Stern and her boss, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer, flank "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm and creator Matthew Weiner at the Lionsgate Golden Globe Party at Polo Lounge in 2010. Larry Busacca/Getty Images Sandra Stern’s office doesn’t look like it’s occupied by someone who’s a few weeks out from retirement.
There are scripts piling on her desk and a series of framed photos and awards that she’s collected during her 40-plus year run in the entertainment business, more than half of them at Lionsgate, where she’ll finish as vice chairman of the television group. As Stern notes, she’ll stay on as a consultant for another year, though March 31 is her last day in a leadership role and her extensive travel plans commence immediately.
“You know, I was terrified,” she says of closing this chapter. “There was an opportunity to take a buyout about a year and a half, two years ago, and a number of people who were close to retirement age took advantage of the opportunity, but I wasn’t ready.”
That changed this past summer, when she told her boss, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer, that she’d be signing off at the end of her contract. It was the right time, she reasoned, and she could feel good about what she was leaving behind. The studio is responsible for current breakouts like Seth Rogen’s Emmy winner The Studio as well as The Hunting Wives, Ghosts and The Rookie, which follow past hits like Mad Men, Weeds and Orange Is the New Black.
As her last day looms, the studio’s highest-ranking female sat for a wide-ranging exit interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Lionsgate TV Group execs Stern and Kevin Beggs flank Oprah Winfrey at the premiere of OWN’s Greenleaf in 2016. Angela Weiss/Getty Images Since this decision was made, I suspect you’ve been in reflection mode. Which memories have come flooding back?
I’ll tell you, I remember going to a pre-Emmy party for Orange Is the New Black at Ted Sarandos’ house, and it was just us and the cast, and everybody, including Ted, was dancing. Ted’s a great dancer, by the way.
I’ve seen him in action.
He loves to party, and at the time, I thought, how much fun is this for all of us to be in this situation? But also, here’s somebody who loves TV. He loves it. He loves everything about it, and he’s having fun with it. And that’s how I always felt about the TV business, which was a real community. And somehow, as much as TV got bigger, it was still a small business. It was still a personal business. A business where everybody gets up with Ted in the middle and dances.
You talk to people around town today and the consensus seems to be that the business is not as fun as it once was.
Well, it’s not fun. Or it’s not as much fun. But this [story came] full circle. I went to the Netflix party for the Golden Globes this year. I didn’t know anybody in the room, which never used to happen. All these years, we knew everybody. But our cast from Hunting Wives happened to be at the party, and there was Ted talking to them and taking selfies. And as huge as that party was and as huge as [his business is], he still loves television and loves the talent. And I did think a bit cynically because Ted is not as old as I am, but he’s still of a generation who recognized that this is entertainment. If you’re not having fun, don’t do it.
So how do you instill that ethos in the next generation?
Well, the business is harder, no doubt about it. I started with Jon Feltheimer in 1986 at a company called New World, and at the time, you’d go to MIPCOM and New World would do a big party every year off-site at midnight. We didn’t have a lot of money. I mean, Lionsgate is wealthy by comparison. And this was really early in my career, and I remember asking Jim McNamara, who ran our distribution, “Why do we do this party?” He said to me, “Because nobody ever walked into our booth to look at our [show] posters. People walk in to see if they could get an invitation to our party or they come back the next day to tell us how great the party was. And once we get them in, we can sell them something.” There was just a much, much greater sense of doing business in a sort of social, organic, relationship kind of way. You feel differently about somebody you’re making a deal with if you were drinking champagne and dancing with them at 3 o’clock in the morning the night before. But [as a business], we stopped having fun.
The business became more transactional.
Yes. A part of it is just that the business has grown up and matured and become more of a business. And partly, it’s that the business is hard today.
Many would argue that you are exiting at the right time.
I am. (Laughs.)
I assume you heard a lot of that when news of your retirement broke?
Yes. Also, I had a really interesting lunch the other day with Ken Ziffren, who’s sort of like my rabbi.
I think he’s a lot of people’s rabbi.
He is, but he’s also my boss because I teach at UCLA Law School in the Ziffren Center. So, we were having lunch, and it’s a treat whenever I can have lunch with Ken, and he said to me, “The business is at an inflection point right now. The business that we had when it was a broadcast business and a linear business, we’ve tried to glom onto streaming and it doesn’t work. So, we need to come up with something new.” Then he said, “And I don’t know anybody except for you who can do it.” And I said, “In that case, I’m leaving at the right time because I do not want to.”
That does not sound fun.
It actually does sound fun to me. I like creating new business models. But I don’t want to do it. (Laughs.)
Fair enough.
But I really have enjoyed the TV business. And so many people here are of a different generation — they’re young and smart, but they didn’t grow up in a business that was joyful. Right now, they’re looking at a business where it’s very hard to get shows on the air, and it’s very hard to make money off those shows. It’s a struggle, and what I’ve really tried to do was instill the joy that this business was for us.
How do you do that?
For one, I make them go out to lunch with people. I’ll tell you a story, something that happened maybe six weeks ago. We were trying to get The Rookie spinoff ordered [to pilot] at ABC, and we were on the 1-yard line and could not get it ordered. Everyone here was lobbying Simran [Sethi, who oversees scripted programming at ABC and Hulu]. And then I called Craig Erwich [who runs the whole TV group] and I said, “What are you doing tomorrow? Are you going to be in the office?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Great, I’ll be over at noon.” I picked up bagels and I drove over there and I walked in and he looked at me and he said, “Where’s the lox?” I said, “For a series order, you get lox. For a pilot, you get bagels.”
Amazing.
We sat and we had bagels, and within two minutes, we had the order. But he said something to me that was really apt and I brought it back to the team. He said, “People don’t do this anymore. This is how we grew up, this is how we handled relationships.” He said, “You’re in Santa Monica, you’re vice chairman of a company, Disney is out in the middle of nowhere, the fact that you make an effort is meaningful.”
You sat down and talked through the issues, versus having your business affairs execs shooting emails back and forth?
Exactly. It was, “What’s the hesitation? Is there an issue that I can solve for you?” You have a two-minute conversation and it’s generally pretty easy. But people don’t talk.
When you look back at all of the deals that you’ve done, which stand out as the hardest or wildest?
The most fun for me that was maybe the hardest and maybe the easiest was Mad Men.
Why?
Years before, I did a series with Darren Star for Fox called The Street. It was about Wall Street and sexism and men behaving badly and it didn’t work. It was a great series. It was written well. The casting was fantastic. People just didn’t show up. And as you always do, you try to do a postmortem — what might we have done differently? And the thinking was, it’s a world that most people are not familiar with, Wall Street, and nobody wanted people behaving so badly in their living room every week. That was our thought. So, when I first read the Mad Men script, I thought, “This is so brilliantly written, but it was men behaving badly and it was Madison Avenue. It was shades of The Street, so I’m not going to do it.”
So, what changed?
I was in my house one Saturday, in the days when we had DVDs, and I got a call from two agents at ICM. I went way back with these guys, and they said, “You’re home, we’re coming over.” And they brought me the DVD of the pilot. AMC had made it but did not want to be producing a series, so they were looking for a partner. I watched it and I said, “I cannot live without this series.” I flew to New York the next day, a Sunday, and had drinks with [creator] Matt Weiner at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. He had whiskey and a milk or maybe it was scotch and a side of milk. Anyway, I fell in love with Matt. I blew off a dinner that I had with somebody else. The next day, I sat with AMC and then I went to their lawyers, bought the series, and then I called [my boss] Jon and I said, “I think I did something really, really good, but if it’s not good, please don’t fire me.”
It worked out well, clearly, though there were other deal hiccups along the way…
Oh yes. But to this day, I’m still friendly with Matt, deal hiccups not-withstanding, personality quirks notwithstanding…
Stern, with the cast as well as creator Matthew Weiner and others execs, at the “Mad Men” premiere. Courtesy of Subject At one point, the show almost went away, no?
This was a fun moment. (Laughs.) Our option at AMC was coming up and they either had to negotiate the deal or lose it. And we had another year on Matt’s [contract], but they were going to have to pick up two years on the series and they couldn’t figure out what to do. They did not have a business person at AMC at the time, so they hired an outside attorney to handle the deal. He was used to representing major talent, which means he was used to having a lot of leverage. That was probably not the best way to approach Matt, and Matt got furious.
Oh, I recall that part.
One day, I’m getting dressed for work and I get a call from CAA and Jeanne Newman, who represented Matt, saying, “We’re at CAA, you have to come over here and sort this out.” At 2 o’clock in the morning, we closed the deal, and it was great. But during that time, I had an idea. I had made a deal with Ted, which is how I got to know him, to license the SVOD [rights to Mad Men] to him at a time when Netflix did not have originals, and we had a very good experience. So, I said to Ted, “My deal with AMC is coming up, and I don’t know if we will be able to make a new deal. You should throw your hat in the ring.” He said, “We don’t do originals.” That was in January. Four months later, he called and said, “And now maybe we will. What have you got?” We went in four days later with Orange Is the New Black. Jenji Kohan had just asked us to option the book for her. We didn’t even have a pitch. I gave the book to Cindy [Holland], who reads, and I said, “Read this over the weekend. Call me Monday.” She did, and you know the rest.
You just said that Cindy Holland reads. Is the implication that others don’t?
Oh, no, no. It was that our team will typically spend months working on a pitch because most development executives will tell you that that is the best way to sell a show. Sometimes it’s a good spec script. But you need to shape the TV show, right? We don’t generally go into a buyer with a book and say, “You imagine what the show is going to look like.” But at that point, Cindy was very new in development, and she was used to reading books.
I remember doing a piece early on in Orange’s run about how talent reps were using things like Halloween costumes as proof of the show’s popularity in their negotiations with Netflix. They didn’t have ratings to use as leverage…
Oh, we had no idea [how many people were watching.] But I’m a pretty pragmatic person and so I just assumed, with Netflix, if it wasn’t doing well, they wouldn’t keep it on the air. And then the longer it stays on, the more leverage you have. And those were really early days. There was no notion that maybe longevity is less necessary for a streamer than for a broadcaster. But that Orange Is The New Black experience was a fun one because it was so early that Netflix was just really Ted and Cindy, so Cindy and I worked out the model, and it was such early days that I remember her speculating, “Well, we don’t know how we’re going to air these. Maybe we’ll do two a week.” They were still trying to figure it out. And our original deal with Netflix was just for the U.S. and Canada. Pretty quickly after, they went global, but they would call me every few weeks, “We’re thinking about the U.K. now. Could you sell me the U.K.?” Or I remember we were talking to a French network and Cindy called and said, “No, no, no, we have to have France.”
And just like that, your international distribution business vanished. Did it concern you at the time?
You know what? It was taking money out of our distribution team’s pocket, but they were paying so much upfront. Orange Is the New Black was really good for Lionsgate. And Jenji, as the creator/showrunner, saw a huge backend. In those days, if you had a hit, it was a huge backend. Today, we’re looking at [something different].
From where you sit, what’s the most and least appealing place to sell a show now?
The best place to sell a show is the place that is going to support it, where it’s going to get an audience and where it can stay on the air. I learned this lesson very early on. I did this show with Jay Mohr when I was at Sony. We developed it for a very early HBO, not with Jay. We developed it with Oliver Platt, actually. And it was an HBO show, but the HBO business model was really terrible — so terrible, at that time, that when I made that deal with Michael Lombardo, who was in business affairs at the time, he said, “We’ll develop it and if the business model doesn’t work for you, you can take the show [elsewhere].”
Wow.
It was very early days. And then Fox knocked on the door at a time when broadcast was the [pre-eminent] model, so we moved the show from HBO to Fox. And we put Jay Mohr in because he was more of a Fox actor than Oliver was. The show was hilarious but it did not work on Fox because it was an HBO show. This had to have been 35 years ago, but I keep [this plaque from Jay Mohr] on my desk as a constant reminder that the best place for a show is the right place and the money should not factor into it.
Presumably, in success, the money will follow.
That’s exactly right. But I always look at, where’s it going to get on the air? Where is it going to stay on the air? Where’s it going to get an audience? And then what’s the deal? My job is about deals but the best deal at the wrong network is not good.
When you started out in this business, you were the only female lawyer at your law firm. And if I’m not mistaken, you’d hear a lot of, “Can you get my coffee?” When did that shift?
You know, that’s a good question because I was conscious of it at the time but it was also just the reality, so I didn’t pay so much attention to it. I put my head down, I did my work and I did notice that I was not invited…
To the golf clubs…
To any of it, and I’m still not. But I never let that define me. You hear women say all the time, “I had to work harder.” I don’t think they had to work harder. I think they got where they got because they work hard and they were just good and therefore succeeded. It may have felt like they were working harder, but I don’t think I would have worked any differently in an organization with women. I might have gotten invited to more things!
I have no doubt.
But I guess I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with that notion of somehow, as women, we’re victims. And a lot of us have done really well. I look at Dana [Walden], I look at Bela [Bajaria], I look at Cindy. And before them, I look at Nancy Tellem and Nina Tassler and Bonnie Hammer. So, there were opportunities. And I think the one thing that I see with all of them, because interviewers will often ask, “How do you get a seat at the table?” And it’s like, “You pull out a chair and sit down.” It’s funny, I remember when I was promoted here, there was a big question about whether I should be chairman or chairwoman or chair.
You landed on chairman. Why was that important to you?
I don’t know, all of the other chairmen in the company were chairman. And chair? I’m not a chair. And chairwoman felt a little defensive. But it was an odd thing. Even at that law firm where I was the only woman, I remember the head of the litigation department would talk and everybody would be taking notes and then he’d get up and walk down the hall and we would all follow him and he’d walk into the men’s room, and everybody would follow him into the men’s room, except me. I would stand outside the door and I remember thinking, even then, “I’m so glad I don’t have to go watch him pee.”
Stern as a young executive with now-FX chief Nick Grad and Apple TV honcho Jamie Erlicht. Courtesy of Subject You’ve gained a lot of wisdom in your 40-plus years in this business. What would you like to pass on to the next generation?
What I’ve seen in the young people that I deal with, particularly young women, is a fear. A fear of being too pushy or being perceived as too pushy, a fear of rejection, a fear that they won’t be accepted or permitted into the room. When a young woman comes to speak to me, by and large, she’ll knock on the door and say, “I’m sorry…” And I’ll say, “Why? What did you do?” Whereas men, and maybe it’s just the way that they are raised or trained, if they have something to say, they’ll come in, “Do you have some time? Can I speak to you.” They’re not apologizing for their presence. So the advice that I always give people is to just assume that you belong and ask for what you want.
How about at the negotiating table?
I think the reason I’ve been successful as a negotiator is because I understand that every deal is the beginning of a relationship. So, every negotiation for me starts with, “What’s important to you?” I remember early in my career on a show called Mad About You, I was making a deal for a new showrunner. In those days, showrunners did not stay with their show for very long — two years and then they turned it over. But one of the showrunners had been quite successful for us, so we were renewing his contract and his lawyer made these outrageous demands. It was a lawyer I know well, who was not an outrageous guy. And I said to him, “There’s an issue here. Tell me what it is.” And he said, “Well, [the showrunner] is not feeling loved or respected by the studio.”
So, I called the showrunner and I said, “You know, I’m worried about you. You don’t look good. You got heavy. I don’t think you’re taking care of yourself. I’m having a treadmill sent to your office and I’m giving you two tickets to Hawaii. Go. Take care of yourself. Have a vacation.” The deal closed. And I never would have thought to do that if I hadn’t asked the question. So, I always say to people who work for me, ask those questions. You don’t have to be so smart, you really don’t. You can be a little dumb. You can say to somebody, “Why? What do you need? What’s the problem?”
Early in this conversation, you agreed this was a good time to get out of this business…
But I’m actually very optimistic about the business.
People are looking at the consolidation that’s happening and they’re looking at how hard it is to make a deal or sell a show. So, tell them why they don’t need to worry.
Because people love stories, and that’s not going to change. So, if the business gets too hard, it’s like everything else, too much pressure here, it’s got to be released there. The models may change. They have to change. And we’re going to go through a tough time because the guild deals are up, but I don’t think anybody’s got the appetite for a strike. I can’t imagine. And if there is one, it’s going to be another bit of pain in the infrastructure. But ultimately, things change. I mean, here we are doing broadcast [shows at Lionsgate]. I’ve found myself saying to Scott Herbst [Lionsgate’s development head], “Find me some more broadcast procedurals.”
Quite the pivot.
I remember when I came to Lionsgate, it was very, very early days, and Kevin [Beggs] was building a TV business with no resources and no support and he was doing remarkably well considering but I came in and I said, “We’re going to get rid of the broadcast business. It doesn’t make any sense for us.” We just didn’t have the money in those days for those kind of deficits. I figured out how to convince everybody that cable would work for us. I remember bringing [then-Showtime boss] Bob Greenblatt Weeds because I knew Jenji. She was a staff writer on Mad About You, and she was really talented. Then Showtime built whatever business it built, which was, for a time, a great linear business and now they’ve decided to shift. And that’s what happens. We at Lionsgate shifted from broadcast to cable, and then when cable became less robust, we figured out streaming, and now we’re back. Suddenly it’s like, The Rookie, that’s a good model because we have all of the rights. My point is that I’ve been in the business long enough to see it all comes back around. And so, yeah, I’m hopeful.
We should note that you are also signing off with a major hit on your hands. Lionsgate is the studio on The Studio, which satirizes this industry. I’ve got to ask, do you find yourself cringing as the scripts or cuts comes through?
I’ll tell you, in the early days, when we first launched, there was a bit of a parlor game that we would play here of, “Who was that supposed to be?” Because Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and [their company] Point Grey has had a long relationship with Lionsgate, and before that with Joe Drake and Nathan Kahane. So, there was a lot of, “Is that supposed to be Joe?” “Is that supposed to be Nathan?”
Oh, I bet…
I remember Catherine O’Hara saying to me at the premiere for season one, “I think I should be channeling you.” And I said, “No, I think you should not be channeling me.” (Laughs.)
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