The Women Who Run Hollywood

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"I had to figure out how to run a company while being true to my own instincts," says Pascal, who began her career as a secretary. "We did some real work. Every time a movie would come out and work or not work, our group would sit around and analyze all our decisions--when we made them and how they contributed. What we didn't do was put our heads in the sand and pretend it was working. I had my staff tell people to write up what they didn't like about me so I knew what they were honestly thinking. That was probably a female thing because it's an egoless thing."

The turning point for Pascal came at the end of 2000 with the runaway success of Charlie's Angels, which the studio produced in conjunction with star Drew Barrymore's Flower Films. "Did we make some movies we shouldn't have made? Yes, along with everybody else," says Pascal's boss, Sony Pictures chairman John Calley. "But Amy's continuing maturity is astonishing. She's the best I've ever seen in this job." Columbia is expected to make another strong showing next summer with the sequel to Charlie's Angels, as well as Bad Boys 2 and S.W.A.T. Also in the pipeline: a big-screen adaptation of I Dream of Jeannie. "Everybody said I made 'chick flicks' when the movies didn't work," says Pascal. "When the movies work, nobody calls them that."

STACEY SNIDER

If you had to cast an actress to play the Universal chairman, your best bet would be Reese Witherspoon, who specializes in characters at once attractive and very direct. At 41, Snider is the youngest of the three power brokers. Like many other younger women working in Hollywood, she resists being labeled a "female executive" or drawing attention to her gender. (For that reason, she declined to be interviewed for this story.) Unlike Pascal, who cites the late Columbia studio chief Dawn Steel as a mentor, Snider--like Lansing--learned the business from some of its toughest male players. "Both of them suckled at the teats of wolves, and they emerged with their humanity intact," says an industry executive who knows both women.

After receiving her law degree at UCLA, Snider worked as a secretary in the testosterone-fueled offices of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun. In 1992 the controversial Sony duo of Jon Peters and Peter Guber gave Snider her first executive position. A more genteel influence was former Universal exec Marc Platt, known for his sure hand with talent. By all accounts, Snider is maneuvering gracefully through the turmoil within Vivendi-Universal and getting along nicely with newly installed corporate watchdog Barry Diller.

Experience has made her a shrewd political operative, but she is also a gentle general who has inspired great loyalty in her troops since becoming chairman in 1999. Along with her boss, Universal Studios president and COO Ron Meyer, Snider has played a key role in revamping the studio with such hits as Erin Brockovich, the Mummy movies, The Fast and the Furious and A Beautiful Mind.