Signing off after more than 40 years in the business, Lionsgate TV's vice chairman offers war stories, sage advice and a reason to be hopeful amid the industry struggles.
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.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, 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 Since this decision was made, I suspect you’ve been in reflection mode. Which memories have come flooding back?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.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 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 fromhappened 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 , 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.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 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 , we stopped having fun. 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.Yes. Also, I had a really interesting lunch the other day with Ken Ziffren, who’s sort of like my 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.”It actually does sound fun to me. I like creating new business models. But I don’t want to do it. 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 , 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. 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 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. 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 , who reads, and I said, “Read this over the weekend. Call me Monday.” She did, and you know the rest.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.’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 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 thatexperience 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.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 .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 .”It was very early days. And then Fox knocked on the door at a time when broadcast was the 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 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.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? AndWhen 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 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!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 , I look at Bela , 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.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.”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.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 calledI 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, 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?”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 . I’ve found myself saying to Scott Herbst , “Find me some more broadcast procedurals.”I remember when I came to Lionsgate, it was very, very early days, and Kevin 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 Bob Greenblatt, 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,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 onthat we would play here of, “Who was that supposed to be?” Because Seth and Evan and 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?”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.” (John Oliver Mocks Trump for Avoiding the Word “War” Amid U.S. Military Operation in Iran: “He Really Just Talks Like a 6-Year-Old”The Hollywood Reporter is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2026 The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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