The Women Who Run Hollywood

By Jess Cagle Sunday, July 21, 2002
    • FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES

    President and CEO of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing

    "I'm an expert in hookers," Shirley Maclaine once said. She was speaking about the limited repertoire for actresses in Hollywood. Things have improved a bit over the years for female stars, but behind the camera, it's a different story. Consider this: according to statistics recently compiled by Martha M. Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State University, men directed 90% of the top 250 movies released in 2001, while the ranks of female directors (and writers) dwindled from the previous year.

    Those numbers remind us that the movie industry remains at its core a boys' club. Yet for the first time in history, women are now running half of the six major movie studios. Sherry Lansing is celebrating her 10th anniversary as chairman of Paramount Pictures, ruling the studio with an iron fiscal fist. And her two younger colleagues — Amy Pascal at Columbia and Stacey Snider at Universal — are known to be every bit as brazen as their male counterparts when it comes to gambling with $200 million production and marketing budgets. All three women are working mothers with decidedly feminine personalities and gentle management styles. And all three are experiencing remarkable success, making them a dominant force in Hollywood at a time when the movie industry is enjoying perhaps its most impressive winning streak ever. "Three women are running companies that make a product that has a huge influence on the culture," says Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin. "That's historic, because they're going to do it differently than men, and it's going to have an impact." It already has. Here are the women who are determining how you spend your Saturday nights.


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    Amy Pascal
    It has been said that you can gauge her mood by whether her hair is straight (foul) or curly (ebullient). These days her mane is growing wild, with good reason. She and her husband, New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub, have their first child, and with hits like Panic Room, Spider-Man and Men in Black II, the chairman of Sony's Columbia Pictures has generated more than $1 billion at the box office this year. Some in Hollywood are skeptical about the profitability of films with such expensive stars and special effects, but her summer slate of pictures has broken all records. "People want spectacle in the summertime," insists Pascal, 44, "and obviously the ancillary markets [like video and dvd] will be gigantic."

    Pascal, who cultivates a disarmingly dizzy but likable persona, originally became known for "chick flicks"--with strong mainstream instincts — in the early 1990s. As a Columbia vice president, she championed such hits as Single White Female and A League of Their Own. She has always been a popular figure who relates easily to creative types. "Amy's emotional," says a male producer who has worked with her recently, "and that's good and bad, but she can get down in the trenches and help you work out a story." Her own ascent to power, however, hasn't been easy. Though she was named chairman in 1999, she seemed to lack the golden gut of the most successful studio chiefs. She released a string of uninspired teen movies and such duds as the 2000 Sandra Bullock-goes-to-rehab drama 28 Days. Guessing when she would be fired by her Sony bosses became a favorite Hollywood pastime.

    "I had to figure out how to run a company while being true to my own instincts," says Pascal, who began her career as a secretary. "We did some real work. Every time a movie would come out and work or not work, our group would sit around and analyze all our decisions — when we made them and how they contributed. What we didn't do was put our heads in the sand and pretend it was working. I had my staff tell people to write up what they didn't like about me so I knew what they were honestly thinking. That was probably a female thing because it's an egoless thing."

    The turning point for Pascal came at the end of 2000 with the runaway success of Charlie's Angels, which the studio produced in conjunction with star Drew Barrymore's Flower Films. "Did we make some movies we shouldn't have made? Yes, along with everybody else," says Pascal's boss, Sony Pictures chairman John Calley. "But Amy's continuing maturity is astonishing. She's the best I've ever seen in this job." Columbia is expected to make another strong showing next summer with the sequel to Charlie's Angels, as well as Bad Boys 2 and S.W.A.T. Also in the pipeline: a big-screen adaptation of I Dream of Jeannie. "Everybody said I made 'chick flicks' when the movies didn't work," says Pascal. "When the movies work, nobody calls them that."

    Stacey Snider
    If you had to cast an actress to play the Universal chairman, your best bet would be Reese Witherspoon, who specializes in characters at once attractive and very direct. At 41, Snider is the youngest of the three power brokers. Like many other younger women working in Hollywood, she resists being labeled a "female executive" or drawing attention to her gender. (For that reason, she declined to be interviewed for this story.) Unlike Pascal, who cites the late Columbia studio chief Dawn Steel as a mentor, Snider — like Lansing — learned the business from some of its toughest male players. "Both of them suckled at the teats of wolves, and they emerged with their humanity intact," says an industry executive who knows both women.

    pagebreak After receiving her law degree at ucla, Snider worked as a secretary in the testosterone-fueled offices of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun. In 1992 the controversial Sony duo of Jon Peters and Peter Guber gave Snider her first executive position. A more genteel influence was former Universal exec Marc Platt, known for his sure hand with talent. By all accounts, Snider is maneuvering gracefully through the turmoil within Vivendi-Universal and getting along nicely with newly installed corporate watchdog Barry Diller.

    Experience has made her a shrewd political operative, but she is also a gentle general who has inspired great loyalty in her troops since becoming chairman in 1999. Along with her boss, Universal Studios president and COO Ron Meyer, Snider has played a key role in revamping the studio with such hits as Erin Brockovich, the Mummy movies, The Fast and the Furious and A Beautiful Mind.

    She has also nurtured profitable partnerships with DreamWorks (which co-produced Meet the Parents and its coming sequel) and Imagine (How the Grinch Stole Christmas). Snider is wary of expensive stars; her ace marketing team specializes in selling such inexpensive concept movies as the upcoming surfer flick Blue Crush. Among the most literate of studio bosses, she usually refrains from pandering; she argued — successfully — against a climactic courtroom scene in Erin Brockovich, worried that it would have rung false. Unlike her female compatriots, Snider seems to have no particular fondness for female-driven pictures. Upcoming films include 8 Mile, starring Eminem, and the next Hannibal Lecter thriller, Red Dragon. And like all other studio executives, she's a sucker for action heroes. Coming next summer: The Hulk.

    Sherry Lansing
    Long before she was chairman of Paramount Pictures, Lansing dreamed of making movies. She got her big break at MGM in 1975 when, after two years of toiling in a low-level job at the studio, she was promoted to head of the story department. She was 30. "I was so excited," recalls Lansing, "and thought I would get a raise." When the studio failed to show her the money, she confronted a senior executive. "He admitted that I wasn't earning as much as a man in an equivalent job. Then he thought about it and said, 'We're not going to give you a raise because you're single, you don't have kids, you don't have a family to support.' I knew it was wrong but, meek little me, I said, 'Oh. O.K.'"

    Times have changed for Lansing, who is no longer described — by anyone — as meek and whose current six-year contract with Paramount, which she signed in 2000, is worth well in excess of $25 million, according to Variety. At 57, this former schoolteacher, model and actress is the most durable studio executive, male or female. She is also the most autonomous motion-picture chairman in Hollywood, though she collaborates closely with Jonathan Dolgen, chairman of Viacom Entertainment Group, Paramount's parent company. Lansing is famous for keeping costs down and profits up. (The most she has ever spent on a single movie was $80 million for Mission: Impossible 2.) The philosophy permeates the studio. Though Mel Gibson continues to develop projects with Paramount, his production company recently moved off the lot; Lansing's team, says one exec, was never entirely comfortable with the terms of his deal by which he pocketed his movies' foreign revenue. And the normally cheerful Lansing can barely conceal her contempt for the rest of Hollywood's obsession with "market share," the annual ranking of studios based entirely on box-office receipts. "It's a meaningless thing," says Lansing. "What we should talk about is profitability." Lansing is sometimes criticized within the industry for taking too few risks, both artistically and financially. She counters by reminding people that she made Forrest Gump after other studios had passed on the project and proudly claims that on her watch, no slate of films has ever lost money.

    Lansing will leave behind several legacies: she and Dolgen pioneered the practice of "creative financing," inviting partners to help pay for expensive projects. (They famously capped their investment in Titanic at $65 million and let 20th Century Fox lose sleep when costs soared.) Lansing herself shattered the glass ceiling for female executives when she became 20th Century Fox's president of production in 1980. The female moviegoing audience, which was largely ignored by studios in the 1970s and '80s, can thank Lansing for helping rediscover them through the success of Fatal Attraction and The Accused, which she produced with Stanley Jaffe. "She was one of the first people [since the Joan Crawford era] to make movies that were successful with female protagonists or antagonists," says Pascal, "movies where a woman was a key character and moved the plot forward."

    pagebreak Lansing, the subject of an Intimate Portrait this week on the Lifetime channel, says her mother was her first role model. "When my dad died when I was 9," says Lansing, "I watched her take over the real estate business in Chicago. So many of my movies are about a woman who is not going to be a victim." When Lansing, who is married to director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), took the Paramount job in 1992, she continued to spin gold out of what she calls "female empowerment films" such as The First Wives Club and Double Jeopardy. She has a stern but maternal demeanor in the office. ("She can say no to you in the most endearing way," says Variety editor Peter Bart, who was a Paramount exec in the early '70s.) Lansing concedes that being a woman heavily influences the kinds of movies she makes. "You have all these rational reasons why you make a movie," she says. "It's a good story, the budget's right. But ultimately it's your gut, and it has to be affected by who you are. It's like a Rorschach test."

    But Lansing points out that the ultimate test has not yet been met for women executives in Hollywood. She notes that there are no female Hollywood titans on the level of Disney's Michael Eisner or Viacom's Sumner Redstone. "The women I came up with," says Lansing, "we all got into this business to make movies, not to run corporations. But I think that right now at the Harvard Business School, there's some girl sitting there saying, 'I don't want Sherry Lansing's job. I want to be Sumner Redstone.'"