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

by Stephen Galloway

  “Right away, Tom started talking about scenes in The Untouchables, and everything else De Palma had made,” she recalled. “He wasn’t going with the flavor of the month.”

  De Palma brought in writer Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York), and together they started to explore ideas for the film.

  “When Brian called asking for help, I called the Huycks, old pals, to check in that everything was copacetic with them,” said Cocks. “This was the first they’d heard they were being succeeded. Awkward all around. But the fact we were friends and—I hope—professionals made the transition easier.”

  Cocks worked on the movie for only a week, but that week was productive. Ideas came bubbling forth, influenced by his wide-ranging knowledge of film, which was more than matched by De Palma’s own.

  “Jay is a phenomenal film historian,” said Wagner. “He came onboard and we started doing all this research. We looked at every single film that had twists and turns in it that you didn’t see coming.”

  In particular, they studied Hitchcock, a tremendous influence on De Palma, and looked at all the old Mission: Impossible episodes, as well as at everything that had inspired its creator, Bruce Geller. They explored the lives of some real-life spies, including CIA mole Aldrich Ames, an agent for the Soviet Union until his arrest in 1994.

  Before locking into a story, the production team agreed it must be rich in complications, packed with unexpected revelations. “Brian wanted it to be done with sleight of hand,” said Wagner. “He loved twists and turns.”

  In these first conversations, the filmmakers decided on one of the movie’s biggest revelations: that Phelps, the leader of the missions in the television series, where he was the embodiment of authority and integrity, would not be who he seemed.

  “I suggested making [him] the major villain,” said Cocks, “an idea Brian loved, and which, to our glee, discombobulated, upset and incensed Mission: Impossible traditionalists the world over. And we came up with and refined the idea of the long sequence in the Chunnel [the rail tunnel under the English Channel, linking England and France]. I don’t recall ever writing anything beyond scrawling a lot of notes on a yellow pad. But it gave some shape and thrust to the finished film.”

  When Cocks left the project for other commitments, new writers stepped in, including Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List), Robert Towne (Chinatown) and David Koepp (Jurassic Park).

  Koepp recalled how De Palma created the film’s most memorable sequence, when Cruise breaks into a super-secret CIA vault in eerie silence. The gleaming vault had echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. It was very much a technocrat’s vision of the future rather than a reflection of the prosaic present.

  “We’d done a bunch of research into how the CIA actually protects its corridors and its physical property, and it was all very boring,” said Koepp. “You know there are video cameras; there’s a guy in a room. It was rather familiar. After wrestling this research into the ground, Brian and I said, ‘Screw all that. Let’s make everything up.’ I loved the Michael Jackson video where the floor lights up [for Billie Jean]. So I said, ‘Why don’t we do that?’ ”

  Two years had passed since Lansing agreed to back the movie; she was still without a working screenplay, and had to stand by as other studios bombarded Cruise with offers. “I understood the process and I understood how long it takes to get something great,” she said. “I had faith in them.” Still, she had a company to run.

  “She said, ‘OK, kids, here are your rules. Here are the players. Here’s what we’re going to do. We have to have this movie,’ ” Wagner recalled. “She said, ‘We have to have it and we have to have it soon. Whatever you need to get there, we’re going to support you, but you better damn well get a great script and a script that’s action and that’s going to be a big hit.’ ”

  Finally Lansing received a draft during a business trip to Chicago. Locking herself in her hotel room and refusing to answer the phone, she tore open the package and whipped through the pages.

  The first part of the script seemed predictable. “It started with an action sequence, but it was still very much an ensemble piece,” she said. “And suddenly everybody’s killed and Tom’s character [the newly created Ethan Hunt] has to take control of the mission. From that point on, you couldn’t stop reading. Even with the thousands of scripts I’d read, I hadn’t seen that coming.”

  —

  Casting was an immediate priority, and it was influenced by the growing globalization of the business and Lansing’s own willingness to consider unorthodox actors.

  “The role of the spymaster was written for a man,” she said, “but we gave it to a woman and brought in Vanessa Redgrave. We also very consciously gave the movie an international feel: we had two French stars, Emmanuelle Béart and Jean Reno, and decided to make this the first major American production to have a substantial shoot in Prague.”

  Adding stars and major new sequences inevitably raised the budget. When the picture seemed to be heading out of control, Cruise offered to defer his salary.

  “Tom and I were partners,” said Lansing, “and he was one of the few producers and stars who truly understood and sympathized with the problems of the studio. He said, ‘I’m going to defer $20 million,’ which allowed him to make the movie he wanted without having to make other cuts.”

  Cruise, in fact, had been given some stern counsel by one of his closest advisers. Knowing the cost might lead the studio to pull the plug, one told him: “You have to give up your salary. Take it on the back end. But you can’t have your first film as a producer go down in flames.”

  In the race to get the screenplay completed before shooting began, Towne and Koepp moved to London, where preproduction was under way, living in separate hotels while rewriting different sections of the story. This was precisely the kind of situation that made Lansing anxious: the script was not locked, money was gushing out, and everyone making key decisions was six thousand miles away.

  Wagner, a newcomer to the production realm, had to serve as a middleman between the production and the studio. “I was a first-time producer, forced to jump into the deep end,” she said. “I remember crawling around, listening under Robert Towne’s door to make sure he was typing at night. Then Sherry would call at six o’clock: ‘Where’s that shooting script? We have to have it.’ ”

  Lansing sent Don Granger, her production executive, to the set. After some initial missteps (the film’s line producer, the man in charge of the day-to-day aspects of the shoot, had to be replaced), he told her to rest easy: Cruise was doing good work.

  At one point, a crew member noted, the actor simulated clinging to the top of a bullet train—a sequence that had to be shot in a studio with CGI—and insisted on using a fan the size of an airplane propeller to create a wind violent enough that people would believe he was hurtling forward as a helicopter explodes overhead. “Tom’s big thing was, there wasn’t enough wind,” said the crew member. “He said, ‘Well, supposedly these trains go at 120 m.p.h.’ I was like, ‘If you get a piece of dust in your eye at that speed it could blind you.’ He said, ‘I want the wind blowing in my face and I want my jaws to be blowing.’ That’s Tom. He’s a guy’s guy.”

  Cruise was as committed to producing as acting, even when it came to such small matters as negotiating how much it would cost to shoot on a bridge in Prague.

  “I thought it was $10,000 for this location,” Wagner explained. “Then we get a call from the production manager. He said, ‘No, no, no. Add a zero. It’s $100,000.’ We were $90,000 in the hole, and we knew the studio wasn’t going to give us that for a bridge. So the first person we go to is the lord mayor of Prague. He can’t help us. Finally, we find our way to Václav Havel, the president. Tom’s doing double duty now: he’s an actor and he’s a producer and he has to help. Havel’s thrilled to be meeting Tom, and he’s an extraordinary man, and he talks about his plays. He says, ‘I have sympathy and care for the artist. I am an artist.’ Then he says, �
�But I have no power.’ ”

  —

  When the picture wrapped, Lansing was delighted with what she saw. Cruise had been right to pick this as his first production and to go with De Palma, whose work was at its most visual and visceral.

  The two had gotten on well during the shoot, so she was puzzled when she heard of strains now, right at the end of postproduction. Differences between them had emerged while the film was being cut. Perhaps De Palma, whose roots were in independent film and whose friends were such iconoclasts as Martin Scorsese, had not anticipated Cruise’s desire for control; perhaps he was simply exhausted from one of the most challenging productions in his experience.

  “Brian saw the enormity of Tom’s star power and the control that he had,” said Cruise’s agent at the time, Rick Nicita. “He wasn’t used to it and took advantage of his tendency not to talk to anyone and slipped out the side door and never came back.”

  “He got a lot of interference, an enormous amount of input from the star,” said one insider. “It was exhausting. At the end, he really felt like, ‘There, fuck it. It’s done.’ And he threw his luggage in his car and drove across the country.”

  Lansing could not reach him, no matter how hard she tried, and when the movie premiered in May 1996, De Palma did not attend. “I called him,” she said, “but he never called back.”

  —

  Mission’s success, with earnings of $458 million at the worldwide box office, made it imperative for Paramount to develop a sequel.

  “The big idea behind the Mission: Impossible franchise was that each movie would be different in its approach, and shot in a different style,” said Lansing. “The first picture was a thriller with an intricately woven story line. We wanted the next one to be more action-oriented.”

  After talking to a number of directors, she and the producers settled on John Woo, who had helped define the Hong Kong action genre with such kinetic works as 1989’s The Killer and 1992’s Hard Boiled before coming to Hollywood, where he had had a big success for Paramount with 1997’s Face/Off, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.

  Work on the screenplay moved fast, and when Cruise felt it was in place he told Lansing he was ready to shoot. But she was less sure; she argued that more work was needed on the script. That would delay the start of production, and the delay would cost money. Cruise said the studio should provide the extra amount; Lansing said no. They met in her office to hash out their differences.

  “It was like these two immovable mountains,” said an executive who was present. “Tom said [if Lansing would not go higher], ‘I’ll make it in a year’s time,’ the last thing a studio chief wants to hear. Sherry said, ‘OK.’ Then they stood up, meeting over. Tom starts walking to the door, and Goldwyn and the others are staring at each other, like, ‘Who’s going to give in first?’ Finally Tom looks at her and says: ‘I can push two weeks. But you pay for it.’ And she looks at him and says: ‘Three weeks. And I’ll pay for half.’ And it was done. Done in a moment. She wouldn’t cave. Nor would he. Both got what they wanted.”

  Later, Cruise was scouting locations in Sydney, Australia, when Lansing called to ask for further cuts and changes. Cruise and his partners resisted. When they got off the phone, the walls began to tremble. Woo, who was there with Wagner and Cruise, was convinced a giant earthquake had hit. “We thought we were cursed,” he joked.

  “We start hearing these things,” said Wagner. “We hear this ‘boom, boom, boom!’ We all hit the floor, thinking we were being attacked. The building was shaking. It was the biggest hailstorm ever in Sydney—there was more than $1 billion of damage. I said, ‘Sherry’s really mad.’ We were laughing. Tom and John were like, ‘Oh boy, she means it!’ ”

  —

  When the film was completed, Paramount arranged a test screening in a small theater in the Midwest. The location was as far away from Hollywood as possible, to avoid prying eyes. The Internet was beginning to change how studios did their business; it was no longer possible to have test screenings in Los Angeles for a movie as important as this, which could affect the direction of the studio and even the price of Viacom stock.

  “The place we found was so remote that you couldn’t fly there commercially,” said Lansing, “so we all went in private jets. Two jets came from Los Angeles, carrying the marketing staff and NRG [the market researchers], Tom arrived in his plane with Paula, and I came on another with Jon Dolgen. It was almost comical, seeing this fleet of Gulfstreams parked alongside each other on a small private airstrip in the middle of nowhere.”

  That evening, the group gathered in a private room near the theater, careful not to be seen by any of the locals who were pouring in for the screening, none of whom had any idea which movie they were about to see. Cruise was kept in another room. NRG’s Joe Farrell told the actor he would sneak him into the back of the theater, unobserved, but only once the picture began. It was crucial for the audience not to know there was a superstar in its midst.

  “The whole thing felt like a top-secret maneuver,” said Lansing.

  She settled into her seat and was listening patiently as Farrell came out to introduce the movie. Suddenly, Cruise leaped through the curtains and the crowd went wild. “It’s Mission: Impossible!” he yelled.

  Dolgen grabbed Lansing’s hand to prevent her from jumping up.

  “I wanted to strangle Tom,” she said. “The entire screening was worthless now. Of course everyone was going to like it—the biggest movie star on the planet had come to town just for them.” For two hours, she sat seething as the audience whooped and hollered, enjoying the moviegoing experience of a lifetime. “All I could think was, I had the most expensive movie Paramount had ever made, and I had no idea if it actually worked.”

  When the screening was over and the audience had filed out, she stormed over to Cruise. He smiled bashfully.

  “He said: ‘I could see the look in your eyes, Sherry. I know you wanted to kill me,’ ” Lansing recalled. “I said, ‘That’s an understatement.’ He said: ‘I’m sorry. I just really wanted them to like it.’ ”

  —

  Throughout, Cruise avoided proselytizing for Scientology, his religion, which would not surface publicly as a force in his life until many years later, when he chose to speak more openly about his beliefs.

  Once, after reading a negative article about Scientology, Lansing called him to discuss it. “I said, ‘I feel terrible that you’re being attacked, and I want to understand this better,’ ” she remembered. “I didn’t want to become a Scientologist, but I respected him and felt I should know more about it.” Cruise asked if she was serious, and when she insisted she was, he arranged for her to have dinner at the church’s Hollywood headquarters, known as the Celebrity Centre.

  “I had a good evening with him and a senior member of the church,” said Lansing. “They demonstrated the ‘e-meter,’ the device they use for measuring your mental state, and asked me some questions to see where I stood. It was very emotional. I left with four books that outlined some of the basic tenets of Scientology, and Tom was very protective of my privacy. He said, ‘No one will ever know you went. It’s between us.’ But I said, ‘I don’t care. I have nothing to hide.’ ”

  That was one of several Scientology events Lansing would attend over the years, including one with Tom Freston, CEO of Viacom’s MTV Networks. His recollection of the evening was less positive.

  “I got this invitation to the Scientology ball, this very fancy invitation from Tom, delivered to my house,” he noted. “So I called Sherry. [She said], ‘Oh, honey, we’ve got to go to that.’ I was mesmerized by the whole thing. [Scientology leader David] Miscavige spoke. They talked about all the great work they’d done at Ground Zero, rehabilitating some people’s respiratory systems. There was a lot of self-congratulation. It was fascinating to be there as an outsider. We were given super-VIP treatment and escorted around very carefully everywhere. I had a front-row seat at a pretty bizarre evening. But you couldn
’t find a more gracious guy than Tom.”

  Lansing never explored Scientology further, but her affinity for Cruise and some of the other stars she worked with who were adherents made her reluctant to join the critical bandwagon.

  “After my visit, no one from the church ever called or solicited anything from me,” she said. “I was never pushed to contribute, and it never interfered with my working relationship with Tom or Anne Archer or John Travolta, who were also Scientologists. I didn’t see Tom try to convert anybody, and there was never any pressure from him on anyone at the studio.”

  Only once did Cruise’s beliefs affect his professional relationships: during a confrontation with Goldwyn, who had been promoted to president of the film division and as such was the most senior Paramount executive under Lansing. The incident took place shortly after Goldwyn had filed for divorce from his wife, Colleen Camp; he was fighting for custody of his daughter and in his divorce papers allegedly had criticized Camp’s commitment to Scientology. There was an added complication: he had recently come out as gay.

  “Tom called and said, ‘I need to see you and John Goldwyn right away. It’s very serious,’ ” said Lansing. “I called John and said, ‘What’s happening with Tom?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  Goldwyn stopped by Rosenfelt’s office on his way. “John came in and said, ‘Tom wants to see Sherry and me. What do you think it’s about?’ ” recalled Rosenfelt. “I said, ‘Your divorce.’ He said, ‘What?’ I just knew. And I knew how Sherry would handle it. She wasn’t going to allow business [to be affected by something] personal.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Lansing was sitting with the two men. The atmosphere was electric. It was clear that Cruise had obtained Goldwyn’s divorce papers and was not happy.

  “Tom sat down on one couch, and John was on the other one,” said Lansing. “Tom said, ‘Have I ever treated you disrespectfully?’ John said, ‘Of course not.’ Tom said, ‘Have I ever treated anybody disrespectfully?’ John said, ‘No.’ Then Tom said: ‘I know you came out, and have I ever said anything negative about your sexuality?’ John said, ‘Never.’ And Tom said, ‘So why have you treated me so disrespectfully? Why have you said such bad things about my faith?’ ”