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

by Stephen Galloway

  When she sent Ford the script, he didn’t agree.

  “He came into my office, dressed in jeans and a work shirt,” she said. “He was one of the most self-assured actors I’d met, which made it easy to talk to him. He never seemed to doubt what he was saying and never raised his voice. He just said, ‘I have a problem with the bomb going off.’ I said, ‘I think that’s the most important thing.’ He said, ‘There’s no movie after that happens.’ I said, ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make it.’ ”

  Faced with losing her star or her script, Lansing made the unusual decision to let Ford go, and replaced him with Ben Affleck, whom she had cast in School Ties when he was an unknown.

  “I heard Ben was interested, and we went for a walk on the lot,” she said. “He asked, ‘Why doesn’t Harrison want to do this?’ I told him, ‘He doesn’t like the bomb.’ That seemed good enough, and he was in. It took a ballsy actor to replace Harrison Ford, but he was willing.”

  “Sherry wanted to make sure she and I were on the same page,” said Affleck. “There was definitely a concern, because Harrison Ford was so iconic and had done such an amazing job. I knew on some level there would be comparisons made, though it was easier because he had replaced Alec Baldwin [in the franchise] and there was already a tradition of people who had come and gone in that role. I hadn’t done a movie like that, a big studio blockbuster. It was daunting, but I trusted Paramount was going to get it right.”

  The actor flew to Maryland to meet Clancy. “You drive to his house and there’s a ‘tank’ sign on the road, and you come around the bend and there’s the tank,” he recalled. “We had dinner, just the two of us. He was cranky, but he really just wanted to be respected. He wanted his opinion to matter. He didn’t like the fact that people had changed his books so substantially when they were adapted to movies. I felt we should have consulted him more, because what made the books so good was his eye for detail. I don’t know that he necessarily would have been the right guy to write the screenplay, because he wanted to write thousands of pages.”

  Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) was hired to direct, an unlikely choice given that he had never made an action film and was best known for more character-driven material. But Lansing liked the blend of thoughtful director and fast-paced thriller.

  “When I went to see Sherry, I said, ‘Are you nuts? Do you want a nice, sweet, gentle film where people leave and say, “Oh, I felt so good?” ’ ” Robinson recalled. “She laughed and said: ‘I don’t want Action Sequel Number Fourteen. I’d like it to be about the characters and the politics, and be smart and have some humor.’ I said, ‘If you really mean that, I’d love to do it.’ ”

  The director was advised to steer clear of Clancy, but a few weeks into production, “Sherry called me one night in Montreal and said: ‘Tom Clancy hates the script. I told him you’d call, and here’s his number.’ So I called him. He was critical of any changes to the book, and the book was eight hundred pages. He had a lot of specific notes and sent me a long memo. I had many talks with him during production, and I think that’s all he wanted, to have his voice heard. And Sherry did a great thing. He was upset that he hadn’t been invited to one of the premieres, and she said: ‘In that case, we’re going to have our premiere in Washington and you’re going to sit next to me.’ And that’s exactly what she did.”

  Later, Robinson even offered to record a DVD commentary with Clancy, in which the writer would have free rein to say anything he wanted, no matter how disparaging. “I didn’t know if Sherry would let us do it, but she did,” said the director. “It’s the frankest DVD commentary you’ll hear.”

  —

  Now, months after that conversation, the film was shot and edited, and the marketing campaign was about to get under way.

  “On the morning of September 11, I was [meant to be] doing a sound mix, getting ready to show Sherry and Goldwyn the film,” said Robinson. Then the attacks took place, and for twenty-four hours everything froze. “We delayed a day, and on the thirteenth we went in. There was a lot of security; there were police cars at the front gate—I never knew if they were props or real police cars. We went into the screening knowing everybody was nervous, but when the lights came up at the end, there was this audible sigh of relief, and I remember Sherry saying, ‘This film is so positive and life-affirming, we could release it today.’ ”

  “There were still very real concerns about the bomb,” Lansing acknowledged. “The marketing people felt it was too scary to put in the commercials, and the initial TV spots had nothing to indicate it goes off. I thought that was a mistake. It’s what made the movie unique.”

  She asked to have the explosion put back in the commercials, and the campaign worked. No matter how jolting it must have been for audiences to see a bomb going off in every two-minute trailer and thirty-second ad, the movie was nothing if not topical.

  In May 2002, Sum opened to mixed reviews but strong box office. Many saw it as a reaction to 9/11, ignoring the fact that filming had wrapped weeks before the terrorist attacks and the most contemporary parts of the picture had been put in place more than a year earlier. Despite her concerns, Lansing remained steadfast.

  “We delayed the test screenings by a week or two, but that’s the only concession we made to 9/11,” said Robinson. “We did not make changes for content. Sherry was not afraid. She said, ‘Let’s just put our best foot forward.’ ”

  —

  The Sum of All Fears marked a turning point for Paramount and its chairman. After almost a decade of success, it was the studio’s only release of 2002 to earn more than $100 million at the domestic box office.

  Whereas previous years had been flush with hits, 2002 and 2003 witnessed a succession of flops. True, there were exceptions (among them We Were Soldiers, The Wild Thornberrys Movie and Changing Lanes), but for the first time since Lansing came to Paramount, the studio barely eked out a profit, and the failure of such pictures as The Four Feathers and K-19: The Widowmaker (a thriller that brought Harrison Ford back to the Paramount fold, directed by Kathryn Bigelow) hurt her personally as well as professionally.

  “The film division wasn’t doing well,” said Biondi, the former Viacom president. “They were making their numbers, largely because of their TV business, but there was a lot of talk about how Paramount was playing low-risk baseball, and how they weren’t taking any creative chances. Jon Dolgen’s contention was, ‘I’m not in the awards business. That’s a talent issue. We’re in the moneymaking business.’ ”

  The desire to make bigger and more profitable films was leading each studio away from the risky and original, and Lansing realized that thinking was beginning to color her, too. Hollywood was transitioning away from the artistic landscape she had loved, and she was torn about how much to transition with it.

  “Sherry started to be unhappy,” said Friedkin, who was experiencing a career rebirth in the worlds of opera and independent film, even as his wife was struggling. “She was unhappy for a long time.”

  Interesting movies were still being released, but fewer were emerging from the majors. Independents such as Miramax were stealing the studios’ thunder as mainstream Hollywood filmmaking shifted away from the dramas Lansing had always favored and toward mega-productions that wolfed down all the resources that might have been available for other endeavors.

  Split rights, foreign sales, tax breaks and local subsidies became the lingua franca of the day as studios hurried to find outside financing, reflecting the epidemic of fear that was spreading through the industry—partly because the gushing stream of revenue from DVD and television that had ballooned since the early 1980s was drying up, and partly because the corporations were ever trying to squeeze out more profit.

  “That was the beginning of a difficult time with these content companies, when the quarter-to-quarter existence really started to emerge,” said Bryan Lourd. “Sherry went from being able just to say yes to [having to] qualify yes with ‘if we get a p
artner.’ ”

  “All of us were protecting our downside,” said Lansing. “Films about people, emotions, society—they were on the way out. It was all about the tentpole now. Every generation creates the films it needs, and I understood that and accepted it. But these films were different from the ones I’d loved and they weren’t the ones I wanted to make. I was no longer in the zeitgeist and I knew it.”

  By the early 2000s, the studios no longer seemed like the creative hubs they had once been. Rather, they had become corporate machines hungry for the franchises they needed to survive—from Harry Potter to Batman to Spider-Man to Paramount’s own Mission: Impossible. The importance of compelling marketing, the hidden force that had propelled Lara Croft to box office victory, ran like a subterranean stream through all of Paramount’s conversations. It seemed impossible to think of a film without considering that. More often than not, the product was ceding ground to the way it was sold.

  “When I started in the business, you made a movie and put it out, and marketing was relatively minor in the scheme of things,” said Lansing. “But at some point during my time at Paramount, marketing became as important as the movie. And then marketing became even more important.”

  The summer of 2001 showed how much things had changed, when one expensive blockbuster tumbled out after another, all sequels to previous films. These were not so much movies as brands, each sold to their audiences with the same methods and media that were used to sell soap or breakfast cereal. It hardly seemed to matter whether the pictures were good. From Jurassic Park III to Dr. Doolittle 2 to Scary Movie 2 to Rush Hour 2 to American Pie 2—each released in the prime summer window between Memorial Day and Labor Day—they dominated the box office.

  “The business was changing,” said Goldwyn. “Everybody was feeling tyrannized and anxious.”

  Lansing could not avoid the discomfiting truth that she was part of an increasingly industrialized complex. She could learn how to function in this environment, but the movies Hollywood was making were not in her blood.

  “If your values are changing, if your interests start to be somewhere else, and you see that in yourself, you know it’s time to go,” she said. “You say, ‘I’m the establishment, and I don’t mind being the establishment. I’m not young, and I don’t mind not being young.’ I started to want other things—to be at the regents’ meetings or listening to scientists talk about their latest advances or even just traveling. The passion I’d had was shifting to something else.”

  The same disillusionment that had washed over her was dampening the spirits of her staff. Many had been at her side for more than a decade; some had lingered in these executive offices from their twenties into their forties.

  “What Sherry wouldn’t do was look at the things bubbling up in the culture that needed to be paid attention to, in terms of movies,” said Rudin. “And she didn’t have a staff that had a handle on that.”

  “As a group, we’d become stale,” said Rosenfelt, the executive to whom Lansing had grown closest. “We’d been together too long. It was harder and harder for us. There’s a shelf life on those jobs.”

  “What was coming through development was very, very slight,” said Dolgen, “and when that happens, other things happen. It makes you want to sell off more of the pictures. It makes people nervous. People get tired, and because they get tired, the output suffers. Shame on us, probably, for keeping people too long. Shame on us all.”

  —

  Battles were being waged at ever greater personal cost, victories won only after blood had been spilled on the tracks—none as much as with The Hours.

  Its producer, Rudin, had assembled a top-notch cast (Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman), along with one of Britain’s leading theater directors, Stephen Daldry, to make the $21 million period piece based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel about three women in different eras, their stories linked by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway.

  Paramount, increasingly entrenched and wary of risk, had partnered with Harvey Weinstein, who had fallen out with Rudin over 2001’s Iris. The two men were a study in contrasts: each terrified (and terrorized) many of those who knew him, but Rudin could be as refined as Weinstein was rough. Their talent, intelligence and sheer rage were balanced, if not complementary. One magazine called them “The Id Couple.”

  Once shooting began, the two men fought like pit bulls, particularly over Kidman’s look in the movie. Rudin, like Lansing, wanted her to wear a prosthetic nose to better resemble her real-life counterpart, Woolf; Weinstein hated the idea. When the Miramax executive insisted on seeing makeup tests, Rudin refused, and even had one of Weinstein’s emissaries barred from the set.

  “He was coming to tell Nicole not to wear the nose,” said Rudin. “I hired security guards to keep him away.”

  When Weinstein forced Paramount to pull the movie out of the Venice Film Festival and openly criticized the Philip Glass score, Rudin called him, outraged. “You skunked me,” he said. “It’s despicable that you pulled this stunt and damaged my movie in front of the press. I don’t think I could ever trust you again.” He sent a crateload of cigarettes to the chain-smoking Weinstein, with a note: “Thanks as always for your help.”

  “We both bring strong viewpoints to every project we work on,” said Weinstein, “and like any good producer[s] we are passionate about our opinions. Sherry understood that.”

  Then she, too, fell victim to Rudin’s wrath.

  “He complained that we weren’t mounting a proper Oscar campaign, although we were flooding the trade papers with ads,” she said. “I confronted him, but his response was irrational. He kept calling Rob Friedman and yelling at him that Paramount wasn’t spending enough. But it was a bottomless pit.”

  Their clashes grew even more intense once The Hours received nine Oscar nominations in February 2003. “Scott smelled he could get Best Picture, Best Actress, best this and that,” said Lansing. “We were spending so much money I cannot tell you. But he wanted us to spend more. How did the Oscars become this monstrosity where people are spending zillions and having parties and slipping things here and there? What happened to the camaraderie?”

  Rudin insisted Paramount was in the wrong. “They really ditched the Academy campaign,” he argued. “Harvey said, ‘I’m not spending money on the Academy,’ because he was chasing [the Oscar for] Chicago. Sherry got very dogmatic about it. She didn’t want to take him on because she didn’t think [The Hours] was going to win. But the movie was a real player; it had won the Golden Globe. When you’re in a situation where you are very clearly right, and you’re getting stonewalled by the person who is meant to be your partner, that’s not fun.”

  By the time of the 75th Academy Awards in March, it was clear The Hours would lose to Chicago, and Rudin skipped the ceremony.

  “Losing is a very hard thing,” said Lansing. “You’re going to sit there at the Academy Awards; you know you’re not going to win, and you want it so much that you can’t handle it. You think success is going to fill you up, but you can only fill yourself up.”

  The Oscars might have been the end of the matter, but Lansing’s relationship with Rudin further deteriorated when he lashed out at her in an interview with Esquire.

  “He said I ‘blew it’ by not spending enough, and accused Jon and me of not caring about our movies,” said Lansing. “At the time, we were working on the budget for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which Scott was producing. Scott claimed I’d lied about it.”

  “I found the amount of energy being poured into this circle jerk frustrating and debilitating,” he told the magazine. “These people can give you a lot of pain when they’re trying to make a movie with you. Imagine what they can do when they’re just trying to give you pain.”

  The article infuriated Lansing. “I remember getting it and just breathing a sigh of ‘wow’ and putting it down,” she said. “It really hurt me, and when you’re hurt you get angry. He’d violated my tr
ust. It’s one thing fighting; it’s another going public. I said: ‘After all we’ve done, after all the years of support, you’ve turned against us. We were your best friends. You broke the code.’ It was profoundly painful. Scott was like a difficult brother, but an artist-producer to whom I’d become incredibly close. I felt betrayed and hurt.”

  Once she might have laughed off such a spat, but not now.

  “It was one fight too many,” she said. “I was plain burned out.”

  In January 2003, in the midst of her battle with Rudin, Lansing fled Los Angeles for the sanctuary of Atlanta, telling only her husband and none of her staff.

  Hollywood was in its post-Christmas lull, and the rest of the world was holding its breath in anticipation of the March 20 invasion of Iraq. Dark shadows were looming on the horizon and a palpable anxiety had pierced even the sealed bubble of Hollywood. In the sixteen months since 9/11, the film business had seemed increasingly disengaged from the world around it, just as Lansing had felt disengaged from its movies. She ached for something more meaningful.

  Three years earlier, she had told Dolgen she was thinking of resigning and entering the nonprofit world, only for him to scoff at the notion. Even her lawyer, a veteran hardened by too many Hollywood skirmishes, had persuaded her to stay on when her contract was up for renewal.

  But her dissatisfaction was growing. She thought of other men and women who had embarked on different lives, even at a point when their careers had reached a peak, and wondered whether she could do the same. None had done so as impressively as President Carter, who had created an institute devoted to global peace after his humiliating loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. When a friend asked Lansing if she would like to meet him, she leaped at the chance.

  “He was an idol of mine,” she said. “After the presidency, he’d used his life to change the world, devoting himself to everything from global health to building homes for the poor. I felt he’d lived a pure life in the years since he’d left the White House.”