The problems were compounded by the banks that were handling the finances but were so slow to pay up that Gibson and Ladd had to spend millions of dollars of their own money to keep the production rolling.
“I got on a plane from Prague, where we were also shooting Immortal Beloved, and went to see Mel,” said Davey. “We were shooting on Ben Nevis mountain at the time, and during an opportune break I went up to him and said, ‘Listen, we’re in all sorts of trouble here. You and I are financing this and we are out of dough, mate.’ I drafted an email to Redstone and Murdoch and all those guys and I just told them, ‘I’m shutting down production.’ ” The money came through.
Halfway through the shoot, Lansing flew to Dublin, where she spent two days with Gibson and watched him film some of the picture’s biggest battle sequences.
She looked on in wonder as epic scenes unfolded before her, with some seventeen hundred Irish soldiers filling in as extras, all supplied free by the Irish government. She stood at Gibson’s side as he rode a two-hundred-pound metal horse, built over a steel skeleton, for his close-ups. And she stared fascinated as hundreds of archers fired ten thousand arrows, creating a moment reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.
She knew the stress Gibson was facing as actor, director and producer, a challenge rarely taken on by any major star, and admired his self-discipline.
At the end of Lansing’s first day on the set, “I walked over to Mel’s editing room and he showed me twenty minutes that he’d cut together,” she said. “It was pouring rain, and I was wading through the water in these galoshes, wet and cold, but all I could think about was the film. I said, ‘Do you understand how great this is?’ And he just sat there, looking at me blankly, as if he really didn’t know.”
Gibson was too exhausted to think. He had spent months dealing with the financing, weeks wrestling with the inclement weather, and now days on end orchestrating vast battles, acting in almost every scene as well as directing, without rest.
“It took everything I had,” he said. “These were eighteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. You’d sit in a dark hotel room and just drool. Honest to God, that’s what it was like. I didn’t want to talk. It was, ‘Leave the lights off. Just send me up some toast.’ It was five months, nonstop. By the end, I could hardly put a sentence together, I was so depleted. That’s when I first noticed gray hairs. [On days off] I stayed in the hotel and didn’t get out of bed. It was only my second outing as a director, so I was pretty scared. I don’t think I’ll ever do anything like that again. It just leaves you bankrupt. You age. At the end of it, I was exhausted. I couldn’t even talk to anyone for a month.”
“That was one of the toughest shoots I’d ever seen,” said Lansing. “The logistics were overwhelming. I felt for him. But I knew it was going to be worth all the effort in the end.”
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Weeks after the film wrapped, she got to see a first cut. “Something didn’t work,” she said. “The film was too long, and the emotion wasn’t fully there.”
“Some of the stuff was way over the top,” Gibson acknowledged. “There were people’s intestines falling out, and their eyes were being gouged.”
Lansing had learned just how much could change in postproduction, and so she wasn’t too worried. She gave the filmmakers detailed notes, reminding them of her enthusiasm and her belief in them. Even though Gibson knew “she didn’t want an X rating,” he never felt pressured to remove an excessive amount of violence or trim the movie more than he might like. Instead, he came to admire her shrewd observations.
“Sherry is probably the smartest executive I’ve seen in a screening room,” said Davey. “Her notes are precise, and she has a great gut feel for what works and what doesn’t. Any notes she gives, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, are spot-on. But she was concerned.”
Lansing suggested a test screening, and together the filmmakers traveled to Sacramento to see how the movie played before an audience. Gibson’s method of attending such screenings was to go incognito.
“He had this latex mask made, and nobody could recognize him,” said Lansing. “It was done by a makeup artist, and he put it over his head so no one ever knew it was him. He came up to me once and said, ‘Hi, Sherry. You don’t know who this is, do you?’ Then I recognized him, but only from his voice.”
Both were nervous about the audience’s reaction, and the result was worse than they had feared. People were running out of the theater, some throwing up.
“It was extreme,” said Wallace, the writer. “Seventeen people walked out before the screening ended.”
When the group left to take the studio plane back to Burbank, they were despondent. Gibson was in turmoil, and Lansing privately was extremely anxious. When the plane landed and the group disbanded, Gibson came over to Wallace.
“It’s two in the morning and I’m at the hangar in Van Nuys airport, and Mel says, ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ ” he recalled. “We drive to Jerry’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard, and we’re sitting there together, and Mel says, ‘I’ve lost my perspective.’ ”
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The next day, Lansing wandered over to the filmmakers’ tiny cutting room and huddled with Gibson and his editor, Steven Rosenblum. Gibson knew the movie was too long, but he was at a loss how to tighten it.
“Steve and I had the film down to three hours and fifteen minutes,” he said. “We were just about hanging ourselves trying to figure it out. Honestly, we were looking at it, going, ‘We don’t know how to make this shorter and quicker and better.’ And Sherry gave us a note. She said, ‘I think you’re letting the audience get too far ahead of you and you’re spoon-feeding them where you don’t need to.’ Steve and I were cranky, like, ‘Easy to backseat-drive’ and all that. Twenty-four hours later, we were both trying to call each other at the same time, and saying, ‘She’s absolutely right.’ We sat down and we said, ‘Fuck! Yeah, she’s right.’ ”
That note, said Gibson, “made us look at stuff differently. We were able to cut three hours and fifteen minutes to two hours and forty-eight minutes [not including titles]. We streamlined it and made it a much better film.”
A second screening went like magic. There were no more walkouts and no throwing up; and even though Bill Mechanic, the Fox executive who had co-financed the picture, tried to persuade the filmmakers to trim a few more minutes, Lansing stood firm.
“Mel cut it back more and had an even shorter version,” she noted. “I saw it and said, ‘Put the five minutes back. It was better longer.’ ”
Braveheart opened May 24, 1995, to a $9.9 million weekend. By the end of its run, it had earned $76 million domestically and an impressive $210 million worldwide. At the 68th Academy Awards, it led the field with ten nominations and became Paramount’s second consecutive Best Picture Oscar winner, taking home five statuettes in all, including two for Gibson as producer and director.
Lansing remained loyal to him over the years, through all his ups and downs, and refused to join his assailants when his rash words and drunken outbursts helped ruin his career.
She remembered how generous he had been after their tough negotiation. “I called him afterward,” she said. “I told him, ‘I know we’ve been through a lot, but I really love this movie. I’m sure you have a dartboard with my picture on it that you’re throwing darts at every day.’ He couldn’t have been more gracious. He said, ‘No. You were doing your job. I was doing mine.’ ”
She added: “He has his demons, and when he drinks he becomes another person. But he’s not anti-Semitic and he’s not homophobic, or any of those things that people believe. He’s honest, shy, funny and real.”
By the time of Braveheart, Lansing had settled into a comfortable routine.
“I’d set my alarm for six-thirty a.m.,” she said, “then I’d grab my bag of scripts and climb on the treadmill. The workout was crucial—if I didn’t exercise, I’d lose my sense of perspective. But the phone would start ringing before I’d walke
d a mile.”
After skimming through two or more screenplays, she would shower and dress, glance at the news in the Los Angeles Times and then leave home for the lot. Frequently, she would stop off for an eight-thirty breakfast meeting. “Hollywood has a thing about talking over meals,” she said, “and whenever I was chasing a director I’d insist on getting together for breakfast or lunch.”
While she was at breakfast, one of her two assistants would arrive at the office and the calls would pour in. “She’d roll them like an air traffic controller,” said Lansing. “One would come after another. They never seemed to stop.” Important or unimportant, each caller would hear back by the end of the day.
She chose not to socialize outside work with the actors and directors whom other executives craved to know well. She wanted to keep a professional distance. “It was hard enough to say no in the best of circumstances,” she explained, “but it would have been impossible if they’d become my intimate friends. That would have impaired my judgment.”
She was now an established public figure, courted for charitable work, targeted for social events and wooed for political endorsements. A longtime Democrat, she was invited to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom during the early years of the Bill Clinton administration.
“I came in through a guest entrance, and someone was waiting to give me a tour of the White House,” she recalled. “Then they took me upstairs and asked if I was comfortable, and showed me around the private quarters. In the Lincoln Bedroom, I was overwhelmed. There was an ornate Victorian bed, and a few pieces of mahogany furniture, and a copy of the Gettysburg Address on a stand. The odd thing is, by the time I said good night to the staff, the Clintons hadn’t arrived. I was alone in their residence, and they were nowhere to be seen.”
She took out a script and got into bed. After a while, the Clintons still had not appeared, and so she got up, snuck out of the room, crossed the hall and peeked into the Queens’ Bedroom.
“I didn’t want to look like I was prying,” she said. “Maybe they’d be there and say, ‘What are you doing?’ I’d met the Clintons, but we weren’t close friends. I was nervous. But I wanted to see what was going on. And after that, I had nothing to do. It wasn’t late, and nobody was there, and it was strangely silent. So I got back into bed and carried on reading my script.”
An hour later, there was a knock at her door. It was the president and the First Lady. They opened the door to find Lansing in a robe, somewhat to her embarrassment.
“The president said, ‘Welcome to the White House. Are you comfortable?’ ” she recalled. She fumbled for words. “The next morning, I had breakfast with Hillary on my own, and we talked and talked, not about politics, just life. She was so open and accessible. It was a wonderful conversation.”
Lansing was invited back to the White House sometime later in the Clinton administration, and was sitting next to the president at a formal dinner when he leaned over and asked, “Do you know Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys?”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, the president of the United States is telling an anti-Semitic joke,’ ” she said. “I wanted to hide under the table.”
Instead, he told her about the country singer and satirist of that name, and his band, the Texas Jewboys, and mentioned that one of Friedman’s books (he was also a mystery novelist) would make a great movie. After dinner, he introduced her to the musician, another of the evening’s guests.
“I felt really stupid,” she said.
She never bought the book.
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Such events were pleasant diversions from her frantic schedule, but they also took her away from her family. Life with a husband and children was a stark contrast to the life she had known before. Her schedule was no longer just hers to control, her priorities quite different from the way they had been when she was single.
“I used to go to Jack’s baseball games, and we’d have all his friends over for the weekends,” she recalled. “We’d have five or six kids come over and they’d all sleep in his room in sleeping bags. We had an attic with a pool table and a big television set and couches, and they could run around and do whatever they wanted there. At the end of the weekend, you’d find pizza on the ceiling—literally. I never knew how it got there, but that was the kids’ room. They were fun. Spending time with Jack and Cedric was pure joy for me.”
Having a family gave ballast to Lansing’s work life and served as a relief valve in an environment that could too easily become toxic. “The hardest thing about that job is not losing yourself in it,” she said. “You’re not finding a cure for cancer, and yet you think you are, in a funny way, because it becomes all-consuming. But it can’t be when you have kids.”
She resented accusations that her husband benefited from her position; this was, she pointed out, an Oscar-winning director. She was particularly disturbed when the Los Angeles Times blasted her for hiring him on the 1995 thriller Jade in a story headlined “Selection of Paramount Chief’s Husband as Director Raises Eyebrows, Even in an Industry Known for Nepotism.”
She had bought the project, based on a Joe Eszterhas story about a San Francisco executive and a prostitute linked by a murder, within days of taking over at Paramount. She insisted she had recused herself from the decision to hire Friedkin, though others were skeptical. “I was upset because it wasn’t true,” she said.
Jaffe said he and Lansing discussed the matter early in her tenure. “Billy was going to direct [the 1994 sports drama] Blue Chips,” Jaffe noted. “She came to me and said, ‘Look, this is really awful. I can’t really oversee this. I want you to.’ I said, ‘Sherry, I’m running the company and I don’t live in California.’ She said, ‘Please.’ So I did. I was involved in the discussions with Billy.”
It was perhaps naive of Lansing to think anyone who worked with her would forget Friedkin was married to their boss. In a rare misstep, she had failed to consider public perception and neglected to put in place measures that would insulate her from charges of favoritism. After Jade, that changed. Five years would pass before Friedkin made another film for Paramount, 2000’s Rules of Engagement.
“I knew from then on we had to avoid even the appearance of favoritism,” said Lansing.
When Jade failed critically and commercially, Friedkin blamed himself for hurting his wife, and she in turn blamed herself for allowing this to happen.
“Sherry was the head of the studio and I had directed this picture,” said Friedkin. “I remember feeling really depressed, because I thought the film was good and other people didn’t. I felt, more than anything, that I had let her down.”
“He felt like a failure and I felt responsible,” said Lansing. “He went off to do a remake of 12 Angry Men, which I thought was a terrible idea. I said, ‘I’m telling you, why would you set yourself up by remaking a classic?’ I was wrong.” The Showtime movie was nominated for six Emmy Awards. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t have anything to do with his creative life. He had to follow his own instincts or I’d lead him astray.”
Their marriage succeeded, in part, because they kept their work lives separate. “How do you handle that?” Lansing asked. “The answer is, you have a life that’s not just based on your work. I fell in love with an extraordinary director, but that was only one of the things that make him special. I fell in love, first, because I was attracted to him, and then I fell in love with his mind and his humor and his kindness. And I fell in love with the way he loved me. He didn’t want to change anything about me. That’s the greatest gift anyone can give you.”
Whatever she had achieved before, she believed, “I’d never have been that successful without him. I knew that if I was fired or had the biggest humiliation in my career, he wouldn’t care. It wasn’t going to change our marriage one bit. Our house became an island of security, where we were thrilled by each other’s successes and suffered each other’s disappointments viscerally and painfully. When I cried, or didn’t want to get out of bed because a
movie hadn’t worked, he’d say, ‘It was great.’ He was my biggest fan and cheerleader. And I was his biggest fan and cheerleader. To this day, I feel his pain as if it were my own, and he feels my pain as if it were his, too.”
They did not always see things the same way, but that didn’t matter, said Friedkin.
“Sherry and I could not be more different in so many ways,” he observed. “We have major differences about people and politics and even movies. We disagree, but it’s not important to me to resolve those disagreements. We love each other. I not only love her, I respect her tremendously and I admire her.”
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In 1996, Lansing took her biggest bet yet on a hugely expensive period piece about the greatest shipping disaster in history.
The industry was abuzz with rumors about Titanic, the first film director James Cameron had made since 1994’s True Lies. Everybody knew how expensive it was going to be (though its eventual cost would surpass the most extreme projections), but the picture had been shrouded in mystery, its script unavailable to any of the Paramount executives until Goldwyn’s wife, actress Colleen Camp, auditioned for a role, and then a Fox executive gave her husband a copy of the screenplay.
Goldwyn had been to a recent exhibition about the real-life ship, which foundered in the North Atlantic in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg, at the National Maritime Museum in London. He had even chatted about it with Cameron at a party celebrating—in true Hollywood style—the fifth anniversary of actor Tom Arnold’s sobriety. When he read the script, he was convinced Paramount should get involved.
Lansing, too, was fascinated by what she read. She was thrilled by the way Cameron had used a real-life tragedy to propel a fictional story about class and romance, a Romeo and Juliet–tale set against an epic backdrop, as modern in its style and themes as it was historic in its setting. The movie may have been largely set in 1912, but it was utterly contemporary in its feel.
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 26