Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [8]
In mathematical terms there is both a short and a long explanation for Lansing’s fate. First, the short answer. Look at this series of percentages: 11.4, 10.6, 11.3, 7.4, 7.1, 6.7. Notice something? Lansing’s boss, Sumner Redstone, did too, and for him the trend was significant, for those six numbers represented the market share of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group for the final six years of Lansing’s tenure. The trend caused BusinessWeek to speculate that Lansing “may simply no longer have Hollywood’s hot hand.”14 Soon Lansing announced she was leaving, and a few months later a talent manager named Brad Grey was brought on board.
How can a surefire genius lead a company through seven great years and then fail practically overnight? There were plenty of theories explaining Lansing’s early success. While Paramount was doing well, Lansing was praised for making it one of Hollywood’s best-run studios and for her knack for turning conventional stories into $100 million hits. When her fortune changed, the revisionists took over. Her penchant for making successful remakes and sequels became a drawback. Most damning of all, perhaps, was the notion that her failure was due to her “middle-of-the-road tastes.” She was now blamed for green-lighting such box office dogs as Timeline and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Suddenly the conventional wisdom was that Lansing was risk averse, old-fashioned, and out of touch with the trends. But can she really be blamed for thinking that a Michael Crichton bestseller would be promising movie fodder? And where were all the Lara Croft critics when the first Tomb Raider film took in $131 million in box office revenue?
Even if the theories of Lansing’s shortcomings were plausible, consider how abruptly her demise occurred. Did she become risk averse and out of touch overnight? Because Paramount’s market share plunged that suddenly. One year Lansing was flying high; the next she was a punch line for late-night comedians. Her change of fortune might have been understandable if, like others in Hollywood, she had become depressed over a nasty divorce proceeding, had been charged with embezzlement, or had joined a religious cult. That was not the case. And she certainly hadn’t sustained any damage to her cerebral cortex. The only evidence of Lansing’s newly developed failings that her critics could offer was, in fact, her newly developed failings.
In hindsight it is clear that Lansing was fired because of the industry’s misunderstanding of randomness and not because of her flawed decision making: Paramount’s films for the following year were already in the pipeline when Lansing left the company. So if we want to know roughly how Lansing would have done in some parallel universe in which she remained in her job, all we need to do is look at the data in the year following her departure. With such films as War of the Worlds and The Longest Yard, Paramount had its best summer in a decade and saw its market share rebound to nearly 10 percent. That isn’t merely ironic—it’s again that aspect of randomness called regression toward the mean. A Variety headline on the subject read, “Parting Gifts: Old Regime’s Pics Fuel Paramount Rebound,”15 but one can’t help but think that had Viacom (Paramount’s parent company) had more patience, the headline might have read, “Banner Year Puts Paramount and Lansing’s Career Back on Track.”
Sherry Lansing had good luck at the beginning and bad luck at the end, but it could have been worse. She could have had her bad luck at the beginning. That’s what happened to a Columbia Pictures chief named Mark Canton. Described as box office savvy and enthusiastic shortly after he was hired, he was fired after his first few years produced disappointing box office results. Criticized by one unnamed colleague for being “incapable of