in different directions.

  Early in her tenure she had clashed with Levy over a small British period piece about two runners who enter the 1924 Olympics. The picture had been developed by David Puttnam, an independent-minded producer based in London, who had commissioned the script from actor-writer Colin Welland.

  Welland had made a few TV movies, all small in scope but charming nonetheless; he had yet to become known as a film writer. Now he had written a drama about two real-life runners, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, a Jew and a religious Scot. Both were played by unknowns (Ben Cross and Ian Charleson) under the guidance of a first-time feature filmmaker, Hugh Hudson.

  The film appeared to have limited commercial prospects: it seemed jingoistic and locked into a plot that alternated uncomfortably between two protagonists whose storylines never meet. Its title, which was biblical in origin but better known as a line from William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” did not have anything to do with its subject. But Lansing loved everything about it. Its name was Chariots of Fire.

  Prior to her arrival, Fox had paid $3 million for the foreign rights, half of the $6 million budget, though the deal had strings attached.

  “There were a few ‘conditions precedent,’ ” said Puttnam. “The key condition precedent was they wanted two marquee names [stars] and I had no money for marquee names at all. Then Brad Davis, who’d done Midnight Express with me, and Dennis Christopher, who’d done Breaking Away, agreed to do the film for free. All I did was pay their airfare and expenses. Without those two, the film would never have been made.”