It was a legendary Hollywood battle, one filled with so much back-stabbing and subterfuge that Vanity Fair likened it to a horror movie: “Wall Street as directed by Hitchcock."
For months starting in the fall of 1993, two media titans, Sumner M Redstone and Barry Diller, fought each other for what was then the entertainment industry's ultimate prize: Paramount Pictures, the 62-acre studio behind classic films like The Godfather and Chinatown and contemporary blockbusters like Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop.
The home entertainment boom was showering Hollywood with cash. But Paramount was more than a money machine. Legacy studios like Paramount