The Women Who Run Hollywood

• Share

(3 of 4)

She has also nurtured profitable partnerships with DreamWorks (which co-produced Meet the Parents and its coming sequel) and Imagine (How the Grinch Stole Christmas). Snider is wary of expensive stars; her ace marketing team specializes in selling such inexpensive concept movies as the upcoming surfer flick Blue Crush. Among the most literate of studio bosses, she usually refrains from pandering; she argued--successfully--against a climactic courtroom scene in Erin Brockovich, worried that it would have rung false. Unlike her female compatriots, Snider seems to have no particular fondness for female-driven pictures. Upcoming films include 8 Mile, starring Eminem, and the next Hannibal Lecter thriller, Red Dragon. And like all other studio executives, she's a sucker for action heroes. Coming next summer: The Hulk.

SHERRY LANSING

Long before she was chairman of Paramount Pictures, Lansing dreamed of making movies. She got her big break at MGM in 1975 when, after two years of toiling in a low-level job at the studio, she was promoted to head of the story department. She was 30. "I was so excited," recalls Lansing, "and thought I would get a raise." When the studio failed to show her the money, she confronted a senior executive. "He admitted that I wasn't earning as much as a man in an equivalent job. Then he thought about it and said, 'We're not going to give you a raise because you're single, you don't have kids, you don't have a family to support.' I knew it was wrong but, meek little me, I said, 'Oh. O.K.'"

Times have changed for Lansing, who is no longer described--by anyone--as meek and whose current six-year contract with Paramount, which she signed in 2000, is worth well in excess of $25 million, according to Variety. At 57, this former schoolteacher, model and actress is the most durable studio executive, male or female. She is also the most autonomous motion-picture chairman in Hollywood, though she collaborates closely with Jonathan Dolgen, chairman of Viacom Entertainment Group, Paramount's parent company. Lansing is famous for keeping costs down and profits up. (The most she has ever spent on a single movie was $80 million for Mission: Impossible 2.) The philosophy permeates the studio. Though Mel Gibson continues to develop projects with Paramount, his production company recently moved off the lot; Lansing's team, says one exec, was never entirely comfortable with the terms of his deal by which he pocketed his movies' foreign revenue. And the normally cheerful Lansing can barely conceal her contempt for the rest of Hollywood's obsession with "market share," the annual ranking of studios based entirely on box-office receipts. "It's a meaningless thing," says Lansing. "What we should talk about is profitability." Lansing is sometimes criticized within the industry for taking too few risks, both artistically and financially. She counters by reminding people that she made Forrest Gump after other studios had passed on the project and proudly claims that on her watch, no slate of films has ever lost money.