John Calley, one of the most sophisticated and filmmaker-friendly studio chiefs of all time whose golden years were at Warner Bros. from 1968 to 1981 (and then later at Sony from 1996 to 2003), has left the earth. He was 81 years old, or close to that. I love the fact that when Calley was handed the Academy’s Thalberg award in 2009, he voiced an uncommonly frank remark about the life of a studio executive: “You’re very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don’t experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you’re lucky.”
