On Friday, for the first time in decades, the Academy's headquarters in Beverly Hills is having to get along without Bruce Davis at the helm.
Davis, who had worked at the Academy since 1981 and served as executive director since 1990, has officially retired, and moved to a different office in Hollywood; in his place, his longtime second-in-command Ric Robertson has been promoted to COO, and former Film Independent executive director Dawn Hudson brought in as CEO. (Both are new positions for AMPAS.)
A former college professor who was hired by the Academy after chairing the theater department at a small college in Pennsylvania, Davis pushed for fundraising, stood up to the board of governors on occasion, advocated for rule changes, earned the nickname "Dr. No" among Oscar staffers for his strong hand, endured both a shrinking Academy Awards audience and a growing style of cutthroat Oscar campaigning, and ran the day-to-day operations at AMPAS.
Also Read: Academy Names Dawn Hudson CEO, Ric Robertson COO
In honor of the end of Davis' tenure, a few snapshots from a long career, taken from about 17 years of interviews and encounters:
OOPS
Davis came to the executive director job a year after what is still the most infamous Oscar show ever (James Franco's shenanigans notwithstanding). It happened in 1989, when Allan Carr produced the show, which began with a hellaciously long and silly opening number in which an actress dressed as Snow White cavorted with a young Rob Lowe. (Their debut on a rewritten "Proud Mary" is still the stuff of Oscar-night legend.)
"It was all very secretive," said Davis, who at the time was the Academy's executive administrator. "It was going to be a surprise not only to the audience, but to us. But when Snow White walked down the aisle and brushed by me, I thought, Oh my God, I wonder if anybody's cleared that. I wasn't the executive director yet, but I knew that there were some things that you have to do some checking around with."
Carr hadn't cleared it, and Disney sued.
WELL ENDOWED
Coming from academia, Davis was familiar with endowments as a way of building up a war chest -- and he was also worried about the revenue from the Oscars, which typically had funded virtually all of the Academy's operations.
So in the late '80s, he pointed out to the board of governors that the Academy was operating its library out of its annual revenue -- and if that revenue dropped as Oscar viewership declined, the library could be in big trouble. He recommended building up a sizeable endowment, and using income from that to support the library. AMPAS president Karl Malden and his successor Robert Rehme spearheaded the effort, which raised enough to, most years, fully fund the library.
(With the economic downturn, admits Davis, the endowment took a hit, and has not always generated enough to support the library.
