Jonathan Dolgen, Longtime Viacom Entertainment Group Chairman, Dies at 78

Mike Barnes
·5 min read
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Jonathan Dolgen, the tough-minded dealmaker and skillful numbers-cruncher who spent a decade at Viacom working for Sumner Redstone and alongside Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing, has died. He was 78.

Dolgen died Monday evening of natural causes at UCLA Medical Center surrounded by his family, a publicist announced. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 2012.

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A native of Queens and a former Wall Street lawyer, Dolgen also held top positions at Columbia Pictures, Fox and Sony Pictures before becoming the first top executive recruited by Redstone for the newly merged entertainment conglomerate forged by Viacom’s $8.2 billion purchase of Paramount Communications.

“I had known Dolgen off and on over the years when I was a motion picture exhibitor, even before I gained control of Viacom,” Redstone recalled in his 2001 book, Passion to Win. “He was with Columbia Pictures, and I remember sitting with him in one particular meeting that became rather heated and thinking, ‘Boy, there is one smart guy.'”

Dolgen came on as Viacom Entertainment Group chairman in April 1994 to essentially fill the role that the ousted Stanley Jaffe had played as Paramount Communications president, and he quickly embarked on slashing expenses.

A burly 6-foot-2 with penetrating blue eyes, the intimidating Dolgen was known to enjoy the gamesmanship of negotiations and for his incendiary disposition. (He liked to swing a baseball bat in his office, referred to as the “Heart of Darkness” by many who dealt with him.)

“Mr. Dolgen has a reputation for having an abrasive personality and an incandescent temper, even by the standards of Hollywood, where screaming is sometimes regarded as a normal level of discourse,” Bernard Weinraub wrote in The New York Times soon after the executive joined Viacom.

Still, the financial whiz left three major studios in better shape than he found them. Successful films released under his watch included Gladiator (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Braveheart (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996), Titanic (1997), The Truman Show (1998) and The Italian Job (2003).

After overseeing Paramount’s movie and television operations (Viacom launched the UPN network in 1995), Simon & Shuster and other divisions, Dolgen resigned in June 2004 in the wake of exec upheaval that saw Tom Freston of MTV Networks and Les Moonves of CBS being named Viacom co-presidents.

“Due to the recently announced changes in Viacom’s management structure, the time was right for me to step aside,” he said. He then became a principal in the investment entity Wood River Ventures.

Born on April 27, 1945, Jonathan Lee Dolgen was the son of Selma Dolgen, a secretary for Zionist organizations and a Hadassah Hospital fundraiser, and Abe Dolgen, a Russian-born organizer and negotiator with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York.

He majored in industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, graduating in 1966, and earned his law degree from NYU three years later. Dolgen specialized in corporate law at the Wall Street firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, then landed at Columbia as an assistant general counsel in 1976.

He moved to 20th Century Fox in 1985 as studio chief Barry Diller was launching the Fox broadcast network, eventually serving as chairman of 20th Television and Fox Inc. and overseeing such areas as TV production, syndication, licensing and merchandising.

Dolgen joined Sony in 1990 as president of Columbia and was president of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s motion picture group from 1991-94 when he reined in costs in the wake of the free-spending Peter Guber-Jon Peters era at the studio.

<p>From left: Jonathan Dolgen, Sumner Redstone and Sherry Lansing in 2003</p>

From left: Jonathan Dolgen, Sumner Redstone and Sherry Lansing in 2003

He arrived at Viacom just two months after Redstone had bested Diller in a bruising bidding war for the company and started co-financing movies with outside partners (and selling overseas rights to others) to limit Paramount’s risks.

“This company has never believed in taking outside financing for anything,” Lansing told Newsweek in 1994. “They were inflexible. All that is changing.”

Early in his tenure, Dolgen lured Michael Douglas and Steven Reuther’s Douglas/Reuther production banner to Paramount in a 12-picture deal.

In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway, Lansing called Dolgen “a fantastic partner” and “a genius at the financial aspect.”

“We would go into these board meetings where there were just long spreadsheets of all these financials, and I would always have my secretary call 10 minutes in and say, ‘There’s a crisis outside! You have to come!'” she said with a smile. “And once [Dolgen] looked at me and said, ‘Twelve minutes? That’s the longest you’ve ever been in one of these meetings.’ I said, ‘But you know how to do it, so you don’t need me.’ … It was a wonderful partnership and a wonderful division of labor.”

A philanthropist, he donated to Pitzer College, UCLA Neurosurgery and Cornell, where a building was renamed Dolgen Hall in his honor in 2008. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus board of director at Expedia and a board member for such nonprofits as The Simon Wisenthal Center, the California Institute of the Arts and Claremont Graduate University.

Dolgen received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Award in 1997 and was named Pioneer of Year by the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation in 2002.

Survivors include his high school sweetheart and wife of 57 years, Susan, a Queens College graduate and longtime board chair of the California State Summer School for the Arts; their daughters, Tamar and Lauren; son-in-law Sergio; brother David; and three grandchildren.

A service will take place starting at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

His family noted that Dolgen “consumed multiple daily newspapers, loved all kinds of music and watched every genre of motion picture and television show” and was a “walking encyclopedia and human Google search, with his curiosity, mind and memory sharp from childhood to his death.”

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