The Studio Shuffle : John Calley

Then: Vice chairman of Warner Bros., 1974-1981.

Now: President of United Artists since Sept. 1993.

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If John Calley had been asked 14 months ago if it was conceivable he would ever take another studio job, he would have said, “Are you nuts?”

Here was a guy who did what very few Hollywood executives at the top ever do: He voluntarily walked away from a plum job, lots of power and big, big bucks to . . . go find himself ?

Calley, 64--who a year ago September became the president of the moribund United Artists after a 13-year hiatus from Hollywood--had been a top executive at Warner Bros. for more than 11 years. In 1980, having just signed a new seven-year deal reportedly valued at $21 million, the studio vice chairman decided that he wanted out. He was 50, and, as he puts it, “didn’t know if there was anyone home.” His friends and colleagues thought he was “a psychopath” for quitting a job he could do with his eyes closed. Not to mention the perks he would miss:

“If you want to get a driver’s license, you call the head of security at the studio, a guy comes in from the Department of Motor Vehicles and says, ‘Thank you, Mr. Calley, for letting me kiss your ass, and here’s your driver’s license--and can I have an autographed picture of Clint Eastwood?’ ”

Sitting in his Santa Monica office at UA nursing a horrible bout of flu, Calley said, “I felt in some wacky way that I had lost myself, that I had no sense of myself and that I was being described to myself by my phone list and the invitations which I never responded to. I wasn’t dreaming my dreams anymore. I hadn’t had an authentic impulse about what I wanted do with myself for some years.”

Shortly after he resigned and was about to go live alone on Fishers Island, N.Y., he attended a party for one of the executives who was going to run Warners’ production department. While there, a young actress approached him. “Are you John Calley?” she asked.

“I heard myself say, and not as a wisecrack, ‘I was .’ The guy you want is over there,’ ” he told her, pointing to his successor.

Calley says he finally realized “I wasn’t enjoying it . . . I knew who I was in the movie business, but I had no idea who I was anywhere else.” He would start each day with an early morning meeting and often not leave work until midnight, “when I’d come home and not have any time to do anything but take a tray up to bed and read screenplays.”

Yet a typical day for Calley at UA is no different: “I’m usually up by 6 and on the telephone or reading. I come in anywhere between 8:45 and 10:30 and go home and read. My day ends when I fall asleep.”

So why go back?

“I was becoming dead,” he says. “I was growing increasingly paralytic in my approach to life. I was doing a lot of recreational sleeping.”

While he admits being obsessive again, this time, he says, “it intrigues me to look at me behaving the way I’m behaving--I come to it as a different person.” Calley says that for the first time in his 30-year career, “I’m enjoying it enormously. It’s gratifying to see it up and running and fun to confirm that perhaps (his success) wasn’t an accident the first time.”