Word: freston
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Is it news if a man stands up to applaud at the end of a movie? It shouldn't be, not when virtually all the other audience members have already leaped to their feet. Yet Tom Freston's leg-stretch after last month's Sundance Film Festival screening of Hustle & Flow was hot dish to an avid press corps. You would have thought he was Brad and Jen, together again...
...headlines as much for who he was as for who he is. Freston, the new co-president of media giant Viacom, had been chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, whose MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central channels make it the lifeline to the youth market. One of Freston's missions from Viacom boss Sumner Redstone is to freshen the image and, more important, goose the profits of Paramount Pictures, the most geriatric of the Hollywood studios. So when the company's new Mr. Big showed up at the iconic indie-film festival, media types saw it as a signal of revolutionary...
Redstone, 81, was quick to promote to co-president both Freston, 58, and Leslie Moonves, 54, who ran CBS, filling the vacancy left by Karmazin, 60. Redstone said he would finally call it quits within three years, setting up a horse race for the top job at Viacom, a la GE after Jack Welch retired in 2001. Critical to Redstone, Freston and Moonves are dyed-in-the-wool content guys. Freston, a free-spirited music lover who has served on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, engineered the phenomenal success of MTV. Moonves, a hard-charging...
...pledged $30 million of corporate cash to launch Logo, a gay channel that the MTV brass had regarded as a top priority. Under Viacom president and heir apparent Mel Karmazin, the channel had been delayed. But at this meeting, attended by Karmazin, Redstone openly said to MTV chief Tom Freston, "You want to do it? You have the money." Karmazin was silent. "It was a dramatic moment," Freston recalls. "All of a sudden, we got something we hadn't expected." The new channel is set to debut early next year...
...show, and Timberlake's song, that MTV never addressed. "MTV did not live up to their end of the deal," said NFL executive vice president Joe Browne. "They told us, 'We'll address your concerns,' and then things never changed." But MTV Networks chairman and CEO Tom Freston said the league and the networks together reviewed the songs, costumes and choreography. He noted that MTV also produced the halftime show three years ago. "If you go back and look," he said, "you'll see the artists doing similar types of music with similar choreography. You even have guys...