Sumner Redstone, the struggling tycoon who turned his father’s cinema-theatre in New England into a media empire that is now launched at virtually every street in entertainment, has died. He’s 97.
Redstone was the recently merged majority shareholder of ViacomCBS and in the past CBS Corp. and Viacom, who made famous the mantra “content is king”.
His daughter and President of ViacomCBS, Shari Redstone, said: “My father led an ordinary life that not only shaped entertainment as we know it today, but created an incredible circle of family legacy. Through it all, we share a wonderful love for each other and it was a glorious father, grandfather and wonderful grandfather I am so proud to be your daughter and I will miss you.
It is with wonderful sadness that we announce the passing of Sumner Mr. Redstone, the self-taught World War II businessman, philanthropist and world war II veteran who has built one of the world’s largest media asset collections. He died at the age of 97, he said in a statement “National Amusements, through which the Redstones control ViacomCBS.” Sumner has played a key role in shaping the entertainment and fashion industry landscape. At National Amusements, he has remodeled a regional film chain to make it a world leader in the film exhibition industry. Sumner was also an avid investor who took stakes in a variety of companies, adding Viacom Inc. and CBS Corporation, now merged as ViacomCBS, which incorporated major foreign media conglomerates and leaders. “
He added: “Sumner was an unheard of type of perseverance and perseverance, who gave his life to his confidence in the strength of the content. With his death, the much-enjoyed media industry lost one of its wonderful champions. Sumner, a His loving father, grandfather and wonderful grandfather will be wonderfully missed throughout his family, who will be pleased knowing that his legacy will endure for generations to come.”
Until recently, Redstone, chief executive of either company, had been under-skilled for some time, as he wondered if he was mentally capable of running his business.
A Harvard-educated lawyer who worked as a Japanese codebreaker in World War II and survived the chimney of a near-fatal hotel in 1979, the resolute Redstone was respectable and vilified by his angry and contentious battles that earned him Viacom in 1987 and then Paramount in 1994. He filed a lawsuit in the 1950s to break Hollywood studios’ control over theatrical distribution and, decades later, went to court to thwart a monopoly on cable television.
Like William Randolph Hearst before him, Redstone reigned as a king, his businesses and workers were subject to his whims. In 2006, he fired Mission: Impossible star Tom Cruise after the actor climbed on Oprah Winfrey’s couch in an interview. “His habit was terrible,” Redstone said, while acknowledging that Cruise “was paid $10 million, on the ground, for doing nothing.”
Six years later, he reconciled with Cruise and said he and the star were “best friends.”
Redstone’s net worth was recently estimated through Forbes at $4.3 billion. He and his family, through their parent company, National Amusements Inc., controlled about 80% of the voting shares of Viacom and CBS, which announced their reunification in August. It had 80 percent of national amusements; her daughter, Shari, vice president of Viacom and CBS, occupied the rest.
Redstone passed quietly. In August 2016, he and Shari organized Philippe Dauman’s indictment as CEO of Viacom, ending a long and bitter legal battle.
Months earlier, redstone’s lifelong girlfriends, Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer, had been driven from their home (Holland allegedly worried about another man). Herzer then filed a complaint alleging that Redstone was not mentally competent when he got rid of medical decisions on his behalf.
But after Redstone testified on video, a Los Angeles ruling discovered the tycoon at the rate of his colleges and dismissed the lawsuit. He then sued Holland and Herzer in October to raise $150 million in gifts he had given them. An agreement with Herzer announced in January 2019.
Sumner Murray Rothstein was born on May 27, 1923, and grew up in a low-class Boston, where his father worked as a linoleum salesman. Redstone said he grew up in poverty and wrote in his 2001 autobiography, A Passion to Win, that his apartment had no bathrooms. “We had to walk down the aisle to use the chained-fabric closet in the dressing room we shared with the neighbors. That kind of life was everything I knew, and I never felt less privileged than everyone else.”
The neighborhoods he grew up in, however, were filled with ambitious immigrants, adding his father, Michael “Mickey” Rothstein, a passionate businessman who bought a used truck and turned it into a successful “karting” business. His good sense attracted the interest of bookie Harry “Doc” Sagansky, whose betting syndicate rivaled Meyer Lansky’s. With thousands of Sagansky dollars pouring in, Rothstein began to get nightclubs and theaters and opened his first drive-in on Long Island in New York in 1934.
As his business flourished, Rothstein replaced the surname with Redstone, in part to avoid anti-Semitism in some Boston business circles and also to deny any speculation that it was related to New York gangster Arnold Rothstein, who conspired to fix 1919. Global trials.
“Redstone had such a solid American sound, so ecumenical, so Christian. I think my father is looking to get us away from our Jewish status,” Redstone wrote in his autobiography. “It bothered me a lot.”
Redstone studied at the prestigious Boston Latin School where, he later wrote, “I first laid out the concept that other thoughtful, informed and disciplined people have the strength in themselves to create a new and larger world.
Redstone then worked as a special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, dealing with tax litigation. During his time in the Department of Justice, he helped overturn the previous-year resolution opposed to the Jewish professor.
Six years after retiring from law school, Redstone earned $100,000 a year at the helm of his own firm, disappointed that law practice had become “just a business.” Thus, in 1954, Redstone devoted himself to painting for his father’s burgeoning film company on a salary of $5,000 a year. He traveled to New England to win houses for the developing chain, known as the National Amusements.
“Forget the real estate agents,” he writes. “I was getting in a car and driving in search of possible smart places. I had a pro forma contract in my jacket pocket.”
While driving along the secondary roads, Redstone developed a review of the theater trade, concluding that “content is king.” It is the quality of the film that shows the channel, not its location or its luxuries, that dictates the money it will generate.
He grew exponentially after applying for a $10 million loan and, after impressing bank executives, won a $50 million line of credit.
He has become a skilled film critic; after seeing 101 Dalmatians in the early 1960s, he bought a significant percentage of Disney’s percentages, and was named ceo of National Amusements in 1967 and allegedly coined the term “multiplex”. A decade later, he invested in film studios, adding Disney and Warner Bros. In 1977, he watched Star Wars, crossed the street to a pay phone and bought 25,000 percentages of 20th Century Fox.
In 1982, National Amusements owned approximately 10% of Columbia Pictures when Coca-Cola took over the studio, contributing a profit of $26 million to Redstone. He had a 5% stake in Fox prior to the acquisition of Marvin Davis, and a major shareholder of MGM/United Artists Home Entertainment prior to Ted Turner’s film adventure.
In the mid-1980s, Redstone became interested in Viacom, which had emerged from CBS years earlier and then owned assets such as MTV, Nickelodeon and Showtime. Viacom CEO Terry Elkes sought to turn the company into something personal in a $2.7 billion debt purchase, but Redstone, then viacom’s 18.3 percent owner, was furious at the price of inside information. He submitted a competitive and hostile acquisition attempt and threatened to sue on behalf of shareholders.
After long infighting, Redstone landed on Viacom in March 1987 for $3.4 billion, adding more than $400 million of his own money, and became president of the company. He wasn’t the typical corporate raider of the time. Unlike competitive buyers such as Kirk Kerkorian of MGM, who bought studios and dismantled them for quick profits, Redstone was there for the long term.
In an effort to win Paramount Communications in 1993-94, Redstone fought Barry Diller of QVC, his old friend, in the toughest war of his career. The bidding war has drastically inflated the conglomerate’s burden and its historic film studio and placed Viacom with a debt of more than $11 billion. For years, Redstone referred to Diller as his “2 billion-dollar ex-friend” until Diller, in spite of everything, said to him, “Are you all right, Sumner? That’s enough.
In a plan that caught the eye in monetary circles, Viacom had bought Blockbuster for its strong coins and then borrowed from the video rental company to raise enough coins to obtain Paramount. Viacom separated from Blockbuster in 2004 and in 2010 the network filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy claim. “Occasionally, you make a mistake. But I don’t need to exaggerate,” Redstone told the Hollywood Reporter in December 2013, when the Blockbuster issue was discussed in his last face-to-face interview.
He made a mistake injecting heaps of millions of dollars into Midway Games and then relinquishing his stake in the now-defunct video game company for less than a penny, consistent with a steady percentage in 2008.
Paramount’s agreement, combined with the upcoming dismissal of its CEO, Frank Biondi, caused serious disruption to Wall Street. Needing to pay off his debt, he downloaded Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, as well as the educational and professional divisions of Simon and Schuster.
In 1999, Redstone entered into some other main contract, the latter to obtain CBS from Westinghouse Electric Corp. for a total of $37.3 billion, which puts Viacom ahead of Disney as the world’s largest media company. After taking over CBS’s debt, Viacom’s debt is around $11 billion, which is not scandalous for a company and then valued at $80 billion.
During the war with Diller for Paramount, his legal team filed an antitrust lawsuit opposed to John Malone’s Tele-Communications Inc. (Malone supported Diller), accusing the distributor of monopolizing the cable business through “intimidation tactics and hard weaponry.” Competitors. In 1995, Viacom sold its cable systems to TCI for an estimated $2.25 billion, becoming, as Redstone said, a “content-based media company.”
Redstone’s tenacity and temperament were mythical and it was difficult for his closest lieutenants to publicly argue with him. One leader who did so was Mel Karmazin, at one time regarded as the most productive candidate to succeed Redstone. Karmazin was the CEO of CBS when Viacom bought the company. The merger was basically the concept of Karmazin and Redstone once called it “a similar spirit.” However, Karmazin’s appointments with Redstone deteriorated and he left Viacom in 2004.
But amid the rise of mega-agreements and the need to climb in the race to compete with the broadcast and generation giants, the Redstones ended up backing a recombination of Viacom and CBS on ViacomCBS, an agreement they reached in December.
Bob Bakish, president and chief executive of ViacomCBS, said Wednesday: “Sumner Redstone was a brilliant visionary, operator and negotiator, who turned a circle of corporate movie family members into a global media portfolio. It was a force of nature and a fierce competitor, leaving a deep legacy in business and philanthropy. ViacomCBS will be Sumner for his unrivalled love of winning, his endless intellectual interest and his general determination towards the company. Today we extend our deepest condolences to Redstone’s circle of relatives.”
Redstone, who later joked in life saying he would never die, was married twice, to Phyllis Raphael for more than 50 years until 1999, and then to Paula Fortunato from 2002 to 2009. Both marriages ended in divorce.
It’s remarkable that Redstone lived as long as he did. In the middle of March 29, 1979, the 55-year-old executive opened his bedroom door at the Copley Hotel in Boston after smelling smoke and engulfed in flames. “The fireplace has a fireplace on my legs. Pain burns me. I burned myself alive,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“One way or another, I staggered to the window. It got stuck, I couldn’t move it. I moved to another window and, I don’t know how, I opened it and went out. I knelt on a small ledge, big enough to set foot. I’m up 3 floors. If I jump, I’m dead. The flames were sprouting from the window with my head on top and I crouched there, hanging from the window sill, with my hands cut off, my hand and my arm directly in the chimney and burning.
A firefighter set up Redstone. His right wrist almost cut off and suffered third-degree burns on 45% of his body. He underwent five operations, 60 hours in total, and remained in the hospital for months. (He sued the hotel and donated his colony to the Massachusetts General Burn Center).
Has Redstone been through his ordeal?
“Absolutely not,” he wrote. “I had the same price formula after the fireplace as before. Whether it’s high school, school or law school or the construction of a theatrical circuit, I was motivated. I have the hobby of winning and the will to win is the will to survive. .
This article was originally published through The Hollywood Reporter.
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