Interview, Fireside Chat
A Conversation with Sherry Lansing
- Anticipates a significant shift in the entertainment industry where more women run studios than men, contrasting this with the era of her twenties and thirties when she believed a woman would never head a studio.
- Plans to leave the movie business before turning 60 to avoid the personal costs of a seven-day work week, which she fears would prevent maintaining a partner, having children, or having unrestricted family time.
- Expects her post-retirement life to be "busier than ever" focused on philanthropy in cancer research and education, areas she believes "found" her rather than her actively seeking them.
- Projects a transition into philanthropy requiring collaboration with scientists to explain technical concepts, noting her current lack of knowledge in these new fields.
- Predicts living to age 100, marking a reversal from previous fears of not reaching 70 due to her parents' early deaths.
- Foresees a post-corporate lifestyle characterized by authentic joy, the ability to stay on vacation or dine with friends without board meeting constraints, and an overall feeling of being "more alive."
- Expresses concern that the executive culture involves excessive bureaucracy regarding logistics like the commissary and parking, as well as internal "fights and battles" driven by the passion of filmmakers.
- Identifies a difficult tension between artistic passion and commercial viability, where loved movies may not be commercially successful.
- Highlights the anxiety of writing a memoir without prior controls or approvals, with an initial uncertainty that the book might never be completed.
- Acknowledges that working as a studio head would have generated constant guilt regarding choices between board meetings and children's events, a scenario deemed impossible to manage alongside running the studio in her youth.
- Notes that romantic relationships would likely suffer under the consuming nature of her executive role.
- Recognizes that some past anxieties regarding movie performance did materialize, though she distinguishes between feeling depressed and self-pity.
- Describes the perception that executives possess "magic" for picking hits as incorrect, despite her own success in the field.
- Recalls feeling anxious following meetings with her analyst, particularly on Mondays after weekend sessions.
- Admits to missing aspects of her previous career while embracing the "happiest time" in her life defined by philanthropy and family.
- Emphasizes that change requires a leap of faith when transitioning between career phases.
- States that she would not have been able to raise children and run a studio simultaneously during the earlier era of her life.