There are peers, moguls, power brokers who think that Sherry Lansing is a little crazy -- to leave behind the pursuit of riches, the glamour, the heady aroma of power all day and all night, who look at her a little blankly when she announces that she's going to devote the rest of her life to philanthropy, to the amorphous but distinctly real notion of giving back.
As is the way of a natural politician, Lansing, the outgoing chairman of the Paramount Motion Picture Group, declines to name names. Sitting in her cream-colored office on the Paramount lot, her sanctuary and power station for the last 12 years, she rolls her blue eyes with incredulity at the people -- and there are legions in this town -- who think that they will never have enough.
In November, Lansing, 60, announced she was retiring, effective when her contract came up some 12 months later, although as these things turn out, she's now leaving at the end of the month, when new Paramount Chairman Brad Grey arrives. She can't stop saying that this is her last interview in the motion picture business, an industry in which she's starred ever since she became the first woman president of a studio in 1980.
"I feel like a chapter has closed," she says. "I probably couldn't close the chapter if I didn't feel such an incredible sense of completion. Someone said to me, 'If you're not growing, you're dying.' "
With a career that spanned 35 years, Lansing is a link to another Hollywood, the one that existed before "Jaws" defined the modern blockbuster, before conglomeration, before video or DVDs, before movies became just another form of branded entertainment. This is a woman who came out here to be an actress and was discovered by legendary director Howard Hawks ("His Girl Friday"), who tried to mold her into a star (opposite John Wayne, no less) only to discover that Lansing never wanted to be anyone other than herself. In an era when Hollywood personalities have grown more buttoned down and corporate, Lansing remained grand.
She has never been one to sentimentalize, but the impending life change makes her slightly tremulous, the heady emotion of it all beating just under her poised countenance, the immaculate makeup, the pearly gray power suit, feminine armor she's worn for years.
The stress of the final days of her Hollywood career -- when the studio was going through a slump -- seems to have dissipated. The rigid tension in her jawbone is gone, as is the slightly distracted air that comes from perpetual vigilance, from always having to watch for fires on the horizon. Lansing feels that Paramount has begun a resurgence and points to the last three films -- "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie," "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "Coach Carter," all moderate hits -- and a promising summer that includes "The War of the Worlds," an event picture from Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise.
She says she's happy to go. Some 2 1/2 years ago, she vowed that this would be her last contract, that she'd leave the business when she turned 60. It was a plan she talked about endlessly with friends, with her husband, the director Billy Friedkin. She even discussed it with the psychoanalyst whom she hadn't seen regularly in years but who 25 years earlier had helped her believe that she could one day run a studio.
"Ninety-nine percent of what you do is instinctual when you're in the movie business, isn't it?" she asks. "There is something inside of you that tells you who the real you is. I knew if I stayed an extra year I would be an inauthentic person, and I would never be true to my value system. I have an incredible sense of peace."
'A throwback'
By now, Lansing's enthusiasm is legendary -- her next act is always the best one yet.
"Sherry's a throwback to the old show business figure," says producer John Goldwyn, former president of Paramount Pictures and Lansing's onetime lieutenant. "She's instinctive, ferocious, and uses whatever the job is that she has as a way to redefine herself. The job is a reflection of herself, her taste, her instinct, and she has not lost that."
Yet she's the first to say that the movie industry changed around her. "When I first started, all you cared about was making a good movie, and if you made a good movie you were convinced that it would find an audience somehow. Word of mouth was really everything. Seven years ago, I started to realize that the marketing was as important as the movie, meaning the date, the commercials, the surrounding tie-ins."
By the end, 60% of her time was consumed with marketing. "You could actually make a really good movie, and if you didn't have a campaign that worked, it wasn't going to find its audience. And that was frustrating to me, because it shifted the paradigm of what was important."
