Sumner Redstone: Empire Builder for the MTV Generation
Soon after Sumner Redstone came aboard, he developed a reputation as an irascible dealmaker who barked his way through transactions. In a less polite time, long before leadership coaches and Power Point presentations, he once yelled so loudly that one of his teeth shot across the room. Through the din of a blustery career, he expanded the drive-ins into a nationwide business of “multiplexes,” a coinage he claimed.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was very much at home in the crannies of the legal system, and with his sharp Boston brogue he once argued a case before the Supreme Court. The law was his everyweapon. While hammering out a deal, he often threatened to sue the people he was negotiating with in an effort to gain some leverage. 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 entertainment executives with alpha status were not mere exhibitors, but owners of the films that made the theaters come alive. Mr. Redstone wanted that power. The glamour, too.
Almost overnight in 1987 — a few months shy of his 64th birthday — he became one of the country’s most powerful media chiefs in a $3.4 billion hostile takeover of Viacom, the parent of the cable networks MTV and Nickelodeon.
