The King of Content by Keach Hagey

Author:Keach Hagey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

“This Is Crazy!”

On Tuesday, August 22, 2006, Tom Freston, now a public company CEO, was taxiing onto the Van Nuys runway in Los Angeles in his new Global Express when his flip phone rang. The stunned voice of Carole Robinson, his head of communications, informed him that Sumner had just given an impromptu interview to the Wall Street Journal declaring that Paramount was firing Tom Cruise, its biggest star, over concerns that his increasingly erratic behavior had dampened the box office for Mission Impossible III. “It’s nothing to do with his acting ability,” Sumner told the Journal. “But we don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”1 Freston, livid, called Sumner.

“This is crazy!” he said. “First of all, you can’t fire Tom Cruise, because he doesn’t work for us. And even if he did work for us, and if we were going to fire him, it should be done by Brad Grey who runs the studio, not by you, not by me.” Cruise was the cornerstone of the Paramount library—why would Sumner want to diminish him? Sumner countered that he controlled the company and could do anything he wanted to do. Freston started pacing up and down the aisle, yelling, “You can’t do this! This is bullshit! This is crazy!”

It was their first screaming fight in twenty years of working together, and it was a doozy. Sumner was famous for bellowing at underlings, but he had an almost paternal relationship with Freston, with whom he dined often and considered one of his dearest friends. Back in the 1990s, during Sumner’s first trip to Asia, Freston had even, at Sumner’s request, taken Sumner and Delsa around the sex clubs of Bangkok. (The sight of a naked, fornicating couple descending from the ceiling atop a Harley-Davidson would be Sumner’s first taste of commercial sex but not his last.) But Freston was now in the most famously dangerous job in media: CEO of Sumner Redstone’s Viacom.

It wasn’t going especially well. After all the talk of how Freston’s side of the company was going to grow fast while Moonves’s was going to crawl, the opposite had happened: CBS’s stock was up almost 8 percent since the start of the year, while Viacom’s, battered by a sector-wide cable advertising slowdown, was down almost 12 percent. Freston now walked into his office every morning to a stack of angry faxes from Sumner, wanting to know why the stock was down a few cents. His first quarterly earnings surprised investors with a 10 percent decline in profit, in part due to the loss of an advertiser in Germany that Wall Street wasn’t expecting, leaving analysts grumbling that Freston could have communicated with them better. And the annual spring “up-front” advertising sales season was soft, stoking fears that MTV was losing its youth marketing mojo to upstarts like YouTube.2 By July, just six months into his tenure, analyst Rich Greenfield declared, “If Mr. Freston cannot swiftly reorient Viacom, Sumner Redstone and the board need to find a new CEO.

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