Tom Freston has never been a typical media executive. He began with a countercultural spirit that shaped an adventurous career spanning from cofounding MTV to leading Viacom and Paramount Pictures. After spending 26 years at Paramount—now caught up in the $100 billion bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery—he remains a defining figure in the evolution of modern entertainment.
The 80-year-old executive, who sounded remarkably youthful in a phone interview with Fortune, harkened back to the days in the 1960s and ’70s when “freedom was in the air.” The vibe was very different then: “It was like, I don’t want to work for ‘the man,’” he told Fortune, referencing a formative summer when he worked as a bellboy at Lake George in the Adirondack foothills of upstate New York. “I had sort of been on the traditional conveyor belt: Go to college, get out, get a job. And then I met all these sort of bohemian characters who—their idea was, you didn’t have a career. You kind of improvise your life. You know, the idea was to kind of maximize experience and do interesting things and take some risks.”
