The Sumner Redstone Story

Many years ago I had the surreal honor of being flown first-class to Los Angeles to spend a weekend at the legendary home of Robert Evans as he very nervously prepared to release The Fat Lady Sang, his long in the works follow-up to The Kid Stays in the Picture.

It was never entirely apparent why I had been invited. It felt a cosmic fluke and cosmic mistake but I got the impression that the famous raconteur labored under the delusion that I was hipper, more powerful and better connected than I actually was. 

Evans did not seem to realize when he very graciously invited me into his world that I was a giant fucking dork who worked for a website that would not exist in a year. 

Evans had read my worshipful article on The Kid Stays in the Picture in the A.V Club and thought that I might be in a position to help him sell his most recent book to the same young, hip audience that made his debut memoir an instant cult classic and one of the best loved and most important books about the movie business ever written.

He was wrong. I had ideas, all right, but they were not ones he seemed particularly interested in. I thought it would be neat if he did the Los Angeles podcast circuit, opening his home, for example, to Marc Maron and WTF so that he could reach a sizable audience that otherwise might not even know that he was still alive, let alone that he’d finally released a sequel to The Kid Stays in the Picture. 

The Chinatown producer did not know what a podcast was, and never left his bed or changed out of his pajamas the whole time I was there so my suggestion did not go anywhere. 

It was a fascinating but also bittersweet and terribly melancholy experience.

To me, Evans was the ultimate winner but he seemed exhausted and terrified that the world had lost interest in him and his fairy tale existence. 

My final night in Evans’ home we watched a boxing match on HBO and the man of the house talked on the phone with one of his friend Sumner. Sumner was off course Sumner Redstone, the billionaire mogul behind Viacom who recently died at 97 years old.

Evans seemed down the whole weekend. He couldn’t stop comparing himself unfavorably to the world-beaters and billionaires in his world. Sure, he had a nice home, but it was nothing compared to where Sumner lived. He similarly complained that while he might not be poor his personal fortune couldn’t compare to that of the many billionaires he called friends. 

That made an indelible impression on me. Even Robert Evans thought that he wasn’t good enough. Even Robert Evans looked in the mirror and saw a failure and a has been with nothing left to say. Even a man legendary for his breezy confidence wrestled mightily with feelings of failure and anxiety and paralyzing depression. 

I learned a valuable life lesson in the process. I’ve managed to hold onto my fragile sanity in an insane and often brutal world by not comparing myself to either people. 

I’ve gone out of my way not to see other people’s success as my failure. It’s not easy, particularly in a feverishly competitive field like pop culture media. But it’s absolutely essential because otherwise the energy that I need to keep this website going and provide for my family during apocalyptic times would be wasted feeling envious of the literally countless number of people who came up with me at the same time and now are much more successful. 

I’ve carved out my own lane. I’m doing my own thing and it’s creatively fulfilling and more or less pays the bills even if it’s not anywhere near as prestigious or lucrative as some of the positions my former colleagues have ascended to. 

I don’t want to be an 83 year old man who feels like he’s a loser because he’s a millionaire rather than a billionaire. When you compare yourself to the most successful people in the world you can only lose. It doesn’t matter how impressive you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re Robert Freaking Evans: you’re still going to come up short.

I might not have taught Evans how to connect with millennials and Gen-Xers but during that intense, extremely emotional weekend I learned something absolutely essential about perspective.  

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