Sumner Redstone's Song of Himself

Normally these days, Sumner Redstone, at 84, prefers to run his schizophrenic media empire from his hilltop retreat in Los Angeles, taking breaks, per Bryan Burrough's razor-edged 2006 profile in Vanity Fair, to take nude swims in his indoor pool and admire his exotic fish.

But this week found the billionaire in South Korea, at the Seoul Digital Forum in the company of trend surfers like Ann Sweeney and will.i.am of Black-Eyed Peas.

Nothing he said from the stage created anything like the stir caused by a not-so-offhand comment to a reporter who asked about his sometime movie-biz buddy Tom Cruise.

Forget that he booted Cruise off the Paramount lot, purportedly for couch-jumping and other random behavior but actually over the costs of Cruise's deal. (Redstone later said the Mission Impossible franchise was delivering just "peanuts" to Paramount after all the other profit partners on the film had been satisfied.)

Redstone is now, following a much-publicized show of rapprochement at the Beverly Hills Hotel, completely okay with Tom revisiting the franchise for Paramount. (Cruise was "happy I agreed to have lunch with him," the reliably megalomaniac titan recalled.)

Or, as he pointed out in his way of saying everything's peachy with his highly capable executives until suddenly, it's not, "That's really up to Brad Grey, who runs Paramount, he will make the decision.... What I can say is, 'I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend, and if Paramount decides to go ahead with him, I will not object.'"

And this came even after the studio had established for itself what looks to be its long-sought new tent pole franchise, Iron Man, with its over $100 million debut weekend-plus-Thursday.

Of course, they could very well make further MI iterations, very much depending on whether Cruise, under what will be more advantageous terms to the studio than existed before the banishment, can put fannies in the seats.

Just as significant, though barely peeking out of another Redstone deal, is that Cruise and partner Paula Wagner, under their new United Artists operation, would be likely contributors to Redstone's latest enterprise.

That deal, still going nameless until someone finds a moniker for the cable television channel it will create, is another good example of the mogul's seeming appetite for internecine rivalry.

He recently announced, in self-righteous concert with ascendant Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, that Paramount Pictures would no longer be selling the broadcast rights to its feature films to Showtime, an arm of Redstone-controlled CBS.

Instead, having failed (accidentally on purpose, one might speculate) to reach terms with Showtime, they joined forces with MGM — thus the corporate link to Cruise's United Artists — and Lionsgate to start up a premium channel and video-on-demand service kicking off in fall 2009.

To rub salt in the wound, both those latter studios will now quit funneling movies to Showtime as they had been. As all the other major film-producing studios have other output deals in place, Showtime was left to mutter that they really don't care that much for programming films anyway (although broadcasting features is the crucial engine drawing viewers to their rival HBO).

"We are an independent company," said Mr. Dauman, who has hung in as a Redstone loyalist despite living through a demotion some years ago. "It's our responsibility at Viacom to drive our strategy to benefit our shareholders."

(Making a mere $20.6 million per year compared to Moonves' $36.8 million could make a man want a little edge on the guy across the aisle.)

Experienced at family feuds, of which more below, Redstone seemingly had just this sort of rivalry in mind back in January 2006, when he separated CBS and Viacom — setting his fiefdoms up to compete against one another in the hope of helping both their stock prices.

In a history that's been much-rehashed by the media ever since. The split seemed to set up CBS's Moonves and Viacom's Tom Freston for a succession bake-off that, Redstone surely hoped, would energize both branches.

When an unimpressed Wall Street sat on its hands, Freston, even as he was putting the pieces in place for a now-resurgent Paramount, found himself the target of a Redstone disinformation campaign leading to an abrupt, graceless firing and a very large severance package.

The Freston ouster occurred around the same time as Cruise's departure, and according to Redstone was over Freston's failure to expeditiously acquire MySpace before Rupert Murdoch could grab it for NewsCorp.

Coverage by Burrough and others has pretty well established that it was foot dragging by Redstone and his board, not by Freston, that cost Viacom that deal. When Murdoch quickly sold ad rights on MySpace to Google for $900 million, eclipsing what the purchase had cost News Corp., Redstone's bitterness increased.

The irony is that Murdoch's acquisition is currently ranked as a bit of a performance laggard in a fast-moving marketplace.

Just yesterday, News Corp. C.O.O. Peter Chernin was seeking to reassure analysts that he was "incredibly optimistic" for the social network, despite its role in the company's interactive operation falling 10 percent short of revenue projections for the fiscal year.

Presumably if success in that ever-more-competitive social networking space doesn't come soon, Redstone will rewrite history to say he never wanted it.

Meanwhile, the Paramount administration that Freston put into place is headed for a potential billion dollar summer. (Yes, movie slates are put together across a span of years, but Brad Grey, installed by Freston as production chief, still owns bragging rights to that number).

Grey, though his relationship with indicted private eye Anthony Pellicano was much whispered about, came through unscathed on the stand as a government witness and is in position to keep succeeding at Paramount.

(The jury was still deliberating over Pellicano and his fellow defendants' fate as of Thursday morning.)

In fact, in a typical Viacom-CBS sideshow, Grey's been encouraged to go ahead and start producing television in competition with Moonves's network if he feels like it.

As the guy who was present at the inception of The Sopranos and a number of other lucrative and well-regarded shows, he's well aligned for it.

(Today came the the announcement of a deal in the other direction, in which he'll bring Sopranos creator David Chase into the feature fold for to make an original drama.)

The almost certain departure of DreamWorks, given DreamWorks partner David Geffen's alienation from what he's seen as a credit-grabbing Grey, will have few immediate consequences as the studio continues to distribute a goodly number of DreamWorks projects.

(If Spielberg was smarting at all from Dauman's contention that his contributions to the bottom line are not "material", it's at least temporarily forgiven as Paramount prepares to distribute Indy 4. That film should help Paramount's ballooning market share, if not their less-impressive profit margin.

Redstone's take on the companies' elbowing to make their own content in each others' specialty has been and remains consistently laissez-faire.

"I have stated from the beginning that Viacom and CBS have the right to pursue their own strategic objectives in the best interest of their individual shareholders," he's explained. "Competition between the two companies hones their skills and their productivity."

Redstone' daughter Shari, 53, has long been honing her skills to take over the chairman's kingdom. But she's had to fight a certain alienation that seems to date to her father's 2002 divorce from his wife of half a century, Phyllis, to marry forty-ish Paula Fortunato.

Shari lives in Boston, the ancestral Redstone (once Rothstein) town where her father legendarily hung from a third-floor window to survive a 1979 hotel fire that burned a third of his body, and the happy couple is in L.A.

"My wife is closer to me these days than my daughter," he's said, and when Shari made hr ambitions known, he slapped her down with the assertion that such a succession would be up to company board members.

"It must be remembered that I gave to my children their stock," he noted archly; "and it is I, with little or no contribution on their part, who built these great media companies with the help of the boards of both companies."

Redstone's son, Brent, who owned — but was prohibited from selling — about 17 percent of the family's primordial money maker, a theater chain called National Amusements sued his father last year to break up the company so he could cash out. He and his father settled this year for an undisclosed amount.

Clearly, to paraphrase a line from (the thriving Paramount Vantage's) There Will Be Blood, the chairman has a competition in him.

The creative tension around Redstone may not be great for family harmony, and it can't be fun for executives waiting for his next sideswipe, but Viacom's stock did rise 7 percent in the first quarter.

(CBS has seen a decline, despite good revenue numbers, and as pundits predict that Fox will move ahead of it as the most-watched network, in mid- April the share price hit a 52-week low of $20.68.).

The surprises will probably keep coming. It was at a Paley Center for Media tribute to Redstone in mid-February that newsman Bob Schieffer took the stage with a country and western band to sing a song dubbed "Mr. Redstone" based on "Mr. Goldstone" from the Musical Gypsy.

The paean touched on the Boston legend ("You lost your good pajamas in that fire in Boston"), spotlighted recent history ("You got rid of one Tom Cruise, but you kept CBS News"), and generally seemed to revel in Redstone's sense that at his age, with his money and clout, he can do exactly as he pleases:

"Have an eclair Mr. Redstone, buy some networks, make a movie, play a tune. Take a break now, Mr. Redstone, 'cause another deal will come along real soon...

Photograph of Sumner Redstone with Paula Fortunato at the 2008 Academy Awards by Steve Granitz/WireImage