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Remembering John Calley’s Golden Years in Hollywood

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The Hollywood film producer John Calley died September 13, at his home in Los Angeles, after a long illness.

Calley was responsible for The Loved One, The Americanization of Emily, Catch-22, and more recently The Remains of the Day, and the popcorn fodder Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code.

But it will be for his work at Warner Brothers that Calley will be best remembered, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

In 1969, [Calley] became executive vice president in charge of production at Warner Bros.; he became president in 1975.

“Under Calley, Warners became the class act in town,” Peter Biskind wrote in his 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.

“Urbane and witty, he gave the impression that he was somehow above it all, slumming in the Hollywood cesspool,” Biskind wrote. “As one wag put it, he was the blue in the toilet bowl.”

At Warner Bros., Calley created what Biskind called “an atmosphere congenial to ‘60s-going-on ‘70s filmmakers” and was known for relying heavily on his own taste in picking films.

Among Warner’s Calley-era bill of fare: Woodstock, A Clockwork Orange, Mean Streets, The Towering Inferno, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, Deliverance, Dirty Harry, All the President’s Men, Blazing Saddles, Superman and Chariots of Fire.

As a salute, here’s a brief video resume of that golden era of film-making.

Read John Calley’s obituary here.
 

Mean Streets (1973)
 

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
 
Clips of other classic films, including ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Mean Streets’, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.14.2011
05:49 pm
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