The Hollywood studio executive and producer John Calley, who has died aged 81, once characterised running a film studio as "a guy lying in a bed in a rented apartment in Century City at four in the morning in a foetal position trying to decide whether or not to say yes to a $175m budget for Spider-Man. In the end, it comes down to one guy who has to use his gut."
When Calley was production chief at Warner Bros in the 1970s, it was his gut instinct that led him to green-light such hit movies as A Clockwork Orange, The Towering Inferno, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, Dirty Harry, All the President's Men, Blazing Saddles, Superman and Chariots of Fire. However, in 1980, when he was about to sign a new seven-year contract worth $21m, he decided to give it all up. "I wasn't enjoying it," he recalled. "I felt in some wacky way that I had lost myself." For the next nine years, separated from his wife, the Czech film star Olga Schoberová, he led a secluded life in his 35-room house on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, and later moved to rural Connecticut. "I pretty much stopped living a contemporary life," he declared.
Belying the fact that in Hollywood anyone who is out of the spotlight for more than a month is considered as good as dead, Calley resurrected his career as a producer. He was invited to become president of the ailing MGM/United Artists company and then chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
It was a long way from his early years in New Jersey, where his father was a used-car dealer, who had, according to Calley, "possible criminal ties". After attending Columbia University and serving in the US army, he joined NBC at the age of 21, working in the mailroom. "Then a few years later, I was hired to run Sony," he quipped. In fact Calley did rise rapidly, becoming director of night-time programming at NBC, then production executive at Filmways television company, prior to taking on the task of producer for Filmways Pictures, releasing films through MGM. From the beginning, Calley's productions – The Wheeler Dealers (1963), The Americanization of Emily (1964), The Loved One, The Sandpiper and The Cincinnati Kid (all 1965) — revealed a rather off-centre taste. This may have been the reason why, apart from the latter, they refused to light up the box-office or excite the critics.
However, it was just after having produced Mike Nichols's flawed film of Joseph Heller's satirical novel Catch 22 (1970), at a cost of $18m, that Calley got a call offering him the job of virtually running Warner Bros, contradicting the Hollywood notion that you're only as good as your last picture. On his return to show business after his nine-year hiatus, Calley produced two Oscar-nominated films, Nichols's Postcards from the Edge (1990) and James Ivory's The Remains of the Day (1993), the latter of which he was most proud. In 1993, Calley become president of United Artists, a job that he likened to being a banker. "Running a studio means you have to say yes or no to a project without having any primary involvement with it. You have to rely on the judgment and taste of the film-makers."
At United Artists, Calley oversaw such hits as the first of Pierce Brosnan's James Bond movies, GoldenEye (1995), and The Birdcage (1996), Nichols's Americanisation of La Cage aux Folles. He steered Sony on to a sound footing before leaving in 2003. Among the last films on which Calley had a credit as producer were The Da Vinci Code (2006) and its sequel Angels and Demons (2009) which, despite large global box-office takings, must be placed among the few stinkers to which every producer is entitled. In the same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Calley with the prestigious Irving G Thalberg memorial award as "a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production".
After his divorce from Schoberová, whose daughter Sabrina he adopted, Calley was married to the actor Meg Tilly from 1995 to 2002. He is survived by Sabrina.