Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (19 page)

John, in something akin to panic, called Sherry to meet privately. Sherry remembers it with great compassion, as John was and is one of her best friends. She had no idea why he was in such a state when he came to see her.

“That’s it?” she said, after he spoke.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re gay?! This is what the problem is? You were being so dramatic, I thought you had embezzled!” She was incredulous. “We don’t care.”

John remembers the moment like it was yesterday. Sherry got up off of her seat and walked over to sit down next to him on the couch. She took his hands in hers. “I am so happy for you,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Now you can have authentic relationships.” He was moved and utterly relieved.

“But I also saw that he was distracted,” Sherry said, as we sat in her elegant office at the Sherry Lansing Foundation on Century Park East. “He was going through an identity crisis and a painful divorce. I couldn’t care less that he was gay,” she added. “But there were problems. It was a seismic shift in John’s identity and what he
wanted to do with his life. He was going through this terrible time. I think his ability to concentrate on his work was compromised, as it would be with anybody. Whatever it was, it all was a perfect storm.”

BAD 2003

I adored John Goldwyn. I remember the day he called me while I was having lunch with a “nonpro”
⁵
girlfriend (who was extremely annoyed by the interruption) at the Peninsula Hotel over Christmas and told me he was leaving. I knew at that moment that things would never, ever be the same at Paramount for me. Half my team was gone. The conversation, connected by his trusty assistant Eben Davidson (now a VP), who was rolling calls all day (phone calls are rolled, not placed, in Hollywood), however, was designed to assure me of the opposite. “I will be there for you and your movies,” John said over the phone. “Sherry has no one in mind. This could even take ’til spring. I will be working with you. It will be a smooth transition, I promise; you will still have me.”

But even as I was talking with John, agents were calling Sherry to discuss his imminent replacement. Would it be my good friend on the lot, producer and former Disney president Donald De Line? He was happy as a producer, and wasn’t angling for the job. But Paramount megaproducer Scott Rudin
⁶
wanted him, and Sherry had made a recent hit with him and was interested. Jim Wiatt, longtime head of the ICM agency, was publicly throwing his hat in the ring. CAA, mostly via Bryan Lourd, was making a case
for newly minted Paramount producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Bryan—whom Sherry (and everyone) took very seriously—was a friend and ally of Lorenzo’s, and had made his producer’s deal at Paramount after his controversial departure from Warner Bros.

A year before, di Bonaventura, a charismatic mountain-climbing guys’ guy, was the high-flying exec at Warner Bros. who’d brought in
The Matrix,
among other cutting-edge hits. Then it was widely reported that di Bonaventura had quietly jetted off to New York to make a play for his boss’s job to the Time Warner corporate brass. He landed at Paramount as a producer.
⁷
CAA, understandably, saw him as a studio head.

This was all well and good, but who would I be for? I needed a horse in the race. I went home and cried. Then I called Sherry.

My horse would be my buddy, the charming, funny, popular and talented Donald De Line. I’d rooted for his underdog hit at Paramount,
The Italian Job
—a gold-heist movie remake starring Mark Wahlberg, Ed Norton, Charlize Theron and Mini Coopers—during that crazy summer of 2003 when all the big tentpoles (like Ang Lee’s
Hulk
) collapsed and the one movie that had the legs and the least tracking (it
would
be Paramount, which wasn’t making tentpoles) had cleaned up. I called it “My Big Fat Italian Job.” Sherry was hoping to find someone who would eventually succeed her as cochairman with Rob Friedman, then president of marketing and distribution.
⁸

Sherry loved Donald—hell, everyone loved him (except Brad Grey, as it later turned out)—but there was serious competition out there. Though CAA was lobbying for Lorenzo, they liked Donald too, as he also had a very commercial track record. I think in the
end it was Sherry’s “throw off her shoes” comfort with Donald that won him the job, after weeks of frenzied speculation, gossip and wrangling. After over a decade with John, that intimacy would be hard to replace, and I know she struggled with the decision. Goldwyn was in agony, but in the end, he is happy and more successful as a producer, as it suits his temperament and creativity.

CANDYLAND

The rainbow coalition of Sherry and Donald began in 2003. The producers were happy, the execs who had whined on my couch were happy; nobody would get fired, Donald’s would be the era of kindness and all would be well on the lot again. Sherry could still reign over the happy Christmas party, and there would be less smoking and moaning on the quad. The Blocker was going to stay, Donald told me, but she was going to be a new, gentler, happier Blocker, reinvented in Donald’s image. She had promised.

Really? I asked.

Really. Everyone on the lot was saying so. She’d gotten a promotion. It was like Candyland.

Then Donald hired a new senior exec, whom we’ll call “Cookie.” She was a tiny ball of fire who brought no small anxiety to the women of Candyland. Donald was crazy about her and thought her wildly commercial, though the stories that preceded her from her prior studio were just wild. Sherry didn’t get that “throw off her shoes” feeling from her. The Blocker sensed the possibility of herself being blocked. I was open to Cookie, as she was even shorter than I am. Perhaps she would help me get
Can You Keep a Secret?
going. The option on the book was coming up.

Cookie cultivated long lines of people outside of her office. A meeting would go like this:

YOU:
It’s about a girl who’s terrified of flying.

COOKIE:
I’m terrified of flying!

YOU:
So many people are! So she gets totally wasted, and sits next to this gorgeous guy on the plane . . .

COOKIE:
Good.

YOU:
And tells him everything about herself.

COOKIE:
Can you get Hugh Grant?

YOU:
I didn’t tell you that the guy ends up being her boss!

COOKIE:
If you get Hugh Grant, I can get it made.

You leave exhilarated. All you have to do is get Hugh Grant. Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant want to work together! Perfect! And then you realize you don’t have a script. And you need Cookie to sign off on a writer. And there are thirty people waiting outside her door, and you can’t get back in for two weeks. And of course you can’t get Hugh Grant before the option runs out.

•  •  •

Sometime around mid-Candyland, Donald called to offer me a movie he wanted to make, with a director already lined up. He knew it wasn’t perfect for me, he said, but it would round out his slate. Great, I said, what is it? I was jazzed.

It was called
Step-Dude.

Okay, it didn’t have a great name.

It was about a cougar who falls in love with a guy her son’s age.

Okay, it had a dicey, creepy, uncomfortable premise.

But it was really funny.

Okay, funny enough. And I hadn’t had a picture in a year now. Too much turmoil. The director was having a hard time getting a cast. Could I help?

My son, Oly, in his twenties at the time, was aghast when I told him the premise. But he played poker regularly with the director. So that was one thing. What thing? I don’t know. I thought it would be fun to location scout New Orleans in a van, such was
my frustration with my efforts to get
Can You Keep a Secret?
made.
Made?
Hell, even to hire a writer! Now Kate Hudson was pregnant! Nine more months.

So we went scouting for locations in New Orleans. While in the van, we heard that Owen Wilson—the director’s best friend—had passed on the script. Then we heard that Seann William Scott—my friend—passed. Then my line producer quit for an Adam Shankman movie. Was this a present, or a trick? I spent months trying to put together a movie I didn’t love. I stopped. This was not my job. Making movies I love is my job. Why wasn’t it happening? In the meantime, I started to invent some more movies that Donald and I could both like and that I could get around the Blocker. But then, of course, someone got fired and there was a hot new boss, so I got a little distracted.

HIP “R” US

When I think back on the glory days of Tom Freston’s reign—all eighteen months of it—it seemed then like he would be at Paramount forever. And why not? He was so cool! He founded MTV! He was a homegrown Viacom star! We were all proud and excited. He came in as the beloved son, waving the MTV banner high, this network he’d founded for proud papa Redstone. He led with his chin, superconfident and New Age, an entrepreneur who could run a conglomerate! Handsome and edgy, he dressed like a rock star and jetted around with Bono or Mick or whomever, wherever. Freston’s loyal longtime staff at Viacom’s starlet division, MTV, saw him as their Steve Jobs. Out with the stodgy old, in with the new, and he was the cutting-edge face of it. He had Sumner’s personal mandate to recreate the brand, and he came in branding away, naming MTV and Nickelodeon the lead faces of the New, Cool Paramount. He seemed to have a bemused contempt for
everything Old Paramount, both in style and substance. Apparently the old administration had treated the film division of MTV shabbily, and that would be rectified both by MTV’s independence and the wholesale reinvention of the sensibility of the studio: Hip “R” Us. There were a lot of unhip holdovers around, and they were looking nervous.

DOLGEN GETS THE SQUEEZE PLAY

What happened to Dolgen is that he suddenly had no real job. One morning he woke up to find Viacom divided into two divisions. Tom Freston was running the movie division and Les Moonves was running the television and cable division, and it wasn’t clear what was left for Dolgen to run. He resigned days later. Sherry was bereft.

It took Tom Freston a while to figure out what he wanted in a new team. In the meantime, he promoted Sherry into Dolgen’s job. Suddenly she was going to Walmart to discuss DVDs, running P&Ls, basically doing the financials. She hated Dolgen’s job, it was taking her away from the movies, taking her away from getting her hands inside the celluloid, the scripts, the packaging, fixing it in post—everything she loved and was good at. But she figured that she might be able to wait it out until Tom got to know the team she had put in place—Rob Friedman and Donald De Line—and appreciate them as she did. She hoped to convince Tom to promote them to her job. So she stayed in Dolgen’s job for eight months, despite the fact she would have preferred to retire sooner, start her foundation and spend more time with her husband, director Billy Friedkin, where she could relax and throw off those wicked work shoes—and not read another financial projection for Paramount ever again. She wanted more than anything to leave gracefully. But as she dutifully performed what was expected of her, Tom Freston
knew she was unhappy doing Dolgen’s job, so he began scoping out his future options, as is the prerogative of any new CEO. Meanwhile, all of us producers on the lot experienced more debilitating confusion.

Freston reached out to some industry players to fill the top job, notably Stacey Snider, Steven Spielberg’s partner at DreamWorks. Behind the scenes, however, it was a bit weird. In a very collegial way, Freston said to Sherry one day, “Let’s start a new team. You and me. You fire everybody.”

Sherry answered, “Why?”

Firing people is not Sherry’s style.

She said to Freston: “But don’t you understand? Next summer is going to be the biggest one in the history of our company. And that summer was created by Donald De Line and Sherry Lansing and Rob Friedman and everybody. What are you talking about?”

She was referring to 2005, the summer that was to see Paramount release
War of the Worlds,
which did $245 million worldwide. Sherry remembered what were to be her last days at Paramount. “And in fact, that was the single biggest summer we’d had in years. But he wanted to fire everybody. And I thought, Huh? I’ll tell them I’m not going to renew and I’ll stay until they find my replacement. If you remember, that’s when I kept pushing for Donald and Robbie [Friedman] to be copresidents.” While Freston was reaching out to big industry players like Stacey Snider, others lobbied for the job. “And then,” Sherry added, “they ended up with Brad Grey.”

Freston took everyone by surprise and chose mega–talent manager Brad Grey (notably Brad Pitt’s manager and an exec producer on
The Sopranos
), whose name had never been in active contention. Grey managed many big clients and needed months to get out of his contract at his company, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. During the long transition, from January through March, Donald and Sherry continued to try to put movies together, but none of them happened. She remembers it as a very nice time in
which she was perfectly happy and felt no pressure. She and Freston “coexisted,” she said. “You know—you decide! Tra-la tra-la! I was perfectly happy. And soon after, I left for a lot of reasons. You know: Been there, done that. Wanting a new life.”

All I remember about Sherry leaving is two things:

1. She resigned. She didn’t get fired. Period. End of sentence. End of thought.

2. Who didn’t come to her good-bye party? I made a list. The place was packed. The gate guards cried. The people she honored every year at the Christmas party for forty years of service cried. Richard Fowkes, head of business affairs, who had been there for three decades, cried. The Blocker and I embraced and cried together.

To her credit, the Blocker was a fantastic person to have work
for
you; all of her bosses adored her and her up-to-the-second inside information that I too would often be privy to. In moments like these, we were on the same team—the sad team. Sherry’s key players would be gone once Brad Grey came in and got to remaking things in his image.