Everything about Sumner Redstone totally explained
Sumner Murray Redstone (born
Sumner Murray Rothstein;
May 27 1923) is
majority owner and
Chairman of the Board of the
National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, Sumner Redstone and his family are majority owners of
CBS Corporation,
Viacom, and
Midway Games,
MTV Networks,
BET, and movie production and distribution
Paramount Pictures and
DreamWorks movie studios, and are equal partners in
MovieTickets.com.
Early life and career
Sumner was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, the son of
Jewish parents Belle (
née Ostrovsky) and
Michael Redstone. His family's name was changed from Rothstein to Redstone, when Sumner was 17. His father was the owner of the Northeast Theater Corporation in
Dedham, Massachusetts--the forerunner of
National Amusements.
Redstone attended the prestigious
Boston Latin School, where he graduated first in his class. He then attended
Harvard College, where he completed his B.A. in three years. Later, Redstone served in
World War II, serving with the team that decoded
Japanese messages for the
United States Army. Upon completion of his Army service, he worked in
Washington, D.C. and attended
Georgetown University Law School. He chose to transfer into
Harvard Law School and received his
LL.B., later amended to a
Juris Doctor from that institution.
After completing law school, Redstone worked primarily in Washington, D.C., working at first for the
U.S. Department of Justice in San Francisco and then going into private practice. However, after a few years in practice, he chose to join his father's theater chain.
As
National Amusements grew Redstone believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary (his famous quote is "content is king!"). He then made
investments in
Columbia Pictures,
Twentieth Century Fox,
Orion Pictures, and
Paramount Pictures (the latter of the 4 of which Redstone's Viacom would buy in the 1990s-see below), all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell the
stock in the early 1980s.
In 1979 he almost died in the Boston Copley Hotel fire. He crawled out of a window onto a ledge. He wasn't expected to survive and underwent 60 hours of burn surgery.
In 1999 he was divorced from his first wife of 55 years, Phyllis Gloria Raphael. He is the father of
Shari Redstone and Brent Redstone. Three years after his divorce, he married Paula Fortunato, a former primary school teacher who is forty years his junior.
Viacom
Looking for a new business venture, he set his sights on
Viacom International, a company which he'd already been buying stock in as an investment and was a spin-off of
CBS in 1971 after the
FCC ruled that
television networks couldn't
syndicate programs they produced. Viacom syndicated most of CBS's programs, but also made a lot of money from syndicating other programs, including most of
Carsey-Werner Productions' shows (
The Cosby Show,
Roseanne, and
A Different World), as well as syndicating shows for other companies (
Columbia Pictures Television's
All in the Family was one notable example), and cable channels (
Nickelodeon's
Double Dare and
Finders Keepers (co-syndicated with
Fox Television Stations) were two examples).
Viacom also owned
MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned
MTV and
Nickelodeon. In addition, other included properties included Showtime Networks (a similar pay-television network to
HBO and
Cinemax) and
The Movie Channel. Viacom acquired MTV Networks in 1985 for $550 million from
Steve Ross'
Warner Communications. (WCI bought American Express' share and then sold the entire entity to Viacom, as they felt that they couldn't make a lot of money from the venture and the bias of a studio owning cable channels would be a conflict of interest. The studio's stance changed in 1995, when as
Time Warner it bought
Turner Broadcasting.)
After a
hostile takeover in 1987, Redstone won voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media (along with
Bertelsmann,
General Electric &
Vivendi's
NBC-Universal,
News Corporation,
Time Warner,
Sony, and
The Walt Disney Company).
Paramount Pictures
Redstone's next acquisition came in the form of the purchase of
Paramount Communications, parent of
Paramount Pictures, in 1993, which he fought over with
Barry Diller (former board member of Vivendi Universal and CEO of
IAC/InterActiveCorp) and
John Malone (president of
TCI/
Liberty Media), where he'd to raise his bid three times. Some say that Redstone overpaid, but after he shed certain assets (the
Madison Square Garden properties to
Charles Dolan's
Cablevision and
Simon & Schuster's educational publishing units to
Pearson plc for almost $4 billion), Redstone turned Viacom's expenditure into a substantial profit. Under Redstone's leadership, Paramount went on an almost ten-year streak of record performance, producing such films as
Saving Private Ryan, Titanic (one of the highest grossing film of all time and Best Picture Academy Award winner),
Braveheart (Best Picture Academy Award), and
Forrest Gump (also a Best Picture winner) and the creation of the hugely successful
Mission Impossible series of pictures.
Redstone replaced the team of Jonathan Dolgen and
Sherry Lansing in 2004 after their 9-year winning streak ended and the studio has struggled since with the relatively inexperienced team of Brad Grey and Gail Berman who both came from the TV business. The Dolgen and Lansing years were the high point of Paramount in many other regards as well.
In addition to the aforementioned award winning films, They also doubled the size of Paramount's music publishing division, Famous Music; expanded UCI Cinemas into 13 foreign countries; created the Digital Cinema Initiatives standards body for the new digital film technology; introduced the DVD; and launched the UPN Network (later part of CBS and now called the CW). The current Paramount Pictures consists only of the movie studio, the other groups having been sold or parcelled out to other divisions given Grey's lack of prior management experience.
The Paramount acquisition was only the tip of the iceberg. Redstone purchased
Blockbuster Entertainment, which included
Aaron Spelling's production company and a huge library of films, much of which has been merged into Paramount Pictures. Blockbuster has now been spun off into its own independent entity. Redstone acquired CBS Corporation in 2000 and then spun it off as a separate company in 2005, taking with it all of Paramount's television shows and catalog. Following the CBS and Blockbuster Spinoffs, Viacom consists of MTV Networks (MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Noggin etc.), music publishing (Famous Music) and Paramount Pictures.
In December of 2005, Redstone announced that Paramount had agreed to buy
DreamWorks SKG for an estimated $1.6 billion. The acquisition was completed on
February 1,
2006. A subsequent financing brought Viacom's investment down to $700m. The animation studio,
DreamWorks Animation, wasn't included in the deal as it has been its own company since late 2004, however Paramount now has the rights to distribute films by DreamWorks Animation.
CBS
One of Redstone's largest acquisitions came in the form of Viacom's former parent, CBS. Former Viacom President & COO
Mel Karmazin (who was then the President of CBS) proposed a merger to Redstone on favorable terms and after the merger completed in 2000, Viacom had some of the most diversified businesses imaginable. Viacom had assets in the form of broadcast networks (CBS and
UPN),
cable television networks (MTV, Nickelodeon,
MTV2,
Comedy Central,
BET,
Nick at Nite,
Noggin/
The N,
TV Land,
CMT, and
Spike TV),
pay television (
Showtime and
The Movie Channel),
radio (
Infinity Broadcasting, which produced the immensely popular
Howard Stern'
radio shows),
outdoor advertising, motion pictures (
Paramount Pictures), and
television production (
Spelling Entertainment,
Paramount Television, and
Big Ticket Entertainment), and
King World Productions (a syndication unit, which notably syndicates the runaway daytime hit,
The Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as
Dr. Phil,
Wheel of Fortune, and
Jeopardy!), among others.
After CBS and Viacom split in late 2005, Redstone remained chairman of both companies.
Succession
Redstone's trusts make it clear that
Shari Redstone (Vice-Chairwoman of the Board of Viacom and CBS, Chairwoman of the board of Midway Videogames as well as President of National Amusements) is set to assume his role upon his death. However, a November 22nd, 2006 New York Times article indicated that Redstone was reconsidering his daughter's role. Recently they've been feuding publicly over issues of corporate governance and the future of the cinema chain. There have also been numerous articles stating that Sumner's marriage is in trouble.
Documents have recently been made public which verify that, as part of a settlement from Sumner's first divorce, all of Sumner's stock is in irrevocable trusts that will be left for his grandchildren.
Redstone made arrangements to step down as CEO of Viacom in 2006. After Mel Karmazin resigned in 2004, two heirs apparent were named: Co-President & Co-COO
Leslie Moonves (who was #2 to Karmazin at CBS; he was the former head of
Warner Bros. Television and before that,
Lorimar Television) and Co-President & Co-COO
Tom Freston (who had been President & CEO of MTV Networks since 1987 and had been with the company since the formation of MTV Networks' precursor company, Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment). Since the Viacom split, Moonves has headed CBS, and Freston had headed the new Viacom, Inc.
When Moonves was promoted to Co-President & Co-COO with Tom Freston, there was speculation that he was on the short list of executives to replace
Michael Eisner at the
Walt Disney Company whose contract expired in 2006. Redstone has confirmed publicly in Vanity Fair that he originally offered the position only to Freston who initially turned it down and later relented when Redstone made it clear he was going to ask Moonves next.
On
September 5 2006 Redstone removed
Tom Freston as President and CEO of
Viacom and replaced him with director and former Viacom counsel
Philippe Dauman. He also brought back former CFO Tom Dooley. This was surprising to many, as Freston had been seen by many as Redstone's heir apparent and that Redstone touted that Freston would run the company after he retired. Redstone publicly stated that he let Freston go because of Viacom's lack of aggressiveness in the digital/online arena, lack of contact with investors, and a lackluster upfront (coupled with falling viewership) at
MTV Networks.
The company split was approved by the Viacom board on
June 14 2005.
Holdings
Currently, Redstone owns over seventy percent of the
voting stock of Viacom, which, in actuality, is a not wholly-owned subsidiary of
National Amusements, which is his privately held, family-owned company. CBS Corporation, likewise, is controlled by Redstone through National Amusements. Redstone also owns over eighty-nine percent of
Midway Games, both individually and through National Amusements.
However, the Midway holdings has drawn the ire of the
National Football League, as Midway's "", a game using a fictional league (previous versions had an NFL license), featured gratuitous violence and other material which the NFL would have rejected, all while CBS has NFL rights.
In 2006 CBS Corporation's CBS Radio unit sued
Howard Stern and Sumner has become the butt of criticism on his show along with
CBS CEO
Leslie Moonves.
Books
His autobiography,
A Passion To Win (which was co-written by Peter Knobler), was released in 2001 and published by Viacom's Simon & Schuster book publishing company. This book details everything from Sumner's life as a young boy in Boston, to the difficult takeover of Viacom, and the problems he overcame in purchasing and managing both Blockbuster Video and Paramount Pictures. There is also coverage of the legendary CBS merger (Viacom was a spin-off company of CBS to syndicate its programs, and the subsidiary bought the parent almost 30 years later).
Viacom's broadcasting properties at the time of "A Passion To Win"'s release included several radio stations and two TV stations (
WBZ CBS 4 (which had just become a CBS O&O through a merger with Westinghouse 4 years before Viacom and CBS merged) and
WSBK UPN 38) in Redstone's hometown of Boston.)
Net worth
In 2007 he was ranked #86 on
Forbes magazine's list of the hundred richest people in the world, with an estimated worth of
US$ 9
billion.
Philanthropy
In April 2007, Sumner M. Redstone announced a commitment of $105 million in charitable grants to fund research and patient care advancements in cancer and burn recovery at three major non-profit healthcare organizations. The cash contributions of $35 million each will be paid out over five years to FasterCures/The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions, based in Washington D.C.; the Cedars-Sinai Prostate Cancer Center in Los Angeles, California; and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sumner is a noted philanthropist. He recently contributed $500,000 (the largest donation the charity could accept) to the Cambodian Children's Fund, a nonprofit program that provides a wide range of critical health and educational services to impoverished and abused children in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Redstone's contribution will be used to create the Sumner M. Redstone Child Rescue Center, a stand-alone facility scheduled to open this fall for children 5 to 16.
Trivia
Midway Games, of which Sumner owns 89%, published a game called wherein one of the main characters is a wizard named Sumner.
In 1979, at the age of 56, Sumner survived a Boston hotel fire by hanging onto a third story ledge with one arm while badly burned over most of his body.
In August 2006 Redstone ended a lucrative contract with actor
Tom Cruise due to "behavior unacceptable to Paramount". This surprised some, as Cruise was their number one box office star. Some say it's because the film underperformed at the box office, although it was still a hit at close to US$400 million worldwide revenues. Others say this is a warning to what some see as spoiled and overpaid actors.
On
March 7,
2007,
Stephen Colbert called Redstone on his program
The Colbert Report to apologize to him after having launched a
polemic against him on the episode the night before in which he referred to Redstone as the
Crypt Keeper. Redstone "forced" Colbert to
Hokey Pokey after his apology. Although Redstone owns a media empire he doesn't appear on television or radio very often. This appearance on the Colbert Report marks a rare cameo on a television show or radio program, which is a testament to how influencial Colbert has become.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sumner Redstone'.
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