Sherry Lansing’s bright blue eyes widen, and her slightly nasal, Chicago-inflected voice pitches higher as she recalls the matinee double features of her childhood at the South Side’s Hamilton and Jeffrey Theaters.
“They were magical,” Paramount Pictures’ 57-year-old chairman says. “They were old theaters, so they had character. Time froze. It just froze.”
She pauses.
“It still does for me,” she adds. “It’s funny to say that. I’m sure I see four movies a week still, and time still freezes if it’s a good one.”
Lansing’s unflagging passion for movies often is cited as a key reason this former actress/script reader/producer became the first woman to run a film studio in 1980 and now stands as the longest reigning of all current studio chiefs. Such movie mania also explains her grimace as she comments on how her business has changed:
“People would say to me, ‘Marketing,’ [and] I’d go, ‘Marketing, schmarketing. Just give me a good movie. Word of mouth is everything.’ Then about five years ago, I started to say, ‘You know, the marketing of the movie is as important as the movie.’ The [release] date, the way we sell it–that’s as important as the movie.
“Today–and this really pains me–I would have to say that the marketing of the movie is more important than even the movie, with some rare exceptions. So if you have a way to market a movie, if it’s not good, it could get to a really big [box-office] number. And if you can’t market a movie and it’s a really good movie, it may never find an audience. And that really saddens me, because that’s not the way it should be.”
Serving the dueling masters of art and business may never have been tougher for film executives, but Lansing’s ability to balance the two has made her a fixture near the top of those ubiquitous “most powerful” Hollywood lists. As a chief officer in the vast Viacom conglomerate, she must answer to stockholders and big boss Sumner Redstone. As perhaps the most successful producer to thrive as a studio head since Irving Thalberg took the reins at MGM in the 1920s, she’s more creatively involved in the filmmaking process than just about any of her peers.
Her touch is evident in what Hollywood people like to refer to as “Sherry movies,” though the definition can be slippery. The term most often applies to films with strong, imperiled female protagonists, such as “Fatal Attraction,” “The Accused” and “Indecent Proposal,” all of which she produced, and “Double Jeopardy” and “The General’s Daughter,” which were hits for her at Paramount.
“A perfect Sherry movie would make a Time magazine cover,” says Lynda Obst, author of the Hollywood memoir “Hello, He Lied” and a producer on the Paramount lot. Indeed, several of Lansing’s films have become part of the national conversation: Anyone discussing an inappropriately clingy relationship will call it a “Fatal Attraction” situation, and “The Accused” sparked debate over the treatment of rape victims.
Recent Paramount successes, “Changing Lanes” and “The Sum of All Fears,” also fit the “Sherry movie” mold for the way they mix topicality and thrills. When “The Sum of All Fears” was released in May, it became a touchstone for speculative news stories about nuclear terrorism. And in a summer stuffed with no-brainer sequels and spin-offs, the studio’s other big movie is the just-released Harrison Ford thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker,” which explores a real-life nuclear near-disaster. Then again, Paramount also released “Pootie Tang.”
In an industry where companies shed top executives as often as snakes discard their skins, Lansing will hit the 10-year mark as Paramount chief in November. It’s a remarkable stretch of longevity in an unlikely career: A Chicago woman with beauty-queen looks conquers male-dominated Hollywood with her brain power, tenacity and charm while generating massive amounts of affection from a community generally keener on throwing knives than bouquets.
“In a town where most people aren’t working [but are] talking about work, gossip becomes a major industry. But you never hear bad gossip about Sherry,” says producer Robert Evans (“Chinatown”), who ran Paramount in the early 1970s. He notes that a studio executive of Lansing’s rank turns down almost every proposed project. “I don’t know of any person in her position that has people really liking her too.”
“In the old Kremlin no one would say anything wrong about Stalin, but in Sherry’s case people mean [the nice things],” agrees her husband, director William Friedkin (“The French Connection,” “The Exorcist”). “She is clearly the most loved and respected executive out here by far.”
Even a staunch Republican like television producer Lionel Chetwynd can’t find anything bad to say about Lansing, a delegate to the 2000 Democratic National Convention. “I wish you were calling me about some other executives, because I’d give you some really good, non-attributable caustic remarks about them,” says Chetwynd, who recently worked with Lansing on an anti-terrorism task force. “I really, really like her.”
That said, likability gets you only so far.
“The reason for her longevity is she’s been successful,” former Universal Pictures chief Tom Pollock says. “Because if you aren’t successful, you get fired, and you get fired very quickly.”
Steven Spielberg, whose “Saving Private Ryan” was co-financed by Paramount, says Lansing has outlasted other studio executives “because she’s got good taste. She knows when she has to suspend her good taste to do a questionable film to make a lot of money. So she has personal good taste, and she has corporate responsibility, and she is not ashamed to admit that not every movie that she’s made is the greatest movie ever made. But they do better than most people’s films do.”
In person, Lansing is as personable and as generous with smiles as advertised; her rejections are reputed to be more palatable than other executives’ yeses. Dressed smartly in a cream-colored suit, she is a striking woman, but not in the manner of Hollywood’s Botox parade of youth worshipers; she has an almost regal bearing and mentions her age more than once without prompting.
Though she’s as Hollywood as Hollywood gets–a glamorous, near-iconic figure who has achieved the ultimate status of being routinely referred to by first name only–she still identifies with her roots in Chicago, the city she left after graduating from Northwestern University in 1966. “I would define myself not as a Los Angeles person,” she says while seated in her spacious, light-wood-toned office just steps from the studio’s famous gates (as immortalized in “Sunset Boulevard”). “I would define myself as a girl from Chicago, which is funny because I’ve lived here longer.
“I think growing up in Chicago was one of the blessings of my life because Chicago is a very real city, and there’s really good values in Chicago. People are warm. They’re down to earth. They care about the right things. They’re not pretentious. There’s a kind of realness to them. They tend to value family and intelligence and friendship and stuff that’s important. The values also in the Midwest are about hard work, and if you work hard it pays off. I think I carry my Midwest values with me constantly.”
Her close friends and colleagues say some of those early influences are apparent in her work. “I think that a lot of what fuels her, what got her to Hollywood, was whoever she was as a schoolgirl in Chicago,” Obst says. “There’s so much of that American girl at the center of who she is. And I think that’s why she makes American movies so definitively. There’s not a European bone in her body.”
Lansing was born July 31, 1944, to Margot and David Duehl and grew up in a bungalow in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. When she was 9, Duehl, a mild-mannered, culture-loving man who supported the family by owning apartment buildings, died of a heart attack, and Margot, 10 years younger than her husband, suddenly bore full responsibility for the properties.
“The people who worked with him came over to my mother and said, ‘We’ll run the business now,’ and she said, ‘No, you’ll teach me how to run the business,’ ” Lansing says. “I remember this so clearly. And she took over his business. She was a survivor from Nazi Germany. She escaped. She was extraordinarily beautiful and warm and fun, but a woman who took responsibility for her life. I think she was my first role model.”
On one occasion, Lansing recalls, her mother began crying because a resident had skipped off without paying his rent. “I remember her stopping crying and saying, ‘OK, let’s pull up our socks. We have to move forward.’ She never pitied herself, and she always looked for the positive and she kept going. I think I learned that from her. . . . I always felt that I had to take care of myself, that I couldn’t look to a man to take care of me, and I couldn’t look to luck. I had to make it happen, and I had to adjust.”
When she was 12, her mother married Norton Lansing, a successful furniture salesman who was as strict and brash as Duehl was refined. Lansing got a new older sister, Andrea, and younger brother, Richard, and she instantly accepted Norton, taking on his last name, and she still refers to him as “father.” It’s no great leap to view Sherry Lansing the studio chief as a melding of these two fathers: the great appreciator of art and the aggressive, frugal businessman.
“I actually think that there’s a lot of truth to it,” Lansing says of this theory, “which of course doesn’t mean that David didn’t have a business side or that Norton didn’t have an artistic side. But it is really true that David, my first father, loved the opera . . . and he’s the first person who took me to the silent movies at the Museum of Science and Industry. He just laughed at Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, and I’m convinced [that] when I saw all that pleasure he was getting from the movies that it kind of infused me and got me interested in movies. My second father, Norton, was a very successful businessman and was more interested in the bottom line.”
Sherry’s squeaky-clean image already was in place in her youth, much to the chagrin of new brother Richard, who suddenly had a popular, straight-A, cheerleader sister just one year ahead of him in school. “We never got along that well,” says Richard Lansing, a food-industry specialist who now lives in Barrington and has since developed a close relationship with his sister. “She kind of liked to tell on me and get me in trouble, and I never had anything I could get her in trouble on.”
Her worst offenses back then? “Probably staying out late. This is sort of what we’re dealing with,” he says with a sigh. “Talking on the phone too long, staying out late. It was really nothing.”
“She loves to soak in the bathtub,” Andrea Lansing says, dropping another bombshell. “Dad used to yell at her all the time because she used up all the hot water. She likes to dance too; she’s a great dancer. She used to put on ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ and the floor would shake in the house. My father was very intolerant of all of that. Mother was the peacemaker.”
Even back then, Lansing says, she had a tremendous drive to succeed. “I always made lists. . . . I was always goal-oriented, I always wanted to work. I used to dream about having a career, and I was always tenacious, yeah, and rejection did not thrill me. But it never caused me to give up.”
Judy Shapiro, Lansing’s childhood friend and now a lawyer in Northbrook, recalls her as being achievement-oriented, but her most vivid memories are of their weekend movie jaunts together. “We grew up on movies,” Shapiro says. “There were two theaters in walking distance in South Shore, and every Saturday we went to see a double feature at the Jeffrey or the Hamilton. We’d get a hamburger at Peter Pan across the street until we found out they were serving horsemeat.”
To Sherry, these movies left more of a lasting impression than school. “I don’t remember the first, but I remember hundreds of them,” she says. “You can start with ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ I remember being scared–that lady, I can still see her, Margaret Hamilton [the Wicked Witch of the West]. I had nightmares. I remember Audrey Hepburn. I remember ‘Imitation of Life’ with Lana Turner. I remember seeing it with my girlfriends. We would cry. And I remember the power of movies. And then I remember as I got older seeing ‘The Pawnbroker,’ which was showing me what movies could do and [how they could] effect social change, so that was another power. As a kid it had that incredible effect on me, and there was nothing else I wanted to do.”
But friends and family were skeptical about a movie career. Back then, Lansing notes, Chicago was “about as far away from the movie business as Mars. . . .You tell your parents you want to go into the movie business, it’s like telling them that you want to fly to the moon or something. And everybody made fun of me. Today if somebody told you that they wanted to go into the movie business, you’d say, ‘Great, here’s where you go study, take these courses, you can do it.’ Then there was no course to take, there was no place to study, and it was like, ‘Well, who do you think you are?’ “
Margot Lansing insisted that her daughter get a college degree so she could support herself. She attended Northwestern University, where she figured theater classes were the closest approximation to film studies. Meanwhile, she married Michael Brownstein, whom she met while she was in high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park and he was a U. of C. undergraduate.
After she graduated from Northwestern as an English major and theater minor, the two of them headed to Los Angeles, where she began teaching public school in the volatile East L.A. neighborhood, did some modeling and tried to break into the movie business. “The only thing I thought you could do was act,” she recalls. “So I thought, well, I’ll become an actress.”
A statuesque, doe-eyed brunette, she quickly was cast in a bit part in Irwin Kershner’s 1970 marital drama “Loving,” and then in Howard Hawks’ final film, the John Wayne Western “Rio Lobo,” as a gun-toting lass. “I was very uncomfortable as an actress,” says Lansing, whose marriage was fizzling around this time. “Not particularly good either, but very uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to be anybody but myself, so when I had to be other people, I got nervous.”
Her experience with Hawks, who liked to transform his actresses into elegant, assertive variations on his ex-wife, Slim, sealed her acting fate. “He would”–she shifted to a low, hoarse voice–“make me talk like this because I had a Chicago accent, and he would make me change my voice, and I was miserable. I just hated it. I remember thinking, ‘I hate this, now what am I going to do?’
“So I quit, and I got a job reading scripts for an independent producer for $5 an hour, and I loved it. I read scripts, and I would synopsize them and give them my opinion, and I was so happy.”
Frank Price, Lansing’s future boss at Columbia Pictures, recalled meeting her in the early 1970s when he was running Universal Television and she was a story editor working for the creator of “Get Smart” and “McMillan and Wife.” “She was bright, vivacious and beautiful and very knowledgeable on story,” Price says. “So we hit it off immediately.”
Stanley Jaffe, who would become Lansing’s producing partner and her first boss at Paramount, knew there was something unusual about Lansing when he met her at a dinner party and someone at the table presented an algebra problem. “We worked it out”–he snaps his fingers–“like that together, and it was an immediate ‘Wow, this doesn’t happen at dinner parties in California that often.’ “
Lansing worked her way to the top of MGM’s story department and then to Columbia, where she became vice president of production while overseeing such films as “The China Syndrome” and Jaffe’s “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which became cultural touchstones on the issues of nuclear safety and single fatherhood, respectively. She had said she didn’t expect a woman to run a studio in her lifetime, but in 1980 she was wooed by 20th Century Fox to lead its film division. Her appointment made The New York Times’ front page, though the headline was typical of the attitudes she had been encountering: “Sherry Lansing, Former Model, Named Head of Fox Productions.”
“I think she’s had it harder than anybody,” Jaffe says. “She really was the woman who broke all the glass ceilings, and I do believe that women initially had it harder in our business than men did as she was coming through the ranks. It was a boys club.”
He adds: “The fact that she was a beautiful woman didn’t help her. In spite of the fact that people think, well, she must have slept her way up, she didn’t sleep with anybody. That’s not how she got there. She got there because she’s got a first-class brain and very real sensibilities and is willing to fight for what she believes in.”
Lansing tends not to focus on her trailblazing role. “When I got the job at Fox and was the first, you don’t really have time to think about it,” she says. “You have so much work to do that all you really do is go, ‘I’m going to do the best job I can so there will be other women that get this job.’ “
Although conflicts with an ever-changing roster of bosses led her to leave Fox after a few years–she had to fight battles on behalf of such films as “Chariots of Fire,” “Taps” and “The King of Comedy”–Hollywood insiders generally credit her with proving that women can thrive at the top. The late Dawn Steel became Paramount’s head of production, and now, with Amy Pascal as Columbia’s chairman and Stacey Snider in the same position at Universal, three of the big six studios have women in charge.
“I think she paved the way for all of us, and anybody who says that she didn’t isn’t telling the truth,” Pascal says. Snider adds: “I am compared to her. I always aspired to be like her.”
Lansing’s tight-knit, if contentious, producing partnership with Jaffe began with “Racing With the Moon” (1984)–Jaffe says director Richard Benjamin referred to them as “the Bickersons”–and struck gold with “Fatal Attraction” (1987), “The Accused” (1988), “Black Rain” (1989) and “School Ties” (1992), the movie that propelled the careers of Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon and current Paramount fave Ben Affleck.
“She was there for every shot,” Damon recalls of Lansing’s involvement in “School Ties.” “She was indefatigable.”
While preparing for the “School Ties” shoot in 1991, Lansing jetted down to Barbados and married Friedkin, whom she’d met just 12 weeks earlier at an Oscar party. Friedkin had been married three times before and was considered as volatile as Lansing was even-keeled. And, it turned out, he was from Chicago.
“Isn’t that the wildest thing in the world?” Lansing says. “Here were these two Chicago kids, and we have traced that we were [once] in the same room, but we never met each other. And when I met Billy, it was like meeting my best friend and my best lover in one person, and I felt like I’d known him my whole life. . . . It was so natural and so easy, and that probably is [because we’re] two kids from the Midwest.”
That year, Jaffe broke off his partnership with Lansing to become president of Paramount Communications, and in 1992 he persuaded her to run the studio. Jaffe since has been replaced by Jonathan Dolgen, Viacom has bought Paramount, and Lansing remains. She and Dolgen are considered to have the most stable regime in Hollywood, with Dolgen concentrating on the business side and Lansing doing the creative work.
They are notorious for being fiscally conservative, and Dolgen typically gets credit for launching the trend of studios’ co-financing films to limit their risk. In one of Paramount’s canniest moves, when Fox was looking for a partner to help underwrite “Titanic,” Lansing and Dolgen secured the domestic rights for $60 million, leaving Fox responsible for the considerable cost overruns and netting Paramount a tidy profit when the epic grossed a record $600 million in North America.
Lansing also scored a major coup by gambling on a project that had been languishing for years. “I remember one night she was lying in bed, and when I came in she was in tears reading this script,” Friedkin recalls. “I said, ‘What is it?’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s a beautiful script. It’s been in turnaround for 10 years. Nobody wants to make it. I’m going to make it. I think it’s great.’ It was ‘Forrest Gump.’ The only contribution I made to that was I said, ‘Gee, it sounds like a stupid title.’ “
Pollock, who was running Universal at the time, says “Gump” is “the most admirable and riskiest thing she ever did. In retrospect, it’s a $600 million movie and won the Academy Award for best picture and Tom Hanks and all the rest of it. But on its face it’s a fable about a retarded man who somehow pops up everywhere in history.”
Lansing’s famously close relationships with–and, some would say, reliance on–big-name talent resulted in another best picture winner, Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” (as well as the Gibson vehicles “Payback,” “What Women Want” and this year’s “We Were Soldiers”) plus Tom Cruise’s lucrative “Mission: Impossible” franchise.
“I’ve known Sherry since ‘Taps,’ ” Cruise says. “I wasn’t a big, big star [at the time]. She went out of her way to talk to me. To this day she still asks about my mother, and it’s not b.s. She asks about my family, and I respect that.”
Under Lansing and Dolgen, Paramount has become a flag-bearer for corporate synergy, regularly releasing movies generated by Viacom companies Nickelodeon (including this summer’s “Hey Arnold! The Movie”) and MTV ( “Jackass: The Movie”). The studio also has its share of bankable franchises (“Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible,” Indiana Jones, the Jack Ryan/Tom Clancy series) and continues to make high-concept thrillers such as the Morgan Freeman-Ashley Judd hit “Kiss the Girls” and “Domestic Disturbance.”
“You could tell a Paramount movie,” DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg says. “I think that’s a distinctive thing. Every once in a while you see somebody else has a ‘Paramount movie’ “–Fox’s recent Freeman-Judd thriller “High Crimes” comes to mind–“and you go, ‘What are they doing with a Paramount movie?’ and then usually it’s not as good.”
In recent years, Paramount has been criticized for being too conservative on the creative side–its biggest Oscar nomination last year was for Nickelodeon’s animated “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius”–and there’s a paint-by-numbers quality to some of those thrillers. But Lansing did roll the dice on Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” which despite starring Cruise was far from a sure bet (it wasn’t a smash, but it did just fine), and she also backed such high-minded, non-formulaic fare as Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys,” Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show.”
She says one of her biggest disappointments was the commercial failure of Steve Zaillian’s “Searching for Bobby Fischer” (1993), an acclaimed, adult-minded, kid-centric drama that attracted neither age group. Alexander Payne’s much-praised satirical high-school comedy “Election” (1999) also proved a box-office letdown. Such failures have an impact on the kind of films that big studios make. “So you now sometimes could read, unfortunately, a ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’ script, and say, ‘Oh, man, I’m not going to go through the pain of that again,’ ” Lansing says. “You have to learn from your mistakes.”
Now Paramount, like most of the majors, avoids such “small” movies where art trumps marketability; the studio might either release such films under its Paramount Classics banner, which operates relatively independently, or will enter a partnership with another company. Miramax, for example, is handling the Paramount-originated “The Hours” (Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep in an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel) and the Jaffe-produced “Four Feathers,” a war adventure remake from “Elizabeth” director Shekar Kapur.
Given the financial pressures, does Lansing ever green-light a marketable movie that she knows isn’t good? (It’s hard to see “Jackass: The Movie,” for instance, as Lansing’s cup of tea.) “I try really hard not to do it,” she says. “We treat every movie here really seriously and we try really hard to make them as good as we can, and we don’t always succeed.”
Still, she adds, she hasn’t given up on the dream of making movies with meaning. “Yes, I wanted to make films that were successful,” she says. “Yes, I wanted to make films that entertained. But I also really wanted to make films that were about something. When you’re overseeing a studio, you’re making 20 films a year. Maybe they can’t all be about something. Maybe some of them are just pure entertainment. But you try to look for that little kernel, that there’s something, you know.”
An important factor in all of these decisions is the audience. Lansing remains a strong advocate of using test screenings to make changes in the final product, a process reviled by some filmmakers. In the most famous example, the ending of “Fatal Attraction” was reshot after preview audiences objected to the original resolution in which Glenn Close’s character kills herself, framing Michael Douglas for her murder. “Fatal Attraction” director Adrian Lyne credits Lansing with making the right call. “The other ending was flat,” Lyne says. “Ultimately [the new ending] was better in terms of the drama of the piece.”
Lansing will even overrule her own strong personal feelings about a film. In her book “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” Rachel Abramowitz reports that Lansing cried when Elisabeth Shue’s character died in the original ending of “The Saint.” But when test audiences balked, Lansing ordered it changed. “We all loved [‘The Saint’], but it wasn’t working,” she says, “and then you try and make it work, and it became a financially successful movie.”
Other Paramount movies that have undergone significant changes after test screenings include the Michael Crichton adventure “Congo,” the Mel Gibson thriller “Payback” and “Changing Lanes.” Chap Taylor, who wrote the original “Changing Lanes” screenplay, said he didn’t blame Lansing for making his dark story more accessible and, ultimately, upbeat. “Even with the changed ending, ‘Changing Lanes’ is an unusual picture for a studio to make,” Taylor said. “It’s about moral dilemmas.”
Friedkin, a former Hollywood maverick whose recent movies have been more commercial and less personal (“Rules of Engagement,” “Jade”) than his earlier ones, is a convert to his wife’s way of thinking. “What she’s made me very conscious of, which I had never really thought about before, was to trust the audience,” he says. “She brought home to me the fact, without ever saying it but just by example, that you make films in this country for audiences, not to hang in the Art Institute, not for posterity but for people’s entertainment now. My own choices of things would be a lot more esoteric, but I believe that her way is the right way.”
Lansing’s track record makes filmmakers more likely to listen to her. “Sherry has probably the most consistent gut in the business,” says Obst, who is preparing the campus horror film “Abandon” for a Paramount fall release. “It’s a completely different market every five years, and she’s been calling hits in every version of that market. When I’ve argued and disagreed with her, she’s turned out to be right.”
Robert Evans, who screen-tested Lansing for the female lead in 1969’s “Goodbye, Columbus” (the part went to his future wife, Ali MacGraw), now proposes films to her as a producer. “I’ve never seen any person develop the way she has,” he says. “I think she’s by far the most astute production person in the industry. She can go through a script and line by line pick out things that’ll work and won’t work, what to cut and what not to cut, and she does her homework.”
Evans recalls the time he and Lansing were viewing actresses’ screen tests for his 1996 Paramount movie “The Phantom.” “A brunette girl comes on the screen and tests with Billy Zane, and Sherry stands and says, ‘Stop it. Hold it. That’s the girl. I don’t know her, but she’s going to be a big star, this girl. We have to have options on her.’ . . . It was Catherine Zeta-Jones. Quite frankly, I didn’t think she was going to be a big star.”
One of Lansing’s advantages is that she, unlike most executives, has hands-on experience as a filmmaker. “She sees the movie from all sides,” Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein says. “And when it comes to a female script and knowing how to market a movie, there’s no one better than her. I was not in love with the script of ‘Save the Last Dance.’ She knew that movie would be a hit. They offered us a co-production, we passed, it cost us a fortune.”
Many of her colleagues note that Lansing has succeeded without pretending to be one of the boys or hyping herself. “Isn’t it interesting that all of the real strong ball-busters, the women who were thought to be the most indomitable, the women who trailblazed on their own, burned out?” Obst says. “Dawn [Steel] died, but there’s just a whole bunch of them that appeared after Sherry; you don’t hear about them.”
“She’s the most feminine lady maybe I’ve ever met,” Evans says. “That’s a rare quality in a businesswoman who has to contend with men all the time and go toe to toe. She has not gotten tough in any way as she ascended the ladder. She has kept that femininity, and, boy, is it a magnet.”
At the same time, Friedkin says, “She ain’t no pussycat. You can’t be. . . . She’s almost daily involved in some hassle at work where somebody’s threatening to break a contract or not do the picture or not edit the film according to what the previews show. The only intolerance I’ve ever seen in Sherry is when someone’s doing something stupidly to hurt the product. But she’ll give them all the rope in the world before she’ll do anything about it.”
Lansing also seems to have avoided the trap into which many of her male counterparts have fallen: sacrificing her family and quality of life for work. “I don’t know how she does it, but she always finds time,” Friedkin says. “She makes time for everyone and everything that’s important to her.”
In a habit that’s part of her legend, she even returns every phone call. “I do,” Lansing affirmed. “I like talking to people, and I think it’s good manners, and it’s polite and you manage your time. I could not leave this office unless I had returned every phone call.”
Meanwhile, she’s active in Stop Cancer (her mother died of ovarian cancer), Big Sisters, the American Film Institute (she’s a board member) and the Democratic Party. She’s a regent in the California state school system and has worked on creating public service announcements and educational videocassettes as part of the government’s war against terrorism.
Some Hollywood types have speculated that she would make a viable candidate for the Senate or other high office. “No. I don’t want to run for office,” she says, laughing. “I will say that in the third chapter [of my life] I would like to work in the non-profit world, and I would like to give back in some way with health care–cancer research is a big passion of mine–or in education.”
But at this point she’s not going anywhere. Even after years and years of budget battles and corporate pressures, dealing with temperamental stars and unpredictable audiences, she’s still in touch with the magic she felt at those weekend matinees.
“I love movies,” she says. “That’s really all it’s about, and I guess I’ll stop when I don’t love movies as much. When you’re making a movie, it’s like the first time you’ve made a movie because every movie is different. There’s a new story and new people and new problems. So I love movies. I love movies as much as I did when I first started.”
