Opinion | CBS. MTV. How Will Paramount’s Shari Redstone Rule On Our Cultural Future?
The hope in this fragile equation is that the other potential buyer, a partnership between David Ellison and his financial backers, will find a way to revive Paramount’s cultural and financial influence with a new management team and a new strategy. The group, which includes RedBird Capital and KKR, has offered to pay Ms. Redstone a big premium to get voting control of Paramount (leaving other shareholders with only a small fraction of the compensation she’s getting). It would then have Paramount buy Skydance Media, the group’s movie production company, and combine it with the Paramount studio to reap the “synergies.”
That complex deal promises the chance — but hardly the certainty — for a creative and economic revival of Paramount. Last week, the Ellison/RedBird deal won the backing of the special committee of the company’s board, and now it’s up to Ms. Redstone, at her sole discretion, to decide whether to accept it. Then, of course, doing nothing is also an option she could choose.
The relentless deal-making, over decades, that led to the creation of Paramount Global has taken a toll. Once innovative and wildly profitable businesses, such as CBS and MTV, are struggling financially. Morale is low as the sale process drags on. “The inability to come to any decision feeds high anxiety,” one longtime Paramount producer wrote me. Ms. Redstone’s conundrum of whether to sell the company, or not, is only possible due to the decades of wheeling and dealing by her father that made the Redstones one of America’s most powerful media families.
In 1987, Sumner Redstone was a little-known but audacious movie theater operator in Boston when he bought Viacom, the owner of a group of TV and radio stations along with MTV, Nickelodeon and Showtime. Over the ensuing two decades he would go on to gobble up the revered Paramount movie studio (a deal I worked on while I was at Lazard); Blockbuster, the video store giant; and CBS, in one of the biggest media mergers of the 20th century. In 2005, he bought DreamWorks SKG, the Hollywood studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Regulators never tried to stop Mr. Redstone, presumably because there were always bigger competitors, such as Disney, or G.E., or Comcast, that also were allowed to grow without opposition from Washington.
Hollywood stars flocked to Mr. Redstone’s Beverly Park mansion in Los Angeles and to Dan Tana’s, his favorite restaurant. By granting access to CBS, or Showtime, or Paramount, or MTV or Comedy Central, Mr. Redstone had the power in Hollywood and in Manhattan to make others rich and famous. What made it all work was his attention to detail, his faith in his executives, and his willingness to wield the law (and his Harvard Law degree) as a weapon.
