“But,” said Eisner, “I believed in them and believed they would do great. Stanley had done this a long time and Sherry had already proved she had great taste.”
She and Jaffe established their own distinctive methodology when it came to finding and overseeing scripts. “We developed things separately,” said Lansing. “Stanley was on the East Coast and I was on the West Coast, and we both had our own projects. It was only when we felt the screenplays were in shape that we’d give them to each other and then take careful notes, and eventually work together on the final drafts.”
In early 1983, they settled into historic oak-paneled offices in Paramount’s Lucille Ball Building, where Lansing was based full-time, while Jaffe traveled back and forth between Los Angeles and his main office in New York. It was in these Paramount offices that Lucy and Howard Hughes had once held court, in these very offices that some of the most talented people in Hollywood history had done their best work.
“I was beyond excited,” said Lansing. “It was like entering a whole new world. I felt nothing could stop us.”
—
It was perhaps inevitable that the first Jaffe-Lansing film would flop.
Racing with the Moon was a poignant story about two friends preparing to leave home to fight in World War II; it was written by Steve Kloves, who would go on to write most of the Harry Potter films. Lansing had developed the script at Fox, where it had been a passion project, but that enthusiasm was not shared by her successor as Fox’s president of production, Joe Wizan, who made his indifference plain.
Soon after Wizan took over, he reached an impasse with director Richard Benjamin, a longtime character actor who had won acclaim for his debut as a filmmaker, 1982’s My Favorite Year. Fox would green-light the movie only if Benjamin agreed to make it for $5 million, rather than the $6 million he felt he needed.
“Things got very strained,” Benjamin recalled. “Fox didn’t see what we saw. I started having meetings with them, and they were questioning things where there were no questions before. They began to bring up the budget, then there were comic elements, and they wanted us to go more in that direction. I said, ‘I can’t have this conversation.’ I gave back a third of my salary to keep it going. I was fighting to keep the picture alive.”
A start date had been set for May 1983, even as the studio and filmmakers bickered about the cost. A month before principal photography, Benjamin asked if he could take the movie elsewhere, and Fox agreed.
Lansing had observed all this from a distance, too preoccupied with setting up her company to pay much attention while the film remained at Fox. She had never expected Wizan to let the picture go, knowing the last thing an executive wanted was to see a small picture he had rejected become a hit for someone else. But when Benjamin asked Lansing to step in, she urged Paramount to buy it, aware that the clock was ticking and the shoot was about to begin.
Negotiations were not easy, as Fox wanted to keep a share of the profits in order to have some upside if the film did well. Paramount, in turn, expected a bargain. The talks came to a head one April afternoon.
“Dick [Benjamin] was en route to Northern California, where the crew was already at work,” said Lansing. “He flew to San Francisco, then caught a twin-engine Cessna to Mendocino, and when he landed he wasn’t sure which studio was backing his movie.”
“The plane let me off at this tiny airport—no lights, nothing,” added Benjamin. “They had to get animals off the runway before we could land. I arrived not knowing if this picture was going to be made, or with whom. So I got off the plane, and as the plane started to taxi away, somebody at this phone booth said, ‘There’s a phone call for you.’ I picked up the phone and it was Stanley.” Benjamin never found out how Jaffe had tracked him down. “He said, ‘It’s done—it’s a Paramount movie.’ It was Fox’s before I landed, and after I got back on that plane it was Paramount’s.”
Weeks later the shoot got under way, and Lansing discovered the joy of being on a set full-time. She embraced the steep learning curve, even if she feared she was not on Jaffe’s level.
“I knew nothing about the camera and about different angles and lenses, or the way a scene should be put together visually,” she said. “I thought, ‘If you’re a producer, you need to know all of this.’ And Stanley had such a mastery of detail that I expected as much from myself. He told me if I was going to be a good producer, I needed to be on the set when the crew arrived, and I couldn’t leave until the last shot of the day was completed. His philosophy was, if the producers didn’t show a 100 percent commitment, how could they expect it from the crew?”
Jaffe was the sorcerer, Lansing the apprentice. But from Benjamin’s point of view, they worked in perfect tandem.
“There was no better team,” he said. “Stanley knew everything about production, right down to how many lengths of cable you might need, and Sherry knew story and all the creative aspects. She had such wonderful taste that I could have her watch dailies without seeing them myself. At the same time, she could tell me anything she liked because of the way she presented it. She was strong—there’s no question of that—but she got things done in such a lovely way that you wanted to do anything for her.”
As the shoot progressed, Lansing grew concerned about a budding romance between two of the movie’s stars, Sean Penn and Elizabeth McGovern. Penn had burst onto the scene with his role as the dim-witted Jeff Spicoli in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and had worked for both Lansing and Jaffe on Taps. He was gaining a reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation, but also as a hothead. As for McGovern, she had recently been Oscar-nominated for Milos Forman’s 1981 drama Ragtime and was expected to become a big star. When Lansing observed them hand in hand, off camera as well as on, she told Benjamin she feared the romance might backfire.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “It will be good for their chemistry.”
During the shoot, he was right. Filming continued without a hitch, and the genuineness of the emotion added an undercurrent of electricity to a picture that might otherwise have lacked it. But later, after the wrap, Penn refused to do publicity, in part because he did not want to answer questions about his relationship with McGovern, and his co-star followed suit. Neither had any contractual obligation to do interviews, and even if they had, a recalcitrant star would have been worse than no star at all.
“They were a couple, and when he told Elizabeth not to do press, she obeyed,” said Lansing. “He said, ‘Bobby De Niro doesn’t do it. That’s hawking the movie. That’s not what great actors do.’ We begged him and begged her, but he had a great influence over her, and they wouldn’t do a thing.”
The situation became contentious. “We’d negotiated a cover story on Sean and Elizabeth with People magazine, a real bonanza for a small film like this,” Lansing noted. “The interview would only have taken ten minutes on the phone, and we’d even arranged for questions to be sent to Sean in advance. But he still wouldn’t do it.”
She was furious, and so was Jaffe. But nothing they did could move Penn, McGovern and their co-star, Nicolas Cage. “We believed it was their responsibility to help the picture, and our cast disagreed,” said Lansing. “But Stanley was rock solid. He said: ‘We made a great movie. I’m really proud of it. We’ll just do the best we can.’ ”
Instead of the stars, Paramount had to turn to its producers and director for a nationwide publicity tour, which lacked the sizzle it might have had with the three young actors. Despite Lansing and Jaffe’s appearances on morning shows, and interviews with daily newspapers and magazines, the film made only $6 million at the box office.
“I remember going to a preview, when it was thought if you got [a test score] in the 80s, you were going to make a lot of money,” said Jaffe. “We got an 85, and no one showed up.”
Years later, Lansing and Penn ran into each other. She had long realized the importance of letting go of anger, and Penn had changed, too, she said. “He gave me a really
warm hug and said, ‘I’ve grown up a lot since then.’ ”
—
The partners were no luckier with their second film, Firstborn, the story of a teenage boy whose life is disrupted when a sinister man takes up with his mother.
Paramount had asked Jaffe and Lansing to join the picture as executive producers (a notch down from full producers) in order to support producers Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, both more experienced in television than film.
“Nothing went right,” said Lansing. “We got Michael Apted to direct when he became available after another movie was canceled, and we tried to hire that movie’s stars, Jon Voight and Jessica Lange, now that they were free. But Paramount wouldn’t sign off on them.”
The studio wanted Tom Berenger, who had just appeared in Southern Comfort to considerable acclaim. “We all thought Tom was going to be a big star, and so we agreed,” said Lansing.
Right before shooting, however, Berenger was in a car crash and had to be replaced by Peter Weller. The movie tanked, earning only $6.2 million when it opened in October 1984, giving Jaffe-Lansing back-to-back failures.
—
By the time Firstborn opened, two years had passed since the partners had come to Paramount, an eternity in the motion picture business. Even though Eisner maintained that “our relationship was very good,” the champagne had gone flat, the confetti had been vacuumed away. Nor were their movies dazzling: both were small in budget and scope, and “Paramount didn’t hire us to make little movies,” said Jaffe.
By late 1984, Lansing began to fear their production deal would not be renewed. After putting her Fox salary into her new house, she had a relatively meager cushion, and she had followed Jaffe’s counsel to take little salary or up-front payment in exchange for a big share of the back end. “What a studio hates is when you make money and they don’t,” she explained. “Here, everyone was rewarded in success.”
That was all well and good when success seemed within grasp, but now it was barely a blip on the radar, and Jaffe’s prickliness did not help. “He was always threatening to break our deal,” said Lansing. “Any time he disagreed with Paramount, he’d say, ‘Forget it. We’re out of here.’ I kept telling him, if he broke the deal I’d be out of a job.”
Jaffe began to explore raising outside money for their films, but Lansing balked. “Stanley was talking to bankers about giving us a fund,” she said. “Instead of making a movie a year or two movies every eighteen months, we’d be making several at a time. I didn’t want to do that because it would be going back to being an executive. I wanted to be deeply involved in one movie at a time.”
She was also wary of investing her own money, and the deal would have required her to contribute $500,000. To Jaffe, that was more than manageable; to Lansing, it was unfathomable. “We could have raised $150 million,” Jaffe mused. “That was a lot of money. But Sherry was afraid.”
For years she had had a recurring dream, and now it came rushing back in force. In the dream, “an elegant man and a stunning blonde are in a Rolls, riding through Beverly Hills,” she said. “They spot a homeless woman, and when the man does a double take, his wife says, ‘Do you know who that is?’ The man says, ‘Yes. That used to be my wife.’ ”
The man in the dream was Lansing’s ex-husband, Michael, “and the homeless woman was me.”
—
While Lansing was coping with nightmares, a different nightmare was consuming Paramount.
In February 1983, on his way home from a trip to the Dominican Republic, Gulf + Western’s Bluhdorn had died of a massive heart attack. Its domino effect would reshape the leadership of three studios.
Bluhdorn’s deputy, Martin Davis (no relation to Fox’s Marvin Davis), was named to replace him and began to make radical changes, selling off many of G+W’s subsidiaries, removing dozens of senior executives (even those who had considered themselves his allies) and ruthlessly slashing perks—so much that he refused to let Bluhdorn’s widow retain a company car and driver.
A rift grew between the bullheaded Davis and the troika of Diller, Eisner and Katzenberg. Once, when Katzenberg dropped by Davis’s New York office, expecting a pat on the back, Davis launched into a tirade, calling him “a little Sammy Glick” and accusing him of conspiring with his colleagues to get Davis removed.
“Marty Davis was elected year-in and year-out the worst boss in America,” said Eisner. “Having a continued relationship with him was not easy.”
Frustrated, the Paramount team began to look for opportunities elsewhere, and their timing could not have been better. Over at Fox, Marvin Davis had severed his ties to Dennis Stanfill and had had enough of Hirschfield. He asked Diller to run the studio, and the answer was yes. At the same time, the floundering Walt Disney Co. was looking for fresh blood to restore its battered name and zeroed in on Eisner, who learned he had the job days after Diller told him he was leaving for Fox.
“Barry had his opportunity at Fox, and out of the blue the opportunity came for me to be CEO of Disney,” said Eisner. “It was a no-brainer.”
Within weeks, the top layer of Paramount executives was gone (Katzenberg followed Eisner) and the map of the industry was redrawn. Disney’s leadership was replaced; Fox was now headed by Diller (who would soon have a new boss of his own in Rupert Murdoch); and Paramount, which recently had seemed the very model of what a studio should be, was rudderless.
These changes were as seismic as any the industry had seen, and they left Lansing and Jaffe uncertain about their prospects as they entered their fourth year at Paramount. No matter how much Frank Mancuso, the gentlemanly executive who took over as studio chairman, tried to reassure them (“It was just a matter of a little bad luck,” he said), Lansing was sure he was wrong.
“I knew, if you have two failed movies, you aren’t long for the world,” she said. “Stanley had had nothing but success before me. I felt like a curse.”
—
While grappling with uncertainty, Lansing was devastated to learn that her mother was seriously ill.
At first she did not appreciate the gravity of the situation: all her mother said was that her stomach was bothering her. Then Lansing went to Miami, where Margot and Norton had started spending their winters.
“The minute I saw her, I knew something was wrong,” she said. “Her stomach was distended, and the pain was so severe it often left her doubled over.”
The initial prognosis was diverticulitis, an intestinal disorder that can require surgery. But treatment proved ineffective, and Margot’s condition deteriorated. “Her stomach kept swelling as though it were filling with helium,” said Lansing. “She got to the point where she looked as if she were pregnant.”
At her daughter’s insistence, Margot returned to Chicago to see Arthur Herbst, a leading oncologist, who informed her she had ovarian cancer.
Lansing knew nothing about cancer, a subject regarded at the time with such unease that many victims would not acknowledge having it, let alone mention it in polite conversation.
“I was worried, but I didn’t take in the full magnitude of what my mother was saying,” she said. “Nobody I knew had cancer. It wasn’t part of my life. All I heard was that my mother had a medical problem and it needed to be fixed. She’d have to be treated, and then she’d get well. I was relentlessly upbeat. I just knew she’d be cured.”
But the news got progressively worse: Margot not only had cancer, it was at stage four, which meant she had merely a slim chance of recovering.
Lansing could not believe it. No matter how complicated their relationship, she could not imagine life without her mother. When an oncologist friend told her, “Your mother’s going to die,” she snapped: “Who do you think you are? God?”
Dr. Herbst outlined a course of treatment: Margot would have surgery to remove the bloating in her stomach, and after that she would undergo chemotherapy.
“And then she’ll be fine?” asked Lansing.
“Maybe,” the doctor replied.
Ignoring his ambivalence, Lansing put all her energy into helping her mother, as if energy alone could solve the problem. She blinded herself to the possibility that Margot’s cancer was terminal.
“I never gave up hope,” she said. “I was desperate to fix it. My only thought was, ‘I’m going to figure out how to cure her.’ I’d call the doctors to make sure she had the best care. I even called my ex-husband, Michael, to see that she was in the best possible hands at the University of Chicago Medical Center.”
The prospect of losing her hair appalled Margot. “She was sitting on a bed at the doctor’s, taking notes on a pad, and wrote BALD in capital letters and underlined it over and over,” said Lansing. “She was so beautiful, and so full of pride, and couldn’t get over the fact that she was going to lose her hair. I told her she could wear a wig until it grew back, and no one would notice.” In fact, Margot’s wig was so well made that when she went out to dinner one night, a stranger asked for her hairdresser’s name.
Chemotherapy got under way, the sessions spaced a few weeks apart.
“That allowed my mother and father to travel back and forth to Miami, to take advantage of the warm weather,” said Lansing. “My mother insisted on buying the cheapest plane tickets, and refused to spend money on herself. They could easily have afforded it, but she hated to be extravagant. That’s what’s so terrible: the inability to spend on yourself when you need to. She was so sick that she’d throw up during the layovers.”
Lansing pretended the studio had given her some first-class tickets, which she gave to her mother. The ruse worked once or twice, “until she figured out I’d bought them myself, when she flatly refused to accept them.”
Margot abhorred being a victim. “The greatest fear she had was that people would pity her,” said Lansing. “She didn’t want to be talked about when she had the disease. She didn’t want people’s pity.”
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 15