Now she was heading to see him.
As her car pulled out of Paramount and onto Melrose Avenue, she glanced up at the giant images plastered on the studio’s outer walls, touting such coming attractions as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Rugrats Go Wild, both movies she liked, neither one of which would be remembered for long. They were her last glimpse of the studio before the traffic swallowed her up.
She sat in silence as her car wound along the anonymous streets and then onto the choked freeway, until her driver deposited her at LAX. As she passed through security, she hoped no one would spot her. What would people think if they recognized her, she wondered? Should she unburden herself and admit the truth? And if not, what else could she say?
It was cold when she landed in Atlanta. As she left the airport and drove into the city, she looked out at the men and women wandering past her along the frosted streets, some languid, some laughing, all locked in their own private concerns just as she was in hers.
Suddenly she felt anxious. She remembered being face-to-face with another of her heroes, Nelson Mandela, and being so tongue-tied she could barely speak. “I was so awed by him, I was like a babbling idiot,” she said. “I just kept saying, ‘It’s so nice to meet you, it’s so nice to meet you,’ and left.”
That thought consumed her as she checked into her hotel and went to her room. Alone, she called Friedkin.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I’ve flown across the country just to see Jimmy Carter and I’ll probably be with him for all of four minutes.”
“Ask about Camp David,” he said. “Ask about the Middle East, then you’ll be fine.”
“The Middle East?” she laughed. “How am I going to find out everything I need to know about the Middle East between now and tomorrow morning?”
The next day, she rose early and gathered her things. After a workout and breakfast, she set out to meet the president.
“I spent four and a half hours with him,” she recalled. “I had lunch with him and his wife, Rosalynn, and met the staff that worked at the Carter Center, which did so much to promote human rights around the world. He seemed so happy, as if he’d found a new purpose in life, and that outer-directed purpose gave him an inner peace.”
Carter pointed out his library and museum, set amid acres of parkland filled with trees, and spoke about his endeavors since creating the center in 1982.
“We talked primarily about the work of the Carter Center, that appealed to her,” he said. “The Carter Center goes wherever people don’t want to go, and we negotiate with leaders who are responsible for unnecessary wars or human rights abuse. We also discussed the plight of the poorest people on earth, in particular women and girls, whose basic human rights are violated grossly. We were exploring a way to address this issue on a global basis.”
They discussed health care, too, one of the issues that most concerned Lansing, and Carter’s success in fighting diseases that had ravaged the lives of millions but were now in abeyance. In particular, he spoke of his efforts to end Guinea worm, a tropical parasite that can infect humans and then grow inside them until meter-long worms crawl out of the skin, causing agonizing pain.
“He was dealing with things that nobody else would touch,” said Lansing. “Guinea worm, river blindness—he helped lead the world in the fight to eradicate them.”
Above all, Carter addressed the one matter that weighed on her so much: how to move to the next stage of her life. He had done so himself, without choice, when he was just a few years shy of Lansing’s age. Nothing was better proof of his success than the Nobel Peace Prize he had received six weeks earlier.
Carter believed Lansing could do anything she set her mind to. He believed in the possibilities of change, and held a mirror to a future full of hope.
“He encouraged me to follow my instincts,” said Lansing. “He showed me there was a whole world that could open up, if I just took the next step.”
—
Lansing returned to Los Angeles vowing to leave Paramount.
But events were moving faster than her. The pressures coming from above were intense, and she knew that Dolgen, her friend, might not last without a new team around him. Now—perhaps too late—she tried to shore up their regime. Marketing chief Arthur Cohen was edged aside in September, and two months later so was Goldwyn.
After thirteen years at Paramount and a lifetime on Hollywood’s center court, Goldwyn had seen the best and the worst the business had to offer. His grandfather, Sam, one of the greatest of all producers, had come to America from Warsaw in 1898 and gone on to make classics such as 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives and 1955’s Guys and Dolls; his father, Sam junior, had cautioned his son against the duplicity of the studios, only to see him reach the summit of one of the very institutions he despised. This third-generation member of the Hollywood Goldwyns had survived his recent divorce, his conflict with Cruise, and even coming out as gay. But his work had suffered, as he was only too aware.
“My last tour of duty, I knew I was about to head into really rocky periods, personally,” he said. “Scott Rudin was at a very crazy place at that time. He was furious, and everyone was furious, and he wrote a vicious letter about me, copied to everybody. He said I was a liar and I should be fired.”
When Dolgen summoned him to go over Paramount’s upcoming film slate, the two had a blowup. “He just went crazy,” said Goldwyn. “He said, ‘You call this a schedule? You call these titles?’ I thought, ‘I’m done. I’m not going to sit here and be yelled at by Jon, not after being here for three Academy Awards and establishing two franchises. Really, after all that, this is how I’m talked to?’ ”
That weekend, he and Lansing agreed to go their separate ways. If Goldwyn had hoped his boss might persuade him to stay, he was wrong.
“Could I have fought for my job?” he asked. “Probably. But it wasn’t worth it to me. It just wasn’t worth it. The door was held open for me [to leave].”
—
Three thousand miles away, in Viacom’s corporate offices, another door was being held open.
Mel Karmazin, Viacom’s president and CEO, had always been an odd fit with his boss Redstone—the latter as mercurial as he was cerebral, the former a bluff salesman type who had headed CBS before Viacom bought it in 1999. Many thought Karmazin had only ever agreed to be Redstone’s deputy in the belief the older man would soon retire, leaving him in charge of the media empire Redstone had built. But he had misjudged the Viacom chairman’s tenacity, forgotten this was the same fighter who had clung to a burning balcony as the flames licked at him and the flesh was seared from his hands. Over the course of five years they had tried to work together but had only grown further apart. Now they despised each other.
“Mel had his own narrative of what went wrong that was different from Sumner’s,” said Dolgen. “And Sumner’s included a fair amount of blame for Mel.”
Within months of Goldwyn’s departure, their relationship ruptured, and over Memorial Day weekend 2004, Lansing learned Karmazin was out.
“Mel had enough, and Sumner kind of punched his ticket,” said Tom Freston, then the head of MTV Networks, who was unable to explain the precise trigger that led Karmazin to leave. “He really was not happy working for Sumner, and Sumner didn’t feel Mel showed him the proper respect.”
As the news swept through the upper reaches of Viacom, Redstone scrambled to regroup while his other executives waited to learn their fate. Someone would be the victor in the battle to replace Karmazin, and someone else would be the loser, and the ripples from that struggle inevitably would trickle down through the company.
Before the weekend was over, without consulting anyone, Redstone offered Karmazin’s job to Freston.
“Sumner pulled me into the Carlyle Hotel [where he lived] and sat me down,” said Freston. “I said, ‘You know, this is a big decision. Let me talk this over with my wife. Give me twenty-four hours.’ ”
Incensed that h
is subordinate had not jumped at his generous offer, Redstone chose not to wait. Without telling Freston that he was rescinding the promotion, he instead gave the job to Leslie Moonves, the ambitious and charismatic chairman of CBS TV, who took it at once. The next day, Freston called to accept.
“Too late,” said Redstone. “I’ve already offered it to Les.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Freston. “You said you were going to give me a day.”
That weekend, he met with Moonves and Redstone, along with a handful of other top executives in Viacom’s headquarters.
“We were trying to figure out what to do,” said Freston. “We were going to carve the company into two pieces. Sumner was going to become the CEO. [He said] ‘You guys are going to run this thing together.’ Then there was a meeting about who was going to run what, and how the announcement was going to be teed up for the following morning.”
The men brokered a deal: Freston and Moonves would ascend in tandem as Redstone’s seconds-in-command, but there would be a shake-up outside their circle. There was no room for Dolgen, they concluded. None of them had been close to him, and they disliked his penny-pinching ways, regardless how much Viacom had benefited from them.
“Dolgen and Freston always had a bad relationship,” said Rudin. “Dolgen felt the movie division of MTV [which Freston had run] was a disaster. There was a massive amount of conflict there.”
Redstone said he would deliver the news to Dolgen himself.
“Sumner called me,” said Dolgen. “I didn’t know anything was coming. He told me there were changes, and that was it. He didn’t say anything about [firing] me.”
Unaware of Redstone’s intention, and failing to realize he had gotten cold feet, Dolgen carried on as usual over Memorial Day, and it was only the following day, when he was shown a press release announcing the Viacom restructuring, that he realized what it meant. The document mentioned that Lansing was being given new duties, but said nothing about him. He called Freston to demand an explanation.
“I was [stunned],” said Freston. “I thought Sumner had talked to him about, ‘You’re going to be leaving the company, we’re going to honor your contract,’ all of that type of stuff. But he had not. He did not step up to the plate. Jon says, ‘I’m reading this press release. What does this mean for me?’ I basically had to tell [him] the decision had been made over my head. It was really uncomfortable.”
After years of hoarding the company’s money as if it were his own, of working nonstop, of finding elaborate and arcane ways to maximize Viacom’s profit, Dolgen had to learn of his firing by default. Not one of the company’s top officers had the decency to tell him.
In the early afternoon of June 1, shortly after his conversation with Freston, Dolgen called Lansing to break the news. She was having lunch with a reporter in the studio commissary when a phone was brought to her table. Breaking away, she hurried to her friend’s office.
“Jon told me he was leaving,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I will, too.’ But he said: ‘Don’t do that. I’ll be fine. You have people to protect.’ He wasn’t bitter. He was philosophical. He said, ‘If [MCA-Universal chairman] Lew Wasserman could end up out of a job, someday it had to end for me.’ ”
Lansing was shaken. “Jon was my partner, my best friend, my brother,” she said. Perhaps she should have resigned there and then, but she vacillated, either lacking the conviction to quit or clinging to the hope she could still turn Paramount around.
“Sherry was a success at a time when the business was run on instinct,” said Rudin. “When Jon left, it was very hard for her. The guys I loved in the business were buccaneers, and she was one of them. She never cared about the P&Ls [profit-and-loss statements]. She could have doubled down, but she’d reached a point where she wasn’t interested anymore.”
“That’s when I saw her depressed for the first time,” said producer Lynda Obst. “That era, that period—she knew it was over.”
—
Lansing was left to run the studio alone.
“They gave me Jon’s job, which I never wanted,” she said. “They literally said to me, ‘You’ll do this job.’ Because I was in charge of the budget, I couldn’t escape meetings after fifteen minutes, as I did when Jon was there. I was dealing with home video and worrying about how many DVDs were shipped and things like that. I thought, ‘I’ve truly become a suit.’ ”
Contracts, negotiations and corporate bureaucracy began to dominate Lansing’s life, while creative encounters, and the thrill of listening to new ideas, began to recede—all summed up in her dealings with America’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart.
“Wal-Mart had become the largest seller of DVDs in the country,” she said. “I met with Lee Scott, its CEO, and flew to their headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to meet with a group of employees.” There she tried to summon whatever joy she could as she watched the employees begin their shifts with the Wal-Mart cheer: “Give me a W! Give me an A! Give me an L! Give me a squiggly!”
She did everything to persuade herself this was all good fun. “I wanted to be responsive,” she said. “But my heart wasn’t in it.”
“We talked about [her leaving] for five years before it happened,” said CAA’s Lourd. “Sherry was always very forthcoming about, ‘This will last as long as it does and then I will leave. With any luck I will leave on my own terms.’ ”
Her spirit had fled the enterprise, and it was only a matter of time before the rest of her followed. When Freston suggested she should fire her remaining staff and bring in fresh blood, she could not take it anymore.
“If I’d waited for the perfect moment, I’d never have left,” she said. “The job had become a way of life, and I’d found a rhythm that worked well over twelve years. But if I didn’t start doing the other things that really mattered to me, I’d never get to do them at all. There were so many times when I’d said to Billy, ‘I’m going to quit,’ it was almost anticlimactic when I finally did.”
“She decided when she was going to step down,” said Lourd, “and plotted it and left elegantly and graciously.”
In fall 2004, Lansing called Redstone. “I told him I was going to leave when my contract was up at the end of 2005, or earlier if he could find a successor,” she said. “He asked me to stay, and then made me sign something saying I wouldn’t go to a rival company. He told me he was sad, but not surprised.”
Freston was “dumbfounded” when he found out, he said. “But she bowed out with total class.”
Lansing’s planned exit was kept under wraps and hidden from all but the key players, even as Freston and Redstone worked on finding a replacement, until on November 2, 2004, the Los Angeles Times broke the news.
In a story headlined “Hollywood Pioneer Lansing Is Poised to Exit Paramount,” reporter Claudia Eller wrote: “Sherry Lansing, a Hollywood pioneer who for three decades has been one of the most powerful figures in the movie business, plans to step down as chairwoman of Paramount Pictures when her contract expires at the end of next year. According to a source familiar with the situation, Lansing will stay long enough to help choose her successor and to aid in the transition.”
Word tore through the industry, and a generation of executives that had grown up with Lansing as their role model collectively gasped in amazement.
Rosenfelt was on an exercise bicycle at the gym when she saw the news on KTLA TV. “It was the last thing I expected,” she said. “I was like, ‘What?’ I was stunned.” Part of her was heartbroken that Lansing was leaving, and part of her thrilled at the way her friend had orchestrated everything. She was convinced, like all of Lansing’s colleagues, that their boss had leaked the story, leaving her firmly in control of her destiny.
“The way Sherry left was like an incredibly produced movie,” said Manning. “We all looked at it and thought, ‘Oh my God! That’s brilliant.’ ”
—
On February 16, 2005, a crowd gathered outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the very first pla
ce Lansing had visited when she arrived in Los Angeles four decades earlier, to watch as her hand-and footprints were embedded in concrete. Diane Keaton and Sidney Poitier were there, and so were dozens of others. It was Lansing’s last day as studio chairman, and her friends had joined the celebration en masse.
“There were crowds upon crowds,” said Lansing. “Anyone from the studio was allowed to come. They gave speeches, and so did I.”
That evening, Paramount hosted a farewell party on the lot. She arrived at the studio with Friedkin after darkness had enveloped the buildings, and nobody could be seen. A momentary pang went through her that her exit had come to this.
“I said, ‘Why’s it dark? Has everybody gone home?’ ” she recalled. She glanced up to see a handful of men and women emerging from the darkness, strolling toward one of the soundstages. Then a dozen more appeared. Then hundreds were walking to the stage where the party was being held. “Everyone came—every waitress, every assistant,” she said. “I saw a mass of people pouring in, streaming from all over the studio.”
Inside the cavernous building, huge posters lined the walls, showcasing many of the movies Lansing had green-lit, which had since become classics—Titanic, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart—with her face and Friedkin’s printed in place of the stars’. That evening, it was announced that her favorite studio theater—the Little Theatre, where she had spent so many hours—was being named after her.
“That’s all I could have asked for,” she said. “Because that’s where I’d spent so much of my life, watching the dailies, seeing the movies over and over again. That’s where I saw Fatal Attraction. That’s where I saw The Accused. That’s where I saw Forrest Gump and almost every single one of the two hundred movies we’d made while I was running the studio, many not just once but dozens of times.”
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 36