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Sumner Redstone, media mogul, dies at age 97

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2011 file photo, Sumner Redstone arrive at the premiere of "Footloose" in Los Angeles. CBS says media mogul Redstone has resigned as chair of the company’s board, replaced by the company’s CEO, Leslie Moonves. The company says Redstone’s resignation took effect Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016, and he now serves as chairman emeritus. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)

Sumner Redstone, the billionaire media mogul who once controlled Viacom (VIA), CBS (CBS), and Paramount Pictures, died on Tuesday at age 97.

Over more than six decades, Redstone’s businesses traced—and at times, charted—industry trends from the explosion of movie theaters to the rise of in-home viewing to the insurgence of online streaming.

In the middle of last century, as middle-class white families fled city centers for outlying suburbs, Redstone identified the need for large multi-screen movie theaters with in-house concessions and ample parking — known today as “multiplexes,” a term he is believed to have coined.

The innovation spurred dramatic growth at National Amusements, a chain of drive-in theaters that Redstone had taken over from his father years earlier. After a string of savvy investments and company takeovers, Redstone parlayed his success into control of some of the nation’s largest and most influential media companies, giving him a hand in television and movies that came to define American popular culture.

Born in 1923, he spent his early years in a public housing complex in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Boston, before his father Mickey enjoyed financial success and moved the family to Brighton, a well-off suburb. Redstone excelled in school and attended Harvard University in the 1940s, where he received a bachelor’s and later a law degree. While a student at Harvard, he spent three years working for an intelligence unit of the U.S. Army tasked with breaking Japanese codes.

“Our codebreaking mission was considered impossible,” he later wrote in 2008 for Proceedings, a magazine published by the U.S. Naval Institute. “I learned that you have to be tenacious — even relentless — and you can't be deterred by obstacles.”

After graduation, Redstone struck out into professional life as an attorney, clerking for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and later working for the tax division at the Department of Justice, before working in private practice as a partner at the Washington D.C. law firm of Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland and Redstone.

In 1954, he decided to leave the legal profession and join his father’s chain of drive-in movie theaters, then called Northeast Theater Corporation. Redstone soon grew the company, adding indoor theaters and understanding the value of the real estate on which they stood. He spread multiplex theaters across the country, renaming the company National Amusements.

In a well-known brush with death, Redstone survived a fire at Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel in 1979, severely burning half of his body and requiring months of skin grafts that allowed for a full recovery.

Paramount Pictures Sumner Redstone, Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson and Chairman/CEO of Paramount Pictures Corporation Brad Grey  at the LA Premiere of "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" held at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Thursday, March 28, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP)
Paramount Pictures Sumner Redstone, Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson and Chairman/CEO of Paramount Pictures Corporation Brad Grey at the LA Premiere of "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" held at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Thursday, March 28, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP)

As he built his movie theater business, Redstone invested in media companies, eventually selling stock worth tens of millions of dollars in Twentieth-Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and MGM. He went a step further in 1987 with the $3.4 billion purchase of Viacom, which then owned Nickelodeon, MTV, and Showtime.

So began a series of high-profile media acquisitions by Redstone.

He merged Viacom with video rental chain Blockbuster in 1994, in part because he needed additional cash flow to bag his desired prize: Paramount Pictures. Months later, he did just that, besting fellow media powerbroker Barry Diller, then chairman of the QVC Network, to take ownership of Paramount for $9.75 billion.

Under Redstone’s oversight, Paramount produced landmark films like “Titanic” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Redstone took the helm of Viacom as CEO in 1996, overseeing the company while it launched era-defining shows like “Spongebob Squarepants” and “South Park.”

Six years after he acquired Paramount, Redstone merged Viacom with its former parent company CBS to form an $80 billion media giant. After difficulty fusing the two operations, Redstone split them up just six years later, remaining the chairman and controlling shareholder of both.

Sumner Redstone, left, chairman and CEO of Viacom Inc., grasps hands with  Mel Karmazin, president and CEO of CBS Corp., after a merger was announced between the two companies Tuesday Sept. 7, 1999. Viacom Inc., the owner of MTV and Paramount studios, is buying CBS Corp. for $36.75 billion, making the richest media merger in history. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

Redstone’s health began to sharply decline in 2014, after a major bout with pneumonia. His deteriorating mental capacity, lavish gifts, and sexual predilections were made public in subsequent years after former girlfriend Manuela Herzer, more than four decades his junior, brought a lawsuit alleging that Redstone lacked the cognitive wherewithal necessary to remove her from his will. The suit, which stretched on for years until a settlement last January, had threatened to undermine Redstone’s control of Viacom and CBS, as some at the companies sought to wrest control from the aging media titan.

After a court-ordered examination of then 92-year-old Redstone’s mental capacity, in 2016, he gave up the chairmanship of CBS and Viacom. Redstone continued to hold a controlling stake in National Amusements but his daughter Shari Redstone, with whom he had long feuded, oversaw day-to-day operations of the parent company.

In August, CBS and Viacom merged, with Shari Redstone placed atop the company as chairwoman, helping CBSViacom compete with streaming giants as it develops over-the-top services like CBS All Access and Pluto TV.

Sumner Redstone is survived by his daughter Shari Redstone and son Brent Redstone, as well as five grandchildren. Phyllis Redstone, the mother of Shari and Brent, was married to Sumner from 1947 to 1999; he later remarried public school teacher Paula Fortunato until their separation in 2008.

National Amusements released a statement about his passing on Wednesday.

Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find him on twitter @MaxZahn_.

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