When all is said and done -- and much will be said in the coming weeks -- perhaps the most lasting aspect of the Daly-Semel legacy is that Warners has lost a generation of leaders to draw upon in their wake. It can be argued that in the film division alone, a shocking number of able executives have passed through the exit door: Billy Gerber, Lucy Fisher, Bruce Berman, and Lisa Henson are just a few of the hot young production executives who, realizing they could rise no higher, left for other studios or production deals.
But Daly and Semel are not alone in this. With the exception of 20th Century Fox -- whose head, Peter Chernin (who got his job after first Barry Diller and then Joe Roth vacated the executive suite), was promoted into parent company News Corp., thus making way for Bill Mechanic -- Hollywood studios are literally ossifying. And it couldn't come at a worse time.
Most Hollywood stocks have failed to realize the recent huge run-ups (nor the comparable executive-compensation packages full of generous stock options that made semi-billionaires of Daly and Semel) that other sectors of the market have seen. And look: Earlier this month, at Herbert Allen's famed Sun Valley, Idaho, retreat, that longtime conclave for the entertainment elite, Hollywood had definitively ceased to be the big draw, no longer viewed as the most glamorous business in the world. The new stars were the Internet entrepreneurs whose world has come to dwarf Hollywood in terms of money and attention, drawing away the visionaries and the best management talent.
No one wants to be the first to say it, but the entertainment business as we know it is dead, done in by $20 million deals for actors, greedy agents, and wildly overaccommodating studio bosses. The product, too, has been under lethal pressure from politicians and interest groups. Traditional Hollywood, increasingly balkanized by the conglomerates that own it, is hemorrhaging money; while the studios bleed, actors and agents and directors and independent producers walk away with the gold. And the Web only expands: In a matter of months, making movies and TV shows and records may merely be just part of yet another expansion: no cooler, no better.
No such fate awaits Daly and Semel, who have more money than they could ever need. They certainly don't have to take Levin's or Turner's guff any more. (Reportedly, they were about to have music taken away from them.) Now they're talking about their third act, which is fine for them. But many able younger executives never got a first act and have already given up on Tinseltown and gone elsewhere. Lust -- for power, for money -- is what kept Daly and Semel in the game so long. Levin wants to fill the vacancies from within the corridors of Time Warner. If he's the visionary he'd like us to think he is, he'll fill them with people few beyond those corridors have ever heard of. Yet.
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