Sumner M. Redstone belonged to the Age of the Media Mogul, a time before Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, when street operators like Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller and John Malone made a bid to save the time of the world dominate.
That era is all but done. The swashbucklers have essentially handed over the Hollywood stage to a group of coolheaded executives who like to give the impression that they are earning billions more through their knowledge of algorithms than with the brutal tactics of running a business.
But the executives leading the digital companies that have come to dominate the entertainment world would not have been very far off without the programs and movies that were marketed by vicious moguls like Mr. Redstone, who died on Tuesday at the age of 97.
He was not so much an innovator because he was a maximum opportunist. He did not invent new forms of entertainment; he used cagey maneuvers to build an empire. He had the gall to borrow wicked sums to make a deal. He loves to buy things. He loves his rivals.
Mr. Redstone started with a string of drive-in movie theaters and became the main architect of ViacomCBS, the media giant that includes CBS ‘broadcast network, the cable channels Showtime and MTV, and the movie studio Paramount.
The former army officer with flame-red hair (in later years it was dyed carrot) liked that he was self-made, but he had a manly progress, thanks to his father, who founded the drive-in chain in the 1930s. . By the time the younger Redstone joined the family business in 1954, auto-culture was king and drive-ins were all the rage.
Even his father, Mickey Redstone, had help, after he began his career with $ 50,000 set up by a Boston mobster, Harry Sagansky, known as “Doc.” “It was my father’s money,” recalled Mr.’s son. Sagansky, Robert Sage, in ‘The King of Content’, a biography of Mr. Redstone by journalist Keach Hagey. “The Redstones have not put any money into it.”
Soon after Sumner Redstone came on board, he developed a reputation as a useless dealer who blew his way through transactions. In a less polite time, long before Power Point leadership coaches and presentations were, he once wrote so loudly that one of his teeth shot across the room. Through the madness of a bluster career, he expanded the drive-ins into a nationwide company of “multiplexes,” a currency he claimed.
He was a student at Harvard Law School, he was very much at home in the crannies of the legal system, and with his sharp Boston colleague, he once filed a case before the Supreme Court. The law was his truce. While making a deal, he often threatened to plead with the people he was negotiating with in an attempt to get some levy. Often enough, he made good on the threat.
Despite his brains and ruthlessness, he was still a second-tier player when he was in his 60s, at least by Hollywood standards. The alpha-status entertainment directors were not mere exhibitors, but owners of the films that brought theaters to life. Mr. Redstone wanted that power. The glamor, too.
Almost overnight in 1987 – a few months before 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 of the cable networks MTV and Nickelodeon.
Decades before Netflix, cable was the original disruptor of the traditional TV business. And Mr. Redstone was particularly honored with MTV. The chaotic headquarters of Times Square, a brightly lit playground filled with record execs and cattle jays, made him feel younger, he said. He hired a loose emperor – $ 3 billion – to make the purchase, and put his family business together with $ 400 million in cash.
“Everyone said I paid too much,” he wrote in his autobiography, “A Passion to Win.”
The biggest prize was Paramount. To land it he had to Mr. Malone, the cable tycoon who once called Al Gore “Darth Vader,” and Mr. Diller, the one-time CEO of Paramount and the founder of the Fox television network, are running away.
In those days, six years after the Viacom deal, Mr. Redstone was still considered something of an arrivalist, while Mr. Diller and Mr. Malone had many Hollywood friends. When Mr. Diller and Mr. Malone made efforts to await Mr. Redstone’s pursuit, the Massachusetts outsider probably did not seem to get what he so desired.
To fund the long-shot scheme, Mr. Redstone arranged a merger with the video rental company Blockbuster and received some help from NYNEX, the company that eventually merged into Verizon. By February 14, 1994, he had taken control of Paramount in a $ 10 billion deal. In the evening, Mr. Redstone, who was making favorite packs from the basement of Filene, celebrated at the ur-den of power, the ’21’ Club in Manhattan, and offered a toast: ‘Here is to you those it won. ‘
For the son of a one-time linoleum salesman who grew up in a Boston establishment, Paramount was an American success. It was home to defining films from the previous century such as “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Chinatown,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Top Gun” and, Mr. Favorite. Redstone, “The Godfather.”
Referring to one of Hollywood’s founding moguls, he told one of his performers, “I want to be Louis B. Mayer,” according to “The King of Content.” Mr. Redstone finally lived out his imagination, and kept court at his Beverly Park connection when he was not eating at Dan Tana’s clubby Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, where New York strip steak was served with a side of pasta.
For a while, Mr. Redstone the fortune of big players from coast to coast, a group that included Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles, and David Letterman, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace in New York. At its peak, its empire was worth more than $ 80 billion.
If you were an executive in the world of Redstone, you would agree with a certain bargain: You would get a big title and the money to fit in, but he would get the credit. And so he went through drivers like water: Frank Biondi, Tom Freston, Mel Karmazin …
Mr. Redstone’s own scorecard has many extinguishers. The purchase of Blockbuster, of all things, turned into an albatross, as video flourished on demand on cable boxes and Apple’s iTunes. Viacom eventually had to come out of the business video; it was a disaster.
Other likes include firing and rehearsing boxing star Super Mr. Cruise; a missed opportunity to buy Facebook in 2005, when it was ready to sell for $ 2 billion (although some dispute it was ever for sale); another missed opportunity, to buy Marvel Entertainment in 2009; and his continued support of Leslie R. Moonves, the CBS chief, who often refers to Mr. Redstone as a ‘super genius.’
Mr. Moonves was fired from the network in 2018 after a dozen women accused him of sexual assault, a pattern that occurred over decades. (He denied the allegations.)
And then there’s Paramount, which in the last place has often been lost among the big studios, with an anemic production line and a few big franchises. Mr Redstone’s award is still in vogue, the victim of a shift to digital that the late-flowering, analog-executor may not have seen coming.
