Sumner M. Redstone was in the era of the media mogul, a time before Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google, when smart executives like Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and John Malone fought in an attempt to dominate the time of world screen.
This era is almost over. Swashbucklers have essentially ceded the Hollywood scene to a bunch of cool-headed executives who like to look like they’re making billions more from their knowledge of algorithms than from the brutal tactics of corporate warfare. .
But the executives who run the digital companies that dominate the entertainment world would not have come very far without the programs and films brought to market by fierce tycoons like Mr Redstone, who died Tuesday at the age of 97.
He was not so much an innovator as a maximum opportunist. He did not invent new forms of entertainment; he used careful maneuvers to build an empire. He had the nerve to borrow ungodly sums to close a deal. He loved to buy things. He loved to chase his rivals.
Mr. Redstone started with a series of drive-in theaters and went on to become the main architect of ViacomCBS, the media giant that includes the CBS broadcast network, Showtime and MTV cable channels, and Paramount movie studio.
The red-haired former army officer (later carrot-dyed) liked to say he was self-taught, but he was way ahead, thanks to his father, who founded the chain of training in the 1930s. By the time young Redstone joined the family business in 1954, automotive culture was king and drive-ins were all the rage.
Even his father, Mickey Redstone, had help, having started his career with $ 50,000 provided by Boston gangster Harry Sagansky, known as “Doc.” “It was my father’s money,” Mr. Sagansky’s son Robert Sage recalls in “The King of Content,” a biography of Mr. Redstone by journalist Keach Hagey. “The Redstones haven’t invested any money in it.”
Soon after arriving aboard Sumner Redstone, he built a reputation as an irascible trader who worked his way through transactions. In a less polite time, long before the leadership coaches and Power Point presentations, he once screamed so loudly that one of his teeth went through the room. Through the din of an eventful career, he extended drive-ins to a national company of “multiplexes”, a currency he claimed.
A Harvard Law School graduate, he was very comfortable in the recesses of the legal system and, with his sharp Boston brogue, he once argued a case in the Supreme Court. The law was his weapon. While making a deal, he often threatened to sue the people he negotiated with in an effort to gain some leverage. Quite often he carried out the threat.
Despite his brains and cruelty, he was still a second-tier player when he was in his sixties, at least by Hollywood standards. Entertainment executives with alpha status weren’t just exhibitors, but owners of the films that brought theaters to life. Mr. Redstone wanted that power. Glamor too.
Almost overnight, in 1987, just months away from his 64th birthday, he became one of the country’s most powerful media chiefs in a hostile $ 3.4 billion takeover of Viacom, the parent company of cable networks MTV and Nickelodeon.
Decades before Netflix, cable was the main disruptor to the mainstream television industry. And Mr. Redstone was particularly passionate about MTV. His chaotic Times Square headquarters, a well-lit playground filled with record executives and veejays, made him feel younger, he said. He borrowed a ransom from the emperor – $ 3 billion – to complete the acquisition, setting up his family business with $ 400 million in cash.
“Everyone said I overpaid,” he wrote in his autobiography, “A Passion for Winning”.
The biggest prize was Paramount. To land it, he had to pass Mr. Malone, the cable mogul Al Gore once called “Darth Vader,” and Mr. Diller, former CEO of Paramount and founding director of the Fox television network.
At that time, six years after the Viacom deal, Mr. Redstone was still seen as an upstart, while Mr. Diller and Mr. Malone had many Hollywood friends. When Mr. Diller and Mr. Malone joined forces to stave off the pursuit of Mr. Redstone, the Massachusetts stranger seemed unlikely to get what he so craved.
To fund the long-term project, Mr. Redstone arranged a merger with video rental chain Blockbuster and enlisted the help of NYNEX, the company that eventually turned into Verizon. On February 14, 1994, he took control of Paramount in a $ 10 billion deal. That evening Mr. Redstone, who preferred Filene’s Basement ready-made suits, celebrated at the ur-den of power, the “21” Club in Manhattan, and offered a toast: “Here’s to we who won. “
For the son of a former linoleum salesman who grew up in a Boston apartment building, Paramount epitomized American success. It was home to defining films of the last century like “Sunset Boulevard”, “The Ten Commandments”, “Chinatown”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Top Gun” and, Mr. Redstone’s favorite, “The Godfather”.
Referring to one of Hollywood’s founding tycoons, he told one of its executives: “I want to be Louis B. Mayer”, according to “The King of Content”. Mr Redstone finally lived the fantasy, courting at his Beverly Park resort while not dining at Dan Tana’s clubby Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, where a New York steak was served with a side of pasta.
For a time, Mr. Redstone controlled the fortunes of major players from coast to coast, a group that included Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles, as well as David Letterman, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace in New York. At its peak, his empire was worth over $ 80 billion.
If you were an executive in the world of Redstone, you accepted a certain windfall: you would get a big headline and the money to match it, but it would earn it. And so he went through executives like water: Frank Biondi, Tom Freston, Mel Karmazin…
Mr. Redstone’s own dashboard has a lot of plagues. The Blockbuster acquisition, of all things, turned into an albatross, as video on demand flourished on cable set-top boxes and Apple’s iTunes. Viacom eventually had to leave the home video business; it was a disaster.
Other imperfections include the firing and rehiring of box office superstar, Mr. Cruise; a missed opportunity to buy Facebook in 2005, when it looked set to sell for $ 2 billion (although some dispute that it was ever for sale); another missed opportunity, to buy Marvel Entertainment in 2009; and his continued support for Leslie R. Moonves, the CBS chief whom Mr. Redstone often called a “super genius.”
Mr Moonves was ousted from the network in 2018 after a dozen women accused him of sexual assault, a pattern that has been happening for decades. (He denied the charges.)
And then there’s Paramount, which has often languished in the last place of the big studios, with an anemic production slate and a few big franchises. The acquisition of Mr. Redstone’s award is still in a turnaround, victim of a digital switch-over that the late-analogue era ruler may not have seen coming.