‘Unscripted’ Book Authors Provide Insights on Redstone Empire Mess
variety.comAndrew Wallenstein President and Chief Media Analyst What began for a pair of New York Times reporters as an investigation into managerial malfeasance ended up turning into a family drama.
While it was the actions of Viacom founder Sumner Redstone and CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves that first attracted James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams to what became their new book, “Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,” it was a third figure who ultimately loomed larger for Stewart. “We had Shari Redstone, the much under-appreciated — to put it mildly — daughter of Sumner Redstone thrust into a world that was not of her choosing, in an attempt to gain control of the companies and the family legacy,” he said on the latest episode of the Variety podcast “Strictly Business.” “So that became the much bigger story.
It’s a corporate story, it is a MeToo story, but it’s much bigger than that.” Listen to the podcast here: As Abrams and Stewart recount in the book, Shari Redstone had a difficult time getting the cooperation of management at Viacom and CBS, in addition to tangling with her own father, with whom she had a complicated relationship, and the women who attempted to gain control of the companies from him.
The “Unscripted” authors broke new ground in illuminating the circumstances around the final years of Redstone, who died in 2020 at the age of 97.
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