Who is Redstone's target?

I have to admit that when I first read Sumner Redstone's barbed remarks about Tom Cruise on the front page of the Wednesday Wall Street Journal -- especially that wonderfully tart "we don't think someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot" -- there was only one person who instantly came to mind: George Steinbrenner.

Although the imperious Yankees owner has had little to say in the last couple of years (apparently he's not in the best of health), in his prime it didn't take much to fuel an eruption, whether he was calling pitcher Hideki Irabu "a fat toad" or derisively dubbing Dave Winfield "Mr. May" when he failed to come through in the World Series.

If you think about it, Steinbrenner and Viacom chairman Redstone have a lot in common, in addition to being allergic to losing. They both run high-profile entertainment businesses where the star talent is paid top dollar to perform. So when something goes wrong, it doesn't take long for the irritation to show.

Thus far the media have focused on Redstone's beef with Cruise, whom the Viacom chief blames for wrecking the studio's most valuable franchise and alienating female moviegoers with his promotion of Scientology during press rounds for "Mission: Impossible III" this summer. But my suspicion is that Redstone isn't just mad at his madcap movie star. It's instructive to remember that some of Steinbrenner's most titanic rages were not directed at his players but at his front-office executives. When a trade would go awry, the blame always fell squarely on the poor guys King George dubbed his "baseball people."

It's worth noting that Redstone's unusually blunt remarks come at a time when the aging mogul has been reinventing Viacom. In January he split the company into separate fiefdoms, one run by Leslie Moonves, the other, the one including Paramount Pictures, by Tom Freston. The biggest changes have come at Paramount, the venerable studio that has been completely transformed in the past 18 months, with an entire new team of largely untested executive talent at the helm.

In other words, Redstone appears frustrated and angry about something far more worrisome than one movie star's deal. To me, he seems equally upset about what's happened to his flagship investment -- his movie studio. By all accounts, something is amiss at Paramount Pictures and I suspect that Redstone, at 83, doesn't have the luxury of waiting forever for his new vassals to figure out how to operate the keys to the kingdom.