I should have linked yesterday to Claudia Eller‘s L.A. Times account of Nina Jacobson‘s dismissal as Disney production president. Jacobson was told Monday morning by studio chairman Dick Cook “when she called him from the hospital room where her partner was about to deliver their third child. Despite the record-breaking performance of Disney’s current release, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, she was hearing rumors and wanted reassurance that her job was safe. It wasn’t.”
Acknowledging that the timing was bad, Cook said, “I begged to see her face to face and she wanted to talk to me right then. This was not what anybody wanted.” (Of course, we all know that when you’re hearing rumors that your job might be imperiled and you call your boss for reassurance and he/she says, “Come to my office so we can talk,” you’re as good as dead anyway.)
And Nikki Finke is seeing an old-boy sexist angle with Paramount’s Gail Berman and Sony’s Amy Pascal “the only women [reminaing] in positions of real Hollywood power” with Jacobson, Fox 200’s Laura Ziskin, Columbia’s Lisa Henson and Lucy Fisher, Paramount’s Sherry Lansing, Universal’s Stacey Snider and DreamWorks’ Laurie MacDonald having “all left their posts, because of situations where either they jumped or were pushed. ” (Obviously Snider’s move from Universal to Dreamamount was neither a tragedy nor a comedown.)
The result, Finke laments, “is that Hollywood movies are returning to the old days when it was a man’s world.”