Twentieth Century Fox

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares119 Views

    Former Fox Employee Convicted of Bribery for Soccer Broadcast Deals

    by

    The employee, Hernán López, and an Argentine marketing firm were accused of helping make illegal payments for rights to tournaments in South America.After hearing seven weeks of often-impenetrable testimony about television contracts, codes of ethics and the interpretation of Spanish phrases in emails sent more than a dozen years ago, a federal jury in Brooklyn on Thursday convicted a former Fox employee and an Argentine sports marketing firm of paying bribes in exchange for lucrative soccer broadcasting contracts.Prosecutors said that Hernán López, who until 2016 worked for a unit of what was then known as 21st Century Fox, had taken part in a complex scheme to make millions of dollars in secret annual payments to the presidents of national soccer federations in order to secure the rights to the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana, widely viewed South American soccer tournaments. Full Play Group, the marketing firm, stood accused of similar but far more extensive corruption. Prosecutors said it paid bribes for the rights to World Cup qualifiers, exhibition matches, the Copa América tournament and the Copa Libertadores.The government also argued that López had taken advantage of “loyalty secured through the payment of bribes” to secure inside information that helped Fox beat out ESPN in its bid for the United States broadcasting rights for the 2018 and 2022 men’s World Cups — a theory Fox has vigorously denied. Fox was never accused of any wrongdoing.López, who holds dual American and Argentine citizenship, was convicted on one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of wire fraud conspiracy and faces up to 40 years in prison. Full Play was convicted on six fraud and money laundering counts and, as a corporation, could face financial penalties.A third defendant, Carlos Martínez, who worked under López at Fox, was acquitted on counts of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.The convictions represent what Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called “a resounding victory” in the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of corruption in international soccer.After a secret inquiry began in 2010, the case broke into public view in May 2015 when sensational predawn arrests were made in Zurich, the city that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, calls home. Since then, more than two dozen individuals and entities have voluntarily pleaded guilty to a wide variety of charges, including racketeering and wire fraud. And in 2017, a different federal jury convicted two soccer officials, from Paraguay and Brazil, on wire fraud conspiracy and other charges.Prosecutors indicted López, Martínez and Full Play in March 2020, signaling that the long-running case — which shook FIFA to the core and resulted in a shakeout of several generations of leadership in its ranks — still had legs.“The defendants cheated by bribing soccer officials to act in their own greedy interests rather than in the best interests of the sport,” Peace said in a statement following the verdict. Judge Pamela K. Chen rejected a request from prosecutors that López be taken immediately into custody, instead releasing him with tightened bond restrictions. A sentencing date has not been set.John Gleeson, a lawyer for López, said in a statement that “we are obviously disappointed with the jury’s verdict.”He continued, “The proceedings have involved both legal and factual errors, and we look forward to vindicating our client on appeal.” Lopez, who left Fox in early 2016, went on to found the podcasting company Wondery, which was sold to Amazon in 2020 in a deal that valued the company at a reported $300 million.Carlos Ortiz, a lawyer for Full Play, declined to comment. The company was founded by an Argentine father and son, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, who were charged in 2015 but were not extradited. A lawyer for Hugo Jinkis said he could not immediately comment on the news.“We are very grateful for the jury’s service,” Steven McCool, Martínez’s lead lawyer, said in a brief call after the verdict. “Carlos received justice today and it was a long time coming.”A watch party in Los Angeles for the 2022 World Cup. Fox had the U.S. English-language rights for last year’s tournament in Qatar and the 2018 tournament in Russia.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThursday’s verdict came on the fourth day of deliberations after a complex and slow-moving trial. Jurors were presented with reams of contracts, financial spreadsheets and bank transfer statements, as well as expert witnesses who debated whether a particular phrase meant “pay him less” or “pay it less.”At one point, early in the trial, Judge Chen admonished the lead prosecutor, Kaitlin T. Farrell, for reading entire emails about corporate issues into the official record, warning that she risked losing the jury’s attention.And as in the first trial in the case, the government relied particularly heavily on a single star witness: Alejandro Burzaco, the former chief executive of the Argentine sports marketing and TV production firm Torneos, who pleaded guilty in the case in 2015 and has been cooperating with the U.S. government since.Over 11 days of testimony, he described in painstaking and sometimes stultifying detail the esoteric series of shell companies and phony contracts that had been used to pay bribes to soccer officials through a joint venture owned by Torneos and 21st Century Fox. Although he personally arranged the payments, Burzaco said he had informed both López and Martínez about their existence and said that neither executive had done anything to halt them.Burzaco also detailed using a relationship cultivated through bribes paid to Julio Grondona — a FIFA vice president and a longtime president of Argentina’s soccer association who died in 2014 — to gain inside information that helped Fox win the U.S. English-language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. ESPN had long held that coveted property.Although bidding was supposed to have been blind, Burzaco said he had asked Grondona in late 2011 for help at López’s request. Burzaco testified that Grondona had “told me if Fox puts $400 million, they are going to award it to Fox — tell your friends.” Fox ultimately paid $425 million, and several years later obtained rights to the 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.Over howls of protest from defense lawyers, prosecutors called the former ESPN president John Skipper to testify about the incident. “I was disappointed,” he said. “In fact, I was angry.”In a statement after the verdict, a Fox spokesman said, “This case does not involve Fox Corporation, and it was made clear that there was no connection to Fox’s successful World Cup bids.” The company has in the past noted that the unit where López and Martínez worked, Fox International Channels, was spun off in 2019 and that it was a different division, Fox Sports, that was charged with negotiating for those rights.Although both López and Martínez maintained their innocence, claiming they were never aware any bribes had been paid, Full Play took a decidedly different tack. Its lawyers readily admitted that the company had made regular payments to Latin American soccer officials but claimed that those payments had not been bribes but simply the standard way of doing business when it came to South American soccer.Ortiz, the lawyer for Full Play, said in his closing arguments late last week: “You can look at it and, say, hey, do I like this morally? Do I think this is appropriate?” But, he added, “all of these executives and officers acted in a manner and behaved and carried themselves in a manner that sent a clear, strong message that their receipts of payments were totally fine.” More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Stella Stevens, Hollywood Bombshell Who Yearned for More, Dies at 84

      by

      She starred alongside the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. But she wanted to direct and write, and she felt held back by industry sexism.Stella Stevens, whose turn as an A-list actress in 1960s Hollywood placed her alongside sex symbols like Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, but who came to resent the male-dominated industry that she felt thwarted her ambitions to be more than a pretty face, died on Friday at a hospice facility in Los Angeles. She was 84.Her son, the actor and director Andrew Stevens, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Stevens was among the last stars to emerge from Hollywood’s studio system, an arrangement that guaranteed her work but, she often said, also limited her creative aspirations. She won a Golden Globe in the “most promising newcomer” category for her role in “Say One for Me” (1959), a musical comedy starring Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, but felt coerced into joining the cast of “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962), an empty Elvis Presley vehicle.Like Ms. Welch, who died on Wednesday, Ms. Stevens was ambivalent, if not outright indignant, about being cast as a Hollywood sex symbol. She described herself as introverted and bookish, and she sought to work with auteurs like John Cassavetes, who cast her as the female lead in “Too Late Blues,” his 1961 drama about a jazz musician (played by Bobby Darin).”I wanted to be a writer-director,” she told the film scholar Michael G. Ankerich in 1994. “All of a sudden I got sidetracked into being a sexpot. Once I was a ‘pot,’ there was nothing I could do. There was nothing legitimate I could do.”She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s. She starred as the love interest of the title character, a timid college professor who undergoes a personality transformation, in “The Nutty Professor” (1963), which Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in; “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), a romantic comedy directed by Vincent Minnelli; and “The Silencers” (1966), a spy spoof starring Dean Martin.In between, though, she had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies, and critics came to view her as a star who was perpetually kept away from realizing her full potential.From left, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall and Ms. Stevens in “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972).20th Century FoxTwo exceptions came in the early 1970s: She acted opposite Jason Robards in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), a comic western directed by Sam Peckinpah, and as part of an all-star cast assembled for “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), joining Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman in an overturned ocean liner.By then her sex-symbol days were fading, and Ms. Stevens hoped to have the time and reputation to become a director. But female directors were almost unheard-of at the time, and her attempts to get support for what she called “a marvelous black comedy” that she wanted to make met repeated dead ends.“Every man I’ve gone to for four years has smiled at me and then double‐crossed me,” she told The New York Times in 1973. “Every man I’ve talked to in every office in this industry has tried his best to discourage me from directing. They don’t want me to find out it’s so easy because it’s supposed to be terribly hard.”Stella Stevens was born Estelle Caro Eggleston on Oct. 1, 1938, in Yazoo City, Miss., though she often told interviewers she was from a town called Hot Coffee, a nearby community. Her agent said anything sounded better than “Yazoo.”Her father, Thomas, worked for a bottling company in Yazoo, and her mother, Estelle (Caro) Eggleston, was a nurse. When Stella was still young, they moved to Memphis, where her father worked in sales for International Harvester.Stella dropped out of high school at 15 to marry Herman Stephens. They had one child, Andrew, and divorced in 1956. (She later changed her surname to Stevens because, she said, it was easier for people to pronounce.)Ms. Stevens in 1968. She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s, but she also had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies.Jack Kanthal/Associated PressShe returned to school after the divorce and earned a high school diploma. She enrolled at Memphis State College, now the University of Memphis, with plans to become an obstetrician.She also took up theater. A role in a college production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” brought an invitation to audition in New York, and by 1959 she was in Los Angeles, on a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox.She finished three movies in six months, including “Say One for Me,” but the studio dropped her soon after. With a young son to feed, she took an offer from Playboy to pose nude for $5,000. After the shoot, she said, Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s publisher, would pay her only half and told her that she had to work as a hostess at the Playboy Mansion to earn the rest.Before the photos ran she signed a new contract, with Paramount. She asked Mr. Hefner to cancel the magazine feature, but he refused, and she appeared as Playmate of the Month in the January 1960 issue, a few months before winning her Golden Globe.“People don’t realize how horrible men can be toward a beautiful woman with no clothes on,” she told Delta magazine in 2010.Her relationship with Playboy remained complicated. Despite her anger at Mr. Hefner, she posed nude for the magazine two more times. She then sued Mr. Hefner and Playboy in 1974, citing several instances of invasion of her privacy, but the case was thrown out because the statute of limitations had expired.In 1998, Playboy named Ms. Stevens 27th on its list of the 20th century’s sexiest female stars, just behind Sharon Stone.Ms. Stevens in 2002. She became a regular guest star on television shows. Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesIn addition to her son, Ms. Stevens is survived by three grandchildren. Her longtime partner, Bob Kulick, died in 2020.Despite her career’s post-1960s fade, Ms. Stevens remained eager to work. She turned to television and had roles in some 80 episodes over the next four decades. Most of them were guest appearances on shows like “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Love Boat” and “Magnum P.I.,” though she was also a member of the regular cast of several shows, including the soap opera “Santa Barbara.”When she did return to film, it was often for soft-core erotic thrillers and campy horror movies, like “Chained Heat” (1983), in which she played a prison warden, and “The Granny” (1994), in which she played a wronged grandmother who comes back to life to get revenge on her scheming family.She eventually did get into the director’s chair, for “American Heroine,” a 1979 documentary, and “The Ranch,” a 1989 comedy starring her son. She also wrote a novel, “Razzle Dazzle” (1989), which featured a thinly fictionalized version of herself.“I don’t feel I’ve been successful yet,” she told The Vancouver Sun in 1998. “I’m still waiting to be discovered. I see myself as a work in progress. I keep trying to work and improve and do things I’m proud of.”Danielle Cruz contributed reporting. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Dorothy Spencer, Film Editor Sought Out by Big Directors

      by

      She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Alan Ladd Jr., Hitmaking Film Executive, Dies at 84

      by

      When other studios didn’t want it, he took on the project that became “Star Wars.” He later guided “Chariots of Fire,” “Young Frankenstein” and numerous other movies.Alan Ladd Jr., who as a producer and studio executive was a guiding hand behind scores of successful films, none bigger than “Star Wars,” which he championed when its young director, George Lucas, was having trouble getting it made, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.Kathie Berlin, who worked with him for years at his production company and at MGM, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Ladd was vice president for creative affairs at 20th Century Fox in 1973 when Mr. Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, began talking with him about Mr. Lucas’s still-evolving concept for what became “Star Wars.” Mr. Lucas had just made “American Graffiti,” but it had yet to be released (once it was, it would become one of 1973’s biggest movies), and so Mr. Lucas’s idea for a space movie wasn’t getting much respect; United Artists and Universal weren’t interested.Mr. Ladd, though, was. He knew movies and audiences — his father was an actor who had been in more than 100 films and TV shows — and he understood the appeal of Mr. Lucas’s vision.“It took me back to the old Saturday matinees,” he told The New York Times in 1977 as “Star Wars,” released a few months earlier, was smashing box-office records. “I used to go crazy over Superman and Flash Gordon. When I heard Universal had passed on it, I thought, ‘They’re crazy!’ So I took an option on it.”From left, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977), which Mr. Ladd agreed to make when other studios weren’t interested.Lucas FilmsIt wasn’t the first time Mr. Ladd had seen potential where others did not. A few years earlier Mel Brooks was shopping his idea for “Young Frankenstein,” but Columbia balked when he insisted on shooting the movie in black and white. Mr. Brooks then sat down with Mr. Ladd.“We all hit it off at our first meeting because the first thing Laddie” — Mr. Ladd’s nickname — “said was, ‘You’re absolutely right. It should be made in black and white,’” Mr. Brooks wrote in his book “All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business” (2021).“I knew right then and there,” Mr. Brooks added, “that I had finally met a studio chief that I could really trust.”Mr. Brooks went on to make several other movies with Mr. Ladd, including the “Star Wars” parody “Spaceballs” in 1987, when Mr. Ladd was chairman of MGM. By then Mr. Brooks was box-office gold, thanks in part to “Young Frankenstein,” which had earned more than $100 million, and, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, he could have taken “Spaceballs” to just about any major studio.“But I’ve known Laddie for years,” he said. “And I’m not so wise, so old or so powerful that I can resist a lot of gut-level help all the way down the line — and especially emotional support — which is something Laddie has always provided.”Gene Wilder, left, and Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974). Mr. Ladd supported Mr. Brooks’s insistence on making the film in black and white.20th Century FoxMr. Ladd, who at various times held top positions at 20th Century Fox and MGM/UA as well as running the Ladd Company, which he founded in 1979, was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives. In a 1999 interview with The New York Times, the director Norman Jewison recalled his experience working with Mr. Ladd on the 1987 hit “Moonstruck,” which won three Oscars.“I gave him a price of what I thought I could do the film for,” Mr. Jewison said, “and told him I was going to go after Cher to play the lead. No other major stars. And he called me up and said, ‘OK.’ And I never saw him again, until I told him that the film was finished and I wanted him to see it. That doesn’t happen anymore.”Ms. Berlin said that while Mr. Ladd’s championing of “Star Wars” may be his calling card, he also deserved credit for backing films like “Moonstruck,” “Julia” (1977) and “Thelma and Louise” (1991) that had strong female characters. He is generally credited with suggesting that the lead character in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979), originally written as a man, be changed, giving Sigourney Weaver a chance to create a memorable sci-fi heroine.“I am always asking, ‘Can this role be more interesting if it’s played by a woman rather than a man?’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.Mr. Ladd in 2007. He was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives.Misha Erwitt for The New York TimesAlan Walbridge Ladd Jr. was born on Oct. 22, 1937, in Los Angeles to Alan Ladd, best known as the star of the 1953 western “Shane,” and his first wife, Marjorie Jane Harrold.Alan Jr. studied at the University of Southern California, was called up as an Air Force reservist during the Berlin crisis of the early 1960s and, once released, went to work in the mailroom of the talent agency Creative Management Associates. He soon became an agent, representing, among others, Judy Garland.In the early 1970s he formed a producing partnership in London with several others and produced his first movies, including “The Nightcomers” (1971), which starred Marlon Brando.Returning to the United States, he became a vice president at Fox in 1973. In 1976 he became the company’s president. Three years later he announced that he was leaving to form his own company.Mr. Ladd was a top executive at MGM twice. In 1985 he was brought in to run one of its movie divisions; soon after that he was named president and chief operating officer, and then chairman. He left in 1988 with the company undergoing ownership and organizational changes. He was leading the movie division of Pathé Communications when that company acquired MGM, and in 1991 he became chief executive. He was forced out in 1993 in another ownership change.Among the movies the Ladd Company had a hand in was “Chariots of Fire” (1981), which won the best-picture Oscar. “Braveheart” (1995), another Ladd Company project, won the same award.But “Star Wars” was almost certainly Mr. Ladd’s biggest triumph. He was still unsure about whether the film would work when he attended the premiere in San Francisco — until he heard the tidal wave of applause at the end.“It kept going on; it wasn’t stopping,” he recalled later. “And I just never had experienced that kind of reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears.”Mr. Ladd’s marriage to Patricia Beazley ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Cindra Pincock. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Kelliann Ladd, Tracy Ladd and Amanda Ladd Jones; a brother, David; a sister, Carol Lee Veitch; and six grandchildren. A daughter from his second marriage, Chelsea Ladd, died in 2021. More