Now more than ever, Hollywood seems like a town in flux. Between changing audience tastes, the advent of streaming, and the scourge of the coronavirus, movie theaters appear on the brink of failing, while studios are gobbling each other up. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that 20th Century Studios wasn’t owned by Disney and still bore the name 20th Century Fox.
Yet long before the current convulsions, ViacomCBS chairman emeritus Sumner Redstone prompted respect, awe, and fear for the gutsy, inspired deal-making that turned the entertainment industry topsy-turvy in the 1980s and beyond. Redstone, who died last week at the age of 97, audaciously reimagined his movie theater business, National Amusements, into the parent company of the cable provider Viacom, the iconic movie studio Paramount Pictures, and the CBS television network.
At the time of his death, Redstone’s various acquisitions and mergers had led to the current iteration of ViacomCBS, the company that controls Paramount and CBS, as well as the cable channel heavyweights Showtime, MTV, and Nickelodeon and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. At one time, Redstone’s reach even included the Blockbuster home video chain.
Once described by Fortune magazine as a “happy warrior,” Redstone took a kind of innocent delight in the art of acquiring companies. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Redstone described how he positioned Viacom to take over Paramount Pictures in the early 1990s, outbidding and outlasting his competitor, former Paramount executive Barry Diller. “I will never forget the night we were at Twenty-One,” Redstone said. “When we got over 51% of the vote, I held up a glass and said to my associates: ‘Here’s to us who won.’ … Barry, on the other hand, was asked how he felt, and I remember his answer: ‘They won; we lost; next.’”
Yet, throughout his life, Redstone worked to assure he was seldom on the losing end. The son of Michael and Belle Rothstein, Sumner experienced a hardscrabble youth but excelled at Boston Latin School. He chose to attend Harvard College, by which time father Michael had decided that the family would adopt the surname “Redstone,” and, after joining the Army in World War II, made his way back to Harvard to take his law degree. Soon, though, Redstone felt the pull of showbiz: He decided to devote his considerable energies to expanding his father’s business, the Northeastern Theater Corporation, a chain of drive-in movie theaters. This became National Amusements, the unlikely seed from which Redstone’s subsequent moguldom sprang.
Redstone may have been a fearsome executive in a cutthroat business, but he was also a member of the Greatest Generation. Consequently, he faced reversals with a kind of gritty, I’ll-show-you determination. Most famously, a 1979 incident in which Redstone fell victim to a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, an incident that led to significant burns requiring extensive surgeries, preceded and perhaps gave birth to the decade when he rewrote the power structure in Hollywood. “All of the most exciting things that have happened to me or I’ve done in my life happened after the fire,” Redstone told the Archive of American Television.
With an unerring eye for media companies ripe for fresh leadership, Redstone took over Viacom, then Paramount, then CBS — each time, the prize became grander, but each time, the bets also paid off spectacularly. Children of the 1990s who feasted on Paramount blockbusters such as Titanic and Mission: Impossible or who prized CBS’s roster of smart comedies and dramas should say a special thanks to Redstone.
Success like that is hard to give up, and Redstone clung a bit too eagerly to his career. As the end neared, his reputation nosedived thanks to a succession of scandals. There was equivocating about the succession plans for his daughter Shari (now the chairman of ViacomCBS), and, having been divorced from his first and second wives, he embarked on ill-advised romances that resulted in litigation. It was the usual Hollywood stuff, yet such improprieties should not obscure Redstone’s hard-won status as an unmatched deal-maker and self-made man par excellence.
When entertainment industry bigwigs die, it is common for talking heads to say they were the last of their kind. Now, they’re saying it about Redstone, but this time, it’s true.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
