Thrilled about their meeting, Lansing called Gordon right afterward, expecting he would be overjoyed. She was taken aback to get only a lukewarm response. Wasn’t it Gordon who had asked her to meet Cohen? Wasn’t he the one pushing to get this made?
“I didn’t understand,” she said. “Finding a director was a key part of getting the movie off the ground, and that was Mark’s dream.”
She did not know that a bigger fish was circling. During a visit to CAA, on his annual pilgrimage to what was then the mecca of Hollywood, Spielberg had heard about Ryan from a young agent, Carin Sage, who blurted out her belief in this obscure piece of material even though she did not represent it.
“The screenplay first came to me through my agents,” Spielberg recalled. “It had been sent to me on offer to direct, and I took to the story immediately. I phoned Tom Hanks, having seen him on every page playing [the leader of the searchers] Captain Miller, only to discover that CAA had sent [him] the script at the same time. We decided on the phone that afternoon to do the movie together.”
Hanks’s office was next to Gordon’s on the Fox lot, and the actor had turned down the script when he first read it, fearing the material was too familiar and too jingoistic. But Spielberg was proposing a hyperrealistic account of war.
“Steven said, ‘Look, with the technology that now exists, we have an opportunity to go back and literally recreate World War II,’ ” Hanks noted. “I said, ‘Steven, please tell me you’d like me to be in this movie, so I can say yes.’ ”
When the star and director told Gordon they were on board, he was sworn to secrecy by CAA, anxious that its clients’ plans would leak and result in a wave of publicity before the deals were done, possibly scuttling the whole endeavor. Hence Gordon said nothing when Lansing called after meeting Cohen, who would soon learn he had lost the job.
Now the coin had been tossed and the deal had been done. The budget was set at $69 million and the picture was a go.
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Lansing shuttled between Paramount and Spielberg’s compound on the Universal lot, a low-level adobe office complex built just for him and decorated with classic movie posters and casual Santa Fe–style furniture. It was the first time she had had any significant dealings with him.
“He made me feel instantly comfortable,” she said. “Everybody there was dressed in baseball caps and jeans, and there was free food for everyone. He made you think you were talking to an equal, and you’d forget you were sitting with someone of his brilliance. He was relaxed and interested and open to any suggestion, and curious about everything you thought: ‘Did you like the script? What are you thinking? What would you like to change?’ ”
Despite how laid-back Spielberg appeared, she realized he was more complex and also more vulnerable than many realized, and it was that part of him she responded to most. The two developed a warm rapport.
“[She] was a great team leader and inspired us all to do our best work,” he said.
At the same time, Rodat polished the screenplay with Spielberg, and was even invited to the director’s Pacific Palisades home for a script meeting, along with Gordon, Hanks and DreamWorks executive Walter Parkes.
“I got there early,” said Rodat. “I was wandering around like, ‘Where the heck am I?’ There’s a bunch of offices. There’s an editing bay and this gigantic office at one end of it. I go into this room and I hear this harsh voice that says, ‘Can I help you?’ I panicked. It was a parrot.”
Sitting down, he and the others stared at a blank TV screen, waiting for Spielberg—who was away on vacation—to be teleconferenced in. “First we see the screen,” said Rodat, “and it almost looks like there’s an iris in a silent film. This circle of light comes in, and then [the camera] pulls out. We realized Spielberg had taken the camera that was on a little umbilical cord, and put it in his mouth as a gag.”
When the laughter died down, they discussed the script.
“He wanted to break it apart,” said Rodat. “We considered all sorts of crazy stuff, like having Ryan be wounded and heavily bandaged.” He told Spielberg he clung to a secret wish: that Captain Miller should die toward the end of the movie. “He said, ‘Absolutely. There’s no question about it.’ ”
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In June 1997, Hanks and other key cast members arrived in England, where they were put through a fierce boot camp led by military adviser Dale Dye.
“It was five days,” said Hanks. “It rained, we were wet, we were very cold. I was worried that we were all going to get sick, and Dale was relatively merciless.” When the actors rebelled, Hanks had to convince them to carry on. “There was a point where the guys said: ‘We’ve had enough of this. We’re actors.’ But the rebellion fell apart and we all ended up staying.”
This was the beginning of a grueling experience that saw them wade through water, slosh through mud, heave bulky backpacks, and live in a state of high alert that lasted from the beginning of the shoot to the end.
“That was an incredibly physical film to make,” said Hanks, “and it played tricks with the mind because so much of it was a very, very tactile experience. It was loud, it was wet, it was uncomfortable, it was hard—literally—on the knees and on the shoulders. Eddie [Edward] Burns got a horrible third-degree burn on his hand because the weapon he was firing was incredibly hot. His hand swelled up and blistered like a baseball bat, but we had to keep going.”
There was only one break, after the August 31 death of Princess Diana. When her funeral took place, “the country shut down,” said Hanks. He and Spielberg traveled to London for the funeral, which they attended with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, both there for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. “We showed up with a few thousand other people, and there were people on the roofs of every building, and every open space had somebody standing in it. We were in front of Westminster Abbey, and all you heard was the footfalls of the people in line. There was no other sound.”
Despite the difficulties his actors faced, Spielberg was in his element, and when Lansing arrived in England she found him more relaxed than any filmmaker she had ever seen.
“I was struck by how calm the set was,” she said. “There was no tension and no yelling. The crew moved about, doing their jobs efficiently. They broke on time for a civilized lunch, and the cast ate with them. Steven would eat and then go into a facility to finish editing Amistad. There were no frantic, last-minute script conferences or haggling over the afternoon schedule. His confidence filtered through the ranks. I said, ‘Steven, I’ve never seen such a relaxed set.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s how you do your best work. You have to be loose.’ ”
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Months later, he showed Lansing the finished film in Paramount’s main theater. She and a handful of other executives settled in to watch the first cut, before anyone other than Spielberg’s closest associates had seen it. Unlike Lansing, the director despised test screenings and preferred to show his film to a few select friends, such as Robert Zemeckis and George Lucas.
No matter how many drafts of the script Lansing had read, and regardless of how impressed she had been on the set, she was stunned by what she saw, and amazed that the director could have made a film this visceral, this groundbreaking. In the first drafts of the screenplay, the Normandy invasion had been a brief flash, witnessed rather than lived; here it was long and real and almost too much to bear.
“That sequence when they land on the beaches of Normandy, I’d never seen anything like it,” she said. “The camera moved in and out of real horror; the cutting was so fast you felt you were trying to catch up with the chaos all around you. This was one of the strongest of antiwar movies, but also one that showed the greatest respect for the soldiers. I couldn’t even breathe, it was so intense. I knew how great it was the moment I saw it, and so did everyone else in that theater.”
“I’ll never forget it,” said Terry Press, DreamWorks’ head of marketing. “People couldn’t speak afterward. Nobody was saying anything, because no
body could speak a word.”
Lansing only had one concern: that the movie’s violence could lead to an NC-17 rating. The very notion that a Spielberg picture might warrant this showed how far the director had come from his early days.
“I discussed the rating at length with Sherry,” said Spielberg, “and she advised that I should preemptively sit with the ratings board to place into context what my intentions were in showing such a vast quantity of violence to depict what it was like for these young men landing on Omaha Beach. They very kindly allowed me to present my reasons for depicting Saving Private Ryan in this way before they viewed the film for the first time. I was never concerned about making the D-Day invasion too violent. I was concerned that the audience for such a graphic depiction of combat would not go out to the movies to give us a chance. I am very happy I was wrong about that.”
The MPAA gave Ryan an R rating, and the picture was a hit when it opened on July 24, 1998. Despite its near-three-hour length, it made $30.6 million over its first weekend and brought in a total of $482 million worldwide, an astonishing number for a war film this intense.
“Here Spielberg, the creator of Schindler’s List, the film that more than any other justifies the justness of World War II, asks us to examine the war’s morality in a different light,” wrote Time magazine’s Richard Schickel. “What we may hope is that Saving Private Ryan will be perceived for what it is—a war film that, entirely aware of its genre’s conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.”
Other critics concurred, and audiences raved about the movie. It seemed destined to scoop the top prizes at the upcoming Oscars.
As the Academy Awards approached, and as the industry entered the months-long period known as awards season, Lansing felt sure that this picture had the substance, the brilliance and the imagination to go all the way. It had beautiful performances and masterful cinematography. How could it lose?
But in the run-up to the March 1999 event, something unexpected happened. Another picture, Shakespeare in Love, began to gain traction. It was funny and charming and joyful, but it was also relatively lightweight and lacked the cinematic originality of Ryan. Rumors of ugly tactics surfaced. There was talk that Harvey Weinstein, the swaggering chairman of Miramax Films—and one of Shakespeare’s producers—was working behind the scenes to undermine his rival. Nobody could prove anything, or fathom his honed and tested methods for winning, but Paramount and DreamWorks insiders began to worry.
“Somebody told me that Harvey had hired all these people to go around saying our movie was all in the first fifteen minutes, and beyond that it was mundane,” said DreamWorks’ Press. “The idea that you could hire people to go bad-mouth somebody else’s movie—to me, that was a completely foreign concept. So I went to Steven and said, ‘This is the world of Harvey Weinstein, and this is what he’s saying about the movie.’ And he said, ‘I will not get in the mud with him. I will not lower myself.’ I said, ‘Are you sure? Because this is like a war now.’ ”
On Oscar night—March 21, 1999—everything looked good. The key players arrived and took their places, all positioned in the first few rows of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, where they could be observed by a dozen or more cameras, each zooming in for a close-up whenever it was needed. The usual meet-and-greets and perfunctory congratulations were dispensed with. And then the host, Whoopi Goldberg—Spielberg’s discovery in 1985’s The Color Purple—emerged to introduce the show, and the initial batch of awards was handed out.
Hours later, when Spielberg won for Best Director, optimism surged through the Ryan team. Gordon, the producer, was so confident that he began to button up his tuxedo jacket, ready to walk onstage and pick up his Best Picture Oscar. When Harrison Ford came out to present the final award, it seemed like a good-luck omen. And then he opened the envelope and announced the winner: Shakespeare in Love.
Lansing turned to the others in disbelief. As five producers walked onstage to collect their Oscars for Shakespeare—four of them jostling for space around Weinstein, who seemed to suck the air from everyone else—it became clear that Spielberg had made a film about one kind of victory, only to have another snatched from his grasp.
“I remember feeling flushed, like I had had some kind of chemical reaction,” recalled Press. “I said to my husband, ‘I need to get out of here.’ I should never have listened to Steven. It was very noble not to get in the mud, but we lost.”
Spielberg was relatively stoic, said Press—he had won the directing Oscar, after all. But a sense of gloom settled on the others.
“It was so crushing,” said Lansing. “You could feel how shattered everyone was. I felt guilty, as if I’d let everyone down. Whenever I failed, that’s how I felt. I’d ask myself, ‘What did I do wrong?’ But there was nothing that hadn’t been done right. It was hard for me and for all of us, but it didn’t change how great that picture was.”
While Lansing formed a close relationship with Spielberg, she formed an even closer one with Tom Cruise.
She had first met the actor at Fox when she oversaw Taps, the 1981 military drama in which he starred with Sean Penn, Timothy Hutton and George C. Scott. Back then, he was an eager if somewhat naive nineteen-year-old with a strong work ethic and an even stronger sense of loyalty, who was grateful to Lansing for being gracious to his mother.
“He was cast in a smaller role, then given a much bigger one in a film with an amazing cast, because you could see right away that he had a giant talent,” she said. “He was always extremely focused and exceptionally polite.”
Lansing had not worked with him since, and production was already under way on The Firm when she took up her post as Paramount’s chairman in 1992. But the Cruise she had met at Fox had not changed. “He was just as focused and just as polite,” she said.
The actor was in the middle of creating a production company with his former agent, Paula Wagner—CW Productions—and had just closed a deal to be based at Paramount when Lansing was named studio chairman. As she moved out of her production offices and into the executive suites, Cruise and Wagner took over her old space in the Lucille Ball Building.
“The goal was to make a couple of movies a year, preferably for Tom to star in,” said Wagner. “But we also wanted to do other films.”
Lansing approved, and was in the thick of finding producers whom she could count on when Cruise and Wagner started their new company. “I knew Tom was hardworking and would take this seriously, because that’s who he is,” she said. “I’d also seen a good success rate with actors who became producers and directors. They have an innate sense of truth and know when material works.”
After developing several projects, Cruise locked into the idea of making Mission: Impossible, based on the CBS series that ran from 1968 to 1973 about a group of secret CIA operatives tasked with mind-bending challenges that they would solve using the latest gadgetry and appearance-altering masks. Paramount had been trying for years to adapt the series, a favorite with Cruise’s generation, but its surface appeal—an action-heavy spy thriller—hid numerous problems. It was an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle, and it was rooted in the Cold War, when the world had moved away from that conflict following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Still, this was the picture Cruise wanted to make.
“I kept thinking, why does a star of his stature want to do this ensemble piece?” said Lansing. “I knew each character in the series had the potential to be distinct, but it was strange that he wanted to make a new version of an old TV show, and a showcase for half a dozen characters.”
Lansing waited as the partners commenced the arduous task of developing a screenplay worthy of their producing debut. A draft by American Graffiti’s married screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, while prescient in putting an ecological crisis at the heart of the story, was rejected as not thrilling enough, and over the next three years a host of lead
ing writers came and went, adding millions of dollars in development fees, but never resulting in a finished screenplay.
“The mandate from Sherry and John Goldwyn was: make Mission,” said Wagner. “Then you start asking all the questions: Is Tom going to play Jim Phelps [the leader of the missions, originally played by Peter Graves]? Are you going to keep the same characters? Are you going to change it? How?”
Early in the process, The Firm’s director, Sydney Pollack, came in to oversee the process, only to drop out. “He wanted it to be a spy film, like something by John le Carré,” said Wagner. “He was really helpful in defining the tone, but he didn’t feel it was his cup of tea, with all the action.” When he left, “we started talking about, ‘Who can we bring on?’ Mike Ovitz had just signed Brian De Palma, who had done Bonfire of the Vanities, then Raising Cain and Carlito’s Way, which didn’t work. But Tom was game.”
After three failures in a row, De Palma was in “movie jail,” the place stars and directors went when they had suffered a colossal bomb or two and nobody in the industry wanted to take a risk on them. Wagner felt the studio was nervous about hiring him, but Lansing was impressed that Cruise chose this director, rather than a more fashionable one.
Her relationship with De Palma had been strained on Fatal Attraction—“Brian’s defection wounded her,” said Goldwyn—but had grown warmer after he acknowledged how good Michael Douglas was. This was the man who had made such visually arresting films as 1976’s Carrie and 1987’s The Untouchables, and Lansing had never forgotten Melnick’s counsel to judge an artist on his best work, not his last.
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 30