Lansing felt enormous stress during the shoot. “I ended up with lockjaw,” she said. “A doctor put me on a liquid-food diet, and I had to do exercises to keep my jaw from locking closed.”
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At the first test screening, some audience members cheered the rapists on. “Then I saw the test numbers,” said Lansing. “The movie had scored a 42, one of the worst results in Paramount’s history.”
“[Marketing executive] Sid Ganis comes up and says, ‘Well, I’m afraid your weird little movie just isn’t going to be seen,’ ” said Kaplan. “ ‘Weird little movie!’ But the numbers were awful. Sherry was furious—I’ve never seen her like that, furious but controlled. She turned to the Paramount people and said: ‘We’re doing this again. We’re going to test it with just women. No men allowed.’ ”
“I said, ‘This isn’t a true test of the movie,’ ” Lansing explained. “I told them, ‘What happened here is an aberration. These comment cards are asking people if they’d highly recommend this movie to everyone. Would I highly recommend it? Of course not—it’s disturbing. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful.’ ”
She reminded the Paramount brass: “In this audience, there are women who’ve been sexually assaulted, and they aren’t going to talk about it in front of men. No woman in a focus group is going to say, ‘I was raped.’ ”
The studio agreed to a second screening, which Lansing attended without a single male colleague. The results were far better, and revealing.
“Out of twenty women in the focus group, eighteen had had an experience with rape, either themselves or a sister or a cousin or someone they knew, and a good third of them had experience with gang rape,” said Kaplan. “And that’s just a random twenty women in Southern California. Sherry was moved. When she came out, she’d been crying. It became something far more than a screening.”
That not only reminded Lansing of what was right with the film, but also showed her what was wrong. She realized she and her colleagues had erred in pushing the early scenes with Foster too far. “In trying not to make her seem like a debutante, we’d made her dislikable,” she said. “Even women at that screening felt that her dancing was so provocative, maybe she deserved to be raped.”
It was clear the original cut of the film had gone in a wrong direction. Kaplan reluctantly acknowledged he needed a fresh set of eyes, and a new editor, Jerry Greenberg, was brought in. Lansing sat at his side as he went through the movie, shot by shot, scene by scene, studying all the material that had not been used, then observed in awe as bit by bit he stitched it back together into a more coherent and powerful narrative. It was the first time she had truly understood how much a film could be built or broken in the cutting room, and the beginning of a lifelong love of the editing process.
Foster, who had been unhappy with aspects of her performance in the previous cut, was thrilled. She had blamed herself for being unable to give Kaplan the variations he wanted in each take during the courtroom scenes.
“I felt terrible about it,” she said. “I felt stupid, and ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I was like, ‘I’m going to grad school. I’m clearly not a very good actress.’ Then the new editor saved my life and saved the movie.”
Lansing was delighted with Foster’s performance, no matter what the actress thought. “Sometimes she would do one take that was tough and one take that wasn’t, one take that was vulnerable and one that was not,” she said. “We’d picked the wrong take every time and not allowed the character to build an arc. When I sat down with Jerry, he had all these strips of film and looked at everything. He saw the whole movie in his head and reconstructed a performance that was always there.”
Once he had done so, Lansing was left with a new challenge: how to overcome Foster’s fears in promoting the movie.
The actress’ life had been thrown into upheaval when John Hinckley Jr., a mentally unbalanced man of twenty-five, attempted to assassinate President Reagan in March 1981. Obsessed with Foster ever since he saw her play a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, he had stalked her at Yale before turning violent in a bid to get her attention. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Seven years had passed, but the firestorm had not entirely abated.
“It was a serious concern,” said Kaplan. “Jodie never stayed in the same place for long, even years after The Accused. I’d go to dinner with her, and she loved to cook, and it would always be a different place. We had to have a security guy with her in Vancouver all the time. Brandy [Almond, Foster’s mother] was very, very specific about what Jodie would and wouldn’t do. Sherry negotiated with her, but they had serious security concerns, because there was a whole subculture of Hinckley groupies who had gone from being in love with Jodie to hating her.”
In the end, Almond agreed that her daughter would take part in an extensive and highly personalized campaign that would take her to different cities across the country.
“We wanted to go on a road tour, which hadn’t been done in years,” said Lansing. “So Paramount got us this little plane, and we’d land in a city and spend a day there, then fly to the next.”
During their expeditions, Lansing got to know Foster better. She had sensed a growing gulf between them on the shoot, when Foster and McGillis seemed to side against the producers. It was the rebels versus the authorities, and Lansing regretted having been too authoritarian—on one occasion even insisting that McGillis wear a business jacket for a scene, against the actress’ wishes.
“I pulled rank,” she said. “And that led Jodie to see me as too imposing. I was so concerned with every little detail, I didn’t know when to let go, and Jodie was put off either by my obsessiveness or my delivery. I remember Stanley saying to me, ‘This is not a sword to fall on.’ I went, ‘Yes it is,’ because I didn’t know. Also, Jodie had gone through quite a dance to get the role, and waited forever for us to make a decision. There was a divide, with her, Jonathan and Kelly on one side, and us on the other.”
Lansing had yet to master the diplomacy that would become her hallmark. “I didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t,” she said. “Everything was life and death. I hadn’t yet learned that you have to pick your battles.”
Squeezed together in the little plane as they shuttled from one city to another, the producer and stars began to talk about life away from work, and Lansing was shocked when McGillis revealed she was a rape victim.
“I was sitting next to her on a flight across the country,” Lansing remembered. “She said, ‘I was raped. And I’m thinking of going public.’ Jonathan knew, but he’d never told me. I can only imagine the emotions she must have gone through watching that rape scene when it was filmed.”
In a November 1988 People magazine cover story titled “Memoir of a Brief Time in Hell,” McGillis described how two men had forced open her apartment door, just after she took a shower. She was a young woman studying acting in New York. “One was very tall, the other was short, and they were both physically strong,” she wrote. “I’ll never forget the way they smelled—like alcohol and old sweat. I felt panic. It was as if time had stopped, and I was desperately trying to assimilate what was happening.” She screamed and went for the phone, but one of the men grabbed her and yanked the line out of the wall. “It was clear that one of the intruders had come to rob and the other had come to rape,” she continued. “Almost immediately the taller one undid his trousers and crudely demanded oral sex. I refused. He tried to hit me on the head with a beer bottle but caught my shoulder instead. I kept screaming, and they yelled, ‘Shut up!’ Then they stuck a knife in my face and forced me into the bedroom. The shorter one demanded money and jewelry. I kept thinking, Be rational, you can talk your way out of this. So I kept saying, ‘You can have my money and anything in the apartment, just leave when you’re done.’ ”
The revelation of McGillis’s ordeal helped propel the film forward, and when it opened on October 14, 1988, it earned $32 million domestically, a substantial sum in relation to
its budget.
In February 1989, Foster was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, her first nomination since Taxi Driver. Her joy was tinged with regret that nobody else from the picture was nominated. “It was just me, by myself, running around Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” she said.
In late March, at the 61st Academy Awards, Lansing looked on, delighted, as Rain Man’s Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman came onstage to present the Best Actress Oscar. After naming the nominees—Glenn Close for Dangerous Liaisons, Melanie Griffith for Working Girl, Meryl Streep for A Cry in the Dark, Sigourney Weaver for Gorillas in the Mist and Foster for The Accused—they announced that Foster was the winner.
“There are very few things: there’s love and work and family,” Foster said in her acceptance speech. “And this movie is so special to us because it was all three of those things. And I’d like to thank all of my families…And most importantly my mother, Brandy, who taught me that all of my finger paintings were Picassos, and that I didn’t have to be afraid. And mostly that cruelty might be very human, and it might be very cultural, but it’s not acceptable. Which is what this movie’s about.”
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With Fatal Attraction and The Accused, Lansing and Jaffe were back in the studio’s good graces. At a time when other producers were struggling, their contract was renewed for three years. “We received one of the richest back-end deals in town,” said Lansing. “As the profits rose on a hit film, our share would escalate exponentially.”
She was at her happiest since MGM and perfectly in tune with Jaffe as they moved on to other films, from 1989’s Black Rain (reuniting them with Michael Douglas on a thriller set in Japan) to 1992’s School Ties (a passion piece that Jaffe planned to direct, about anti-Semitism in a boarding school). It was Rain that tested their mettle the most.
“When we got to Japan, it was far from ready,” said Douglas. “I was being a little crabby and bitchy. Sherry was not happy and let me know it. I remember those eyes getting big, and her saying: ‘You’re being nothing but self-destructive. I don’t need this. I don’t need your bullshit.’ ”
There could be moments of levity, despite that. In a bid to distract a local shopkeeper so that the crew could keep filming beyond the tightly restricted hours the authorities allowed, Lansing started chatting up a diminutive but ferocious local, doing her best to charm the woman while the crew lined up a shot—only for the woman to start kicking her in the shins and literally brushing her out of her shop. “I remember this little shopkeeper with a broom, sweeping Sherry out: ‘Go, go, go!’ ” said Douglas. “Sherry was a foot taller than her. She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”
Another time, when Lansing was in a taxi with Jaffe and Douglas, the three became so engaged in their conversation they failed to realize the taxi was heading to Tokyo, three hundred miles away. “We screamed at him, ‘Stop! Turn around! We said, screening room!’ ” said Lansing. “But the more we screamed, the less he understood.” As they tried harder and harder to make themselves clear, it all seemed so absurd they started to laugh, and dissolved in tears at the back of the cab, puzzling the driver even more. Finally Lansing spotted a phone box and got the driver to pull over—only to discover that the instructions were in Japanese. “We were hysterical,” said Jaffe. “The three of us were crying on the floor of the backseat. But at last we remembered how to say the name of our hotel and the driver turned back.”
Filming in Japan was near-impossible, hindered by a thicket of arcane rules and endless bureaucracy, all of which Lansing had to navigate. But it became clear here as never before that she was truly her partner’s equal, which her Accused director Kaplan had believed from the start.
“Sherry and Stanley had this amazing partnership,” he said. “They were both interested in the stories and the casting, and Stanley was totally interested in the photography and had a really good eye. He was also a great line producer [in charge of the day-to-day details of a film], while Sherry was interested in taking care of the actors and making sure that everything was working properly. She got the best out of him. That’s what she’s brilliant at: she recognized what his talents were. She knew how to handle him.”
After eight years together, Lansing was confident their relationship would continue for decades, when Jaffe came to her with a bombshell.
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“I was in New York in March 1991 when Stanley called and said he needed to see me,” Lansing recalled. “He came over and told me he was leaving to become president of Paramount Communications [the renamed Gulf + Western].”
The news hit her hard. Throughout their years together, she had never doubted that Jaffe would tell her the truth. But now she realized that for days, and possibly weeks, he had harbored a secret as he negotiated to become the second-ranking executive in one of America’s top media companies.
“We used to talk a dozen times a day,” said Lansing. “We’d pour our hearts out, pushing through movies that no one else wanted to make. That was our way of life. And now it was ending. I could barely talk. I felt betrayed. I felt completely out of control. I was afraid I was going to cry. But I didn’t want him to see it. I hated the thought that he’d feel sorry for me, so I didn’t show what I was really thinking. It was like someone telling me, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ ”
“The day I told her was one of the hardest of my life,” said Jaffe. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about it before, and probably I should have because I could trust her, but I didn’t. It was tough. I said, ‘I have to take it. I just can’t let this opportunity go,’ which was selfish. It was hard. I did her a disservice.”
His departure confirmed Lansing’s worst fears: that even the strongest bond was liable to break, the safest relationship crack into pieces. Life was evanescent; everything that seemed most solid could melt into thin air.
“People will go only so far with you, and then they’re gone,” she reflected. “I’d been with Stanley for years, but in the end he had to do what was right for him.”
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She considered finding another partner. But nobody held Jaffe’s appeal.
“It’s a lonely feeling to have nobody to talk to,” she said. “I missed Stanley, his mind, his humor, his friendship. I missed having an equal partner. I missed bouncing ideas off him. He made me better, and I hope I made him better, too. But there was nobody to replace him.”
Closing the company’s New York office, she consolidated her staff in Los Angeles, where she faced the immediate challenge of finding a director for School Ties, which was about to go into production, with Jaffe no longer available to direct. In his place she hired a young filmmaker named Robert Mandel, casting Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in two of their earliest roles.
Rather than isolate herself, she plunged deeper into work, both professional and personal. Her nonprofit activities engaged more of her time and helped lift her above her anguish.
“One of the most moving experiences I had was visiting City of Hope, a hospital in Duarte, California, that made free care available to patients with cancer, leukemia and other blood disorders,” she said. “Even with all the sick people there, they had an incredible optimism. Outside a doctor’s office, there was a sign I never forgot: ‘They said smallpox was hopeless. They said tuberculosis was hopeless. They said polio was hopeless. Cancer is only a disease.’ ”
Earlier, she had joined the board of the American Association for Cancer Research, and later she would serve on the board of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, a group advocating medical research, particularly related to cancer. Along with these activities, she became more involved with Big Sisters of Los Angeles, which paired struggling girls with adult women as their mentors.
Her work with Big Sisters took her into the inner city for the first time since she had left teaching. She discovered a realm apart, just miles from the perimeter of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, where the children seemed to inhabit a different emotional and financial landscape. Crack cocaine had decimated their
neighborhoods; poverty and a prison epidemic had made any notion of stability illusory. What she saw shook her all the more as she met the young boys and girls for whom this was everyday life and the teachers who struggled to help them get through it. If her mother’s death had been the catalyst in her fight against cancer, so her experiences with Big Sisters galvanized her to fight for improvements in education.
Most of the Big Sisters girls were black or Hispanic, often from single-parent families whose lives had been destroyed by narcotics or physical and sexual abuse. One girl had grown up in foster homes because of her mother’s dependence on drugs, and yet somehow had done well enough to win a place in college—even as she shared a room with three other foster kids. Another girl had to look after her sister’s baby at the same time as trying to study, while living under one roof with multiple families, mostly illegal immigrants. She dreamed of majoring in engineering at a good university, but how could she ever get accepted, with no time for her schoolwork, no money and no papers?
“These girls often didn’t have mothers, or their mothers had serious problems and couldn’t look after them,” said Lansing. With her friend Sarah Purcell, she set up an endowment, the Future Fund, to provide scholarships allowing hundreds to go to college. Watching the big sisters, “I saw how one person could change a whole life, how if you committed yourself to help, you could touch their lives forever.”
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Shortly after her split with Jaffe, Lansing got a call from their Fatal Attraction director, Adrian Lyne, asking her to join him on a new film, Indecent Proposal. Once again she was caught in the maelstrom of making a movie.
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 19