John Calley

For the ceremony, Calley, unable to attend in person due to illness, recorded remarks that were projected on a giant video screen, remarks characterizing the life of a film studio executive and called "one of the night's more startling bits of honesty": "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."

According to Mervyn LeRoy in his autobiography Mervyn LeRoy: Take One, Calley played a big role in LeRoy's exit of Warner Bros. when The Kinney Company acquired it. Calley notified LeRoy that due to a "change in corporate thinking", the studio was not going to support his effort in producing the story Thirteen Clocks. When LeRoy asked Calley about the promises that he had made before, Calley answered "We'll have to wait and see".

Calley attended Columbia University in the late 1940s, and then briefly served in the Army. His early life also included working for his father—"who had possible criminal ties"—as a used-car dealer. His first significant industry job was at NBC's New York headquarters, at age 21, when he started in the mailroom. Read Less