Word: semel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bittersweet night for Hollywood. At the world premiere of the feverishly awaited Warner Bros. movie Eyes Wide Shut, the last work by the late director Stanley Kubrick, stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman effervesced with the town's glitterati. But Warner Bros. co-CEOs Robert Daly, 62, and Terry Semel, 56, struck some as oddly distracted. Moments before the screening, producer Paula Weinstein found Semel alone in an empty lobby, where the two reminisced about a previous Kubrick premiere. "The moment I saw him, all these memories flooded back," Weinstein says. "I was filled with a sense of history...
...Scarcely 24 hours later, Daly and Semel flew to New York City, where they stunned the entertainment world by telling Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin and other directors of the studio's parent company that they would not renew their contracts. Vice chairman Ted Turner, who had wrangled with the two over their lavish spending, was moved enough to hug them...
Their departure was not without other large dollops of irony. In an open letter to Levin, Daly and Semel cited their "two spectacular, unbelievable decades" at Warner, a 19-year tenure spent mostly at the top of the film heap. And in recent years Warner's highly profitable television business even eclipsed the movie studio, creating such TV hits as ER and Friends and the rapidly rising WB network. Along the way they took the reins of Time Warner's vast $4 billion music empire following one of the brutal power struggles that periodically boiled up after Time Inc. merged...
...with the Batman films that Daly and Semel originally launched to box-office bravos, the thrill was in fact fading fast for the dynastic duo. Warner's had produced a string of costly flops in the past two years before rebounding in 1999 with such hits as The Matrix, a sci-fi action flick, and the mob comedy Analyze This. The Daly-Semel formula centered on the relationships the two had with stars like Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood and producers like Joel Silver. The movies were big--Lethal Weapon, Unforgiven--the dollars were bigger, and everyone got a piece...
...Daly and Semel almost seemed to be kissing off their employers before they got the kiss-off themselves. The two men long ago became centimillionaires by virtue of their salaries and zillions of stock options. Says Semel: "For the first time in my life I will not have a contract, a road map to follow. This could be the first time I can choose what direction I'm going...