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

by Stephen Galloway

  “The uglier the rumor, the more people relish it,” quipped music mogul David Geffen.

  “Watch for this story,” wrote gossip columnist Liz Smith. “It could be bigger than Columbia and David Begelman!”

  “It was so fantastic,” said Steve Roth, a Fox executive. “You can’t steal money from a studio during the development process. People can pad production budgets on a film, but not development money.”

  Soon, insiders were not just speculating about $500,000 going amiss but claiming that Lansing had purloined $1 million from Fox and given it to Melnick. Days later, the number was up to $50 million, all allegedly hidden in British banks.

  “My God,” quipped Melnick, “what are the Swiss going to say?”

  Lansing became the subject of an official investigation by the city of Los Angeles’ Task Force on White Collar Crime in the Entertainment Industry, created in the wake of the Begelman affair.

  “At first I dismissed it as preposterous,” she said. “I’d done nothing wrong, but I was powerless to correct it. The Fox lawyers knew the rumors couldn’t be true, but even they were concerned. They were worried that all the negative press would affect the studio’s reputation. Every expense had to be documented, and I could hardly get a pencil sharpened without a corporate sign-off.”

  When Davis’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, came to see her in private, she realized how serious things were. He advised her to have her own attorney present, but she declined. “I told him I had nothing to hide,” she said. “By the end of our conversation, he was practically apologizing to me and he agreed how ridiculous the allegations were.”

  For three months this continued, and it was only at the end of that period—when Lansing’s reputation had been shredded, along with her ability to concentrate on her job—that she was redeemed when the task force concluded its work in November 1982 and declared: “We have found no evidence to support any type of criminal investigation. No evidence has been found to support any of the rumors. Moreover, none of the key persons involved have made any allegations that criminal activity took place.”

  “What remains are bruised feelings and damaged reputations and a singular case history of how rumors feed on rumors in the insular world of moviemaking in Hollywood,” reported the New York Times in a story headlined “How a Hollywood Rumor Was Born, Flourished and Died.” “The anatomy of this incident offers a crash course in the pathology of a community united chiefly by its fear of failure and its envy of success.”

  —

  Lansing had never expected this. Now, just as she hoped the worst was over, her conflict with Levy peaked as they argued about a new Scorsese film.

  She had leaped at the chance to make The King of Comedy, the latest movie from one of America’s most brilliant young directors, about a down-at-the-heels comedian (Robert De Niro) who kidnaps a TV star (Jerry Lewis). “I was behind it from the moment it was offered to me,” she said. When the film was finished, she was flattered to have Scorsese ask her opinion. “I loved the way he was open to hearing what anybody thought, even the janitor. That was the mark of a truly confident artist. He was willing to get ideas from anywhere and had no ego about them.”

  Many have since damned the film as one of Scorsese’s lesser works, with too much of a resemblance to the themes and characters of Taxi Driver. “[It is] one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “It’s hard to believe Scorsese made it; instead of the big-city life, the violence and sexuality of his movies like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, what we have here is an agonizing portrait of lonely, angry people with their emotions all tightly bottled up. This is a movie that seems ready to explode—but somehow it never does.”

  Levy hated it. It was ugly, mean-spirited and morose, he believed, the very opposite of what audiences wanted to see. The country was going through the most serious recession since the Great Depression; unemployment was fast approaching 10.8 percent, and Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” was looking more like midnight. Even though conventional wisdom held that the movie business did well at such times, many insiders knew this notion dated to a time before ticket buyers could watch their free television instead, and at the height of the Great Depression ticket sales had in fact declined. The last thing people needed now, Levy argued, was something like this.

  When a test screening confirmed his opinion, “Norman wrote it off,” said Lansing. “In his mind, the movie wasn’t going to be commercial, so he chose to open it in just a few theaters, with minimal advertising. He completely buried it, and there was nothing I could do.”

  Regardless of the film’s merits, the idea of dumping any movie was anathema to Lansing’s growing conviction that a studio must do everything to promote its pictures out of a moral obligation to the artists as well as bottom-line concerns. She felt she had personally let Scorsese down, especially when Levy told her he would not attend the film’s premiere.

  The director was appalled. “Basically, it was, Screw you, forget the picture,” he said. “I realized at that point nobody cared, and that was when I really understood that the ’70s were over for me, that the directors, the ones with the personal voices, had lost.”

  For Lansing, the movie marked a turning point when she realized she could no longer be part of the studio fold.

  “I’d gone through not being able to buy Chariots of Fire and then the fight over Porky’s, and I was even more crushed by The King of Comedy,” she said. “I couldn’t deliver on any of my promises, not the marketing or the advertising or the release. So what was the point of staying in the job? I knew I had to go.”

  Less than three years since news of her appointment had ricocheted around the world, the buoyant, almost giddy sensation Lansing had felt had melted away. She had savored success and found it wanting. All that was left was a bitter aftertaste, and the memories of her lost hopes and faded dreams.

  “Ultimately, what did it mean?” asked Merzbach, the story editor. “Sherry became head of Fox, and it wasn’t happy-making. I don’t think it ever gave her enormous joy. She was powerless to do anything, and when things failed, she was the one who took the hit.”

  “We hadn’t been really successful,” said Hirschfield, “and Sherry wasn’t happy. Toward the end, we both thought we were going to get terminated. There was a last party, where all the outcasts had a big celebration. We were in one corner and everybody else was in another, like we had leprosy.”

  The Verdict might have turned things around if it had come out a little sooner, but its December 1982 release was a case of too little, too late, especially from Davis’s point of view.

  “My dad loved Sherry,” said his son John. “He just really, really got along with her, and after he sold the studio he remained close to her, personally. But he was an oilman trying to understand the business, and she had had a run of movies that didn’t go well, and he knew he needed to shore the company up. In reality, he needed to get rid of Norman and Alan, and probably Sherry, too. She wasn’t yet the great, seasoned executive she would become.”

  Lansing began to explore other options. Melnick wanted to partner with her as a producer, but he was not offering her a full 50 percent of their new venture; besides, she had grown distant from her former mentor, bothered by his braggadocio and endless claims that he was the queen-maker of Hollywood. “We had dinner downtown at the Omni Hotel, far from prying eyes,” she recalled. “I told him it wasn’t possible, that I’d always be in his shadow.” A cooling took place in their relationship that would continue until his death in 2009.

  Another executive, Ned Tanen, broached the idea of partnering, but Lansing declined, perhaps because his experience as Universal’s production president was too close to her own, or perhaps, as one friend observed, because “Sherry never really felt he needed her, and she wanted someone who did.”

  Instead, she opted for Jaffe. They had come to know each other well, having worked on Kramer before going through the roller-co
aster ride of Taps. She admired his taste, his ethics, his business skills and his knowledge of production. Besides, he wanted a true and equal partnership, which was remarkable given that he was already an Oscar winner with major releases to his credit.

  “Stanley said we’d be fifty-fifty,” Lansing noted. “Even though I wasn’t his equal, he never let me feel that way.”

  “I said, ‘If we’re partners, we’re partners,’ ” recalled Jaffe.

  Now they dug in: Where would their company be based? What kind of films would it make? How many staff members would it need? They thought of returning to their old home at Columbia but decided against going back to the studio both had left with some bitterness. And any notion of remaining at Fox was squelched by Levy’s ascendance.

  “There was no legal impediment to either of us leaving Fox,” said Lansing. “Stanley had a ‘key man’ clause, saying that if I left he could leave, too, and I had an out that allowed me to go after eighteen months.”

  In December 1982, after a period of talks that they managed to keep under wraps, the two closed a deal with Paramount, where Jaffe had deep ties, having served as the company’s president several years earlier. When everything was in place, Lansing walked into Hirschfield’s office to tell him she was resigning.

  “He was shocked,” she said. “He picked up the phone and called Marvin on his private jet, and Marvin went berserk. He lived by the credo that no one could leave until he fired them.”

  “Doll face, you can’t quit!” he barked. “Nobody quits on me.”

  “I just did,” replied Lansing.

  Courtesy of the Sherry Lansing archives

  Sherry Lee Duhl as a child.

  Courtesy of the Sherry Lansing archives

  Margot Heimann, Lansing’s mother.

  Courtesy of the Sherry Lansing archives

  David Duhl, Lansing’s father.

  Harry Langdon Photography

  Modeling work came before Lansing began her career as an actress.

  Harry Langdon Photography

  In her early acting days.

  Everett Collection

  “These were glorified modeling jobs,” said Lansing about her initial work as an actress. “Landing them was all about looks and luck.”

  CBS Inc.

  Opposite Jack Lemmon (left) in 1969’s The April Fools. Their relaxed manner belied the reality of being cooped up for weeks in a sweltering studio.

  Photofest, Inc.

  John Wayne was always gracious, but he kept silent about his cancer and marital problems.

  Courtesy of the Sherry Lansing archives

  Lansing would regularly escape Hollywood, traveling around the world. In her late twenties, she spent several days living with the Maasai and Samburu tribes in rural Kenya.

  © 1980 Tom Zimberoff © 1980 Tom Zimberoff

  Lansing’s appointment as president of Fox made the cover of the New York Times Magazine.

  © 1980 Tom Zimberoff © 1980 Tom Zimberoff

  In her early days at Fox.

  Courtesy of the Sherry Lansing archives

  With her stepfather, Norton, and her mother, Margot, in the 1980s.

  Photofest, Inc

  China Syndrome star Jane Fonda secretly intimidated Lansing, much as she admired the actress (bottom right).

  Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

  Lansing (on the set of Black Rain) was devastated when her partner, Stanley Jaffe, left to become president of Paramount.

  Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection/Getty

  Anne Archer and Michael Douglas joined their Fatal Attraction producer Lansing for the motion picture academy’s 1988 nominees’ lunch.

  Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

  On location with Black Rain.

  Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

  With Michael Douglas on the set of Black Rain.

  Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

  Robert Redford surprised everyone when he wanted to pull out of Indecent Proposal. “The kids [Demi and Woody] are wonderful, but I’m not,” he said.

  Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

  With director Adrian Lyne (center) on the set of Indecent Proposal.

  The man with whom Lansing would be joined at the hip was in many ways her opposite. Like her, Stanley Jaffe had lost a parent early (his mother died when he was five); like her, he had served as an executive before becoming a producer; and like her, his tastes veered toward the more thoughtful end of the motion picture spectrum. But unlike her, he was born into Hollywood royalty, or at least its East Coast aristocracy.

  The son of Leo Jaffe, a former chairman of Columbia Pictures, he had grown up in New Rochelle, New York, in a home where kids traded movie gossip as others traded baseball cards. After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he had risen quickly to become president of Paramount Pictures at age twenty-nine, making him the youngest studio chief in history. Then, in a burst of indignation, he walked out following a spat with his boss and friend Charles Bluhdorn, the founder of Paramount parent Gulf + Western Industries.

  He was intelligent, elegant and refined, but he was also volatile, with a temper that was liable to get the better of him, just as it did when he blew up at Bluhdorn. “Stanley was very direct,” said Karen Rosenfelt, a Paramount executive. “He took no prisoners. It would be, ‘With all due respect, you’re full of shit.’ ”

  Like so many of the men to whom Lansing was drawn, he had echoes of Norton; his anger was familiar and even familial, his strength a reminder of the safety Norton had brought her following David’s death.

  The two had met in 1975 at a dinner party hosted by Dynasty producer Douglas Cramer and his gossip-columnist wife, Joyce Haber. There, during a game, they had bonded over a math problem, a five-line algebraic equation based on a false syllogism that they had solved with ease.

  “Stanley had a lot of the traits that I like in men,” said Lansing. “He was fearless, direct, loyal and honest to a fault. Our styles couldn’t have been more different: he’d get upset if his coffee came without cream. But there was nobody better in a crisis and nobody I’d rather have at my side when things went wrong.”

  With Jaffe, she embarked on her new career as a producer, fulfilling the dream she had envisioned at Columbia. Whatever the surface similarities of the two jobs, being a producer was very different from being a studio executive.

  “When you’re running a studio you’re largely reactive,” she said. “You walk into the office. There are sixty calls. You have to read this script in five minutes, that one in the next hour. You have a screening in ten minutes. There are constant problems and fires to put out, but you’re usually not creating anything from scratch. Whereas a producer has to come up with ideas and get them off the ground, find the money to pay for development, work with the writer, cast the actors and oversee everything from the first day of shooting on. If you’re not active, nothing gets done.”

  While she had no producing experience, she knew from running Fox that she would need the full support of Paramount’s executives, who ultimately would have the power to green-light her films.

  Since the thirty-two-year-old Diller had been named Paramount’s chairman in 1974 and hired the equally young Eisner to join him, the studio had become the hottest place in town, delivering an unparalleled succession of hits.

  “Paramount has figured out, better than any other studio, how to make the right movies,” wrote Tony Schwartz in New York Magazine. “This scarcely means flawless judgment, just that successes like 48 Hrs. are big enough to overshadow failures like The Keep. The studio bases its choices less on the timeliness of subject matter or the ability to attract big-name stars than on the concept—the story itself, stripped of considerations.”

  Schwartz was referring to a new pattern of thinking that was beginning to dominate the studio system and would do so ever more markedly as it moved from the 1970s into the 1980s. Gone were the glory days of auteur directors and antihero stars; now w
hat the studios wanted were stories that could sell themselves—“high-concept” movies, as they were called—where the basic idea was so compelling it could be expressed in a single sentence and bring in an audience, almost regardless of quality—from Jaws (killer shark must be stopped) to 1993’s Jurassic Park (cloned dinosaurs rampage out of control).

  This was a fundamental shift. It was given a significant boost by Don Simpson, a Paramount executive turned producer who had partnered with Jerry Bruckheimer to make such films as 1983’s Flashdance and 1986’s Top Gun. Other kinds of moviemaking were still tolerated, and indeed frequently found within Paramount’s development slate, but this particular format was fundamental to the success of Diller, Eisner and their protégé Katzenberg.

  Later, these movies and their spawn—the “franchise” films that would give brands precedence over one-off stories—would suffocate the adult-oriented films that Lansing most loved. But right now there was room for both, and she was eager to start developing the character-driven, richly thematic pictures she and Jaffe held dear.

  On January 4, 1983, the industry’s trade publications announced the formation of Jaffe-Lansing Productions. “Paramount, a unit of Gulf & Western Industries Inc., said it made a five-year exclusive production agreement with Jaffe-Lansing under which Mr. Jaffe, 43 years old, and Miss Lansing, 38, will co-produce their own films and acquire completed films for distribution,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “The company also will produce films that Mr. Jaffe will direct.”

  Eisner said he was counting on the producers to make at least three pictures per year, either a case of irrational exuberance or political spin, given that Jaffe had produced only seven films in his entire career, while Lansing was a neophyte. Most producers took years to stock their quivers, guiding their scripts through “development hell,” when each one could pass through a dozen iterations or more, with just as many different writers, before it came close to being made.