Redstone, Sumner

▪ 2002

      “The words step down, the word retire … is not in my dictionary. I love what I'm doing. I know I'm at the top of my game.” These sentiments were expressed in June 2001 by Sumner Redstone, the 78-year-old chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Viacom Inc., a media conglomerate whose holdings included, among others, Paramount Pictures, CBS, Blockbuster, Simon & Schuster, and MTV. Also in 2001, along with his executive duties, Redstone published his autobiography, A Passion to Win, written with Peter Knobler.

      Redstone was born Sumner Rothstein on May 27, 1923, in Boston. He graduated with a B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1944. Because he had become fluent in Japanese, he was chosen to join a U.S. Army team charged with cracking secret Japanese military and diplomatic communication codes during the remainder of World War II. After the war he entered Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1947. During the next few years, he worked for the U.S. Court of Appeals and served as an instructor at the University of San Francisco and as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark. In 1951 he became a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland, & Redstone.

      Stating that “litigation is generally offensive to me,” Redstone in 1954 returned to Boston and began working for Northeast Theater Corp., a motion picture-exhibition business that his father had established. By 1964 he had expanded Northeast Theater to 59 screens in the Boston area, and three years later he became president and chief executive officer of the firm, which was renamed National Amusements. During the next few years, he continued to increase the company's number of movie theatres. Although prosperous and successful, he concluded that the real money and power in the movie business was in Hollywood. After seeing the film Star Wars in 1977, he began buying shares in Twentieth Century Fox, the movie's producer, and he later sold them at a large profit.

      In 1979 Redstone suffered severe burns in a hotel fire in Boston. At the time, he had increased the number of National Amusements theatres to 180. With time to reflect during his recovery, he began to think, however, that his ambitions had been too limited. In 1987 he purchased Viacom, which was then a somewhat obscure television company. With that acquisition he became the largest producer of programs for cable television subscribers, owning Showtime, the Movie Channel, MTV, five network-affiliated TV stations, and syndication rights to The Cosby Show, one of the most popular programs on television; at the same time, his movie-theatre chain had expanded to 1,300 screens.

      In 1994 Redstone added to his empire by winning hard-fought battles to acquire Paramount Communications and Blockbuster, and in 2000 he merged Viacom with CBS to create the second largest media company in the world, behind only AOL Time Warner.

David R. Calhoun

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▪ American executive

originally  Sumner Murray Rothstein  

born May 27, 1923, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

      American media executive whose company, Viacom, acquired leading film, television, and entertainment properties.

      Redstone's father, Michael (Mickey), was a liquor wholesaler, nightclub owner, and drive-in movie operator. As a boy, Redstone studied at the private Boston Latin School and went on to attend Harvard College (B.A., 1944) and Harvard Law School (L.L.B., 1947). After practicing law in Washington, D.C., and Boston, Redstone joined his father's company, National Amusements Inc. (NAI), in 1954 and in 1967 became its president and CEO. His leadership transformed NAI into one of the largest movie theatre chains in the United States. Redstone built new movie theatres near suburban shopping malls and, frustrated by the preferences shown to studio-owned theatres, successfully sued Hollywood studios for the right to show first-run movies. When he saw that movie production could be far more profitable than movie distribution, Redstone began acquiring large shares in studios. Moments after viewing Star Wars in 1977, he ordered 25,000 shares in the film's sponsoring studio, Twentieth Century–Fox.

      In 1987, at age 63, he became head of Viacom (Viacom Inc.) when NAI took a controlling interest in the cable network. That move was followed by a series of aggressive acquisitions over the next 15 years. Viacom's holdings came to include Black Entertainment Television (BET), MTV Networks, United Paramount Network (UPN), publisher Simon & Schuster, and majority shares in Comedy Central and Blockbuster Inc. (sold by means of a stock spin-off in 2004). Redstone had borrowed against his Blockbuster shares to acquire Paramount Pictures in 1993. In 1999 Viacom purchased CBS for $37 billion—the largest entertainment merger up to that date—which made it a peer of American media leviathans TimeWarner and the Walt Disney Company.

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