Published at: June 22, 2000, 9:22 p.m. CST by staff
Hey, all. "Moriarty" here. It's just after 7:00 in Los Angeles, and for the last hour, my phone has been ringing with people all telling me the same incredible story. I've been doing my best to confirm it with someone. "Bill Mechanic is out at Fox," they all said. It just didn't sound possible to me. Looks like Inside.Com has already nailed the story down, though, in a piece you can read here. You'll notice that Inside.com characterizes his departure as a "resignation." That's not what I've heard from source after source, but if that's the good face Fox is going to put on his exit, then so be it.
Now, personally, I'm sorry to see this announcement. Bill Mechanic may not have always been the biggest fan of AICN, but he's proven himself over time to be one of the good guys, an executive who was genuinely liked and respected by the creative community. Several of the people I spoke with this afternoon regarding his exit from Fox were upset by the news. Now, Inside.Com comments that he "had been under pressure, in part because of the lackluster performances this year of ANNA AND THE KING and, more recently, of the animated TITAN A.E.," but there's been a lot of hits under Mechanic's watch as well, including (let's not forget) the single highest-grossing film of all time. My sources indicate that this current trouble with Rupert Murdoch began with Mechanic's support of THE THIN RED LINE, a film I think is piercing and brilliant and beautiful. If this really was the beginning of the end, then there's no shame in that. Mechanic fought for films he believed in, and that's a rare quality in executives in this town. The article speculates that he will be starting his own production company. I hope that's true. Whatever his decisions in the future, he's definitely left a mark on Fox, and his leaving the company can only be called incredibly significant. This isn't just an isolated thing, either. There seem to be seismic shifts in executive personnel all over town today. Brian Witten is leaving New Line, and we should expect several more major departures from that company, and there's execs who are on their way out of Warner Bros, too. All this shuffle means some interesting new configurations of power in the days ahead. We'll see how this plays out...
