Sumner Redstone

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{{Infobox Celebrity| name = Sumner Murray Redstone| image = Sumner Redstone.jpg| caption = Sumner Murray Redstone| birth_date = | birth_place = Boston, Massachusetts [mass media businessman (2002 - present)| children = [Shari Redstone, Brent Redstone [1923 in Boston, Massachusetts) is majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, he is majority owner of Midway Games, Viacom and CBS Corporation.

Early Life and Career Sumner was born to Jewish parents Michael and Belle Rothstein in 1923; his family's name was changed from Rothstein to Redstone (the literal translation of the surname from German language to English language) in 1940, when Sumner was 17. His father, Michael Rothstein, was the owner of the Northeast Theater Corporation in Dedham, Massachusetts--the forerunner of National Amusements.Weddings/Celebrations: Paula Fortunato, Sumner M. Redstone, New York Times, April 6, 2003

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.Cf. "The Highwaymen" by Ken Auletta. Auletta also wrote that Redstone finished his Harvard undergraduate degree in two and a half years. 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, 20th Century Fox, Orion Pictures Corporation, 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 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, a company which he had already been buying stock in as an investment and was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the Federal Communications Commission ruled that television networks could not Television syndication 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 (TV series), 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 (TV channel)'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 (TV channel). 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 could not 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 had 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 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 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, was not 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, Black Entertainment Television, Nick at Nite, Noggin (TV channel)/The N, TV Land, Country Music Television, and Spike TV), pay television (Showtime and The Movie Channel), Radio programming (Infinity Broadcasting, which produced the immensely popular Howard Stern' Talk radios), 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 (TV series), Wheel of Fortune (American game show), 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 have been feuding publicly over issues of corporate governance and the future of the cinema chain (http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/09/19/redstone_says_he_relies_on_his_instinct/) . There have also been numerous articles stating that Sumner's marriage is in trouble. (http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/redstone-family-woes-now-his-marriage/ , http://www.laobserved.com/biz/2007/08/redstone_marriage_in.php)

Documents have recently been made public which verify that, as part of a settlement from Sumner's first dicorce, all of Sumner's stock is in irrevocable trusts that will be left for his grandchildren. (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-fi-shari1oct01,1,4236064.story?coll=la-headlines-business-enter)

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. (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=ahBw0yOHsTgE&refer=us). 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. Press Release

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. Viacom, 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 "Blitz: The League", a game using a fictional league (previous versions had an NFL license), featured gratuitous violence, excessive amounts of sex, and 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. Redstone has acknowledged that Stern saw him in a restaurant in New York, and said "I'll be back," but added that Stern was joking.

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).

Interestingly, Viacom's broadcasting properties at the time of "A Passion To Win"'s release included several radio stations and two TV stations (WBZ-TV which had just become a CBS O&O through a merger with Westinghouse 4 years before Viacom and CBS merged and WSBK-TV) in Redstone's hometown of Boston.)

Net worth In 2007 he was ranked #86 on Forbes's list of the hundred richest people in the world, with an estimated worth of US dollar8 1000000000 (number).

Trivia Midway Games, of which Sumner owns 89%, published a game called Gauntlet: Dark Legacy 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.Vanity Fair Article, Page 2

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 is because the film Mission: Impossible III 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 (character) 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.

Notes

References

Auletta, Ken, "The Highwaymen", Harvest Books, 1998. ISBN 0156005735