Warner Bros.' Jeff Robinov Gets His Fiefdom

The just-announced January `08 ascension of Jeff Robinov to president of a newly formed entity--Warner Bros. Pictures Group--has been long expected but did make Hollywood pause a beat to absorb it. The consensus wisdom seemed to be that although his record has been mixed, and his forward-leaning personality a bit more robust than those of the suits around him, he's been such a good company man that the promotion was inevitable.

If you go to the drawer on the company's corporate site that lists "Divisional Executives", he's currently one among 28, including marketing head Dawn Taubin. (They've seldom been accused of being best friends.) He'll now have dominion ovr distribution and marketing and move up a tier to be among the Operating Officers, still a crowded category, but in strict film-biz terms, not that much has changed--he'll still report to mentor and president-COO Alan Horn, who will retain the sole authority to greenlight pictures. (That said, Horn plans to be busy with trips to India and elsewhere as he joins Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer on the big-picture development of the company)

The press-shy Robinov has typically, in briefings for reporters, thrown the credit for Warner's big-betting film strategy to Horn. Over the past two years, with wounded tankers like Poseidon and not-quite-heroic entrants like Superman Returns, that's been something of a left-handed compliment. More recently, he was center of a controversy when Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke reported that three different producers had told her Robinov was saying, in her paraphrase, "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." After some waffling, and much back and forth, Warners stuck to a categorical denial, and Robinov made the phone call that helped elevate him in Finke's eyes from "Neanderthal thinking" to, later, author of what was characterized as a "charming" e-mail.

In the months before the Joel Silver-produced Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One (along with Nicole Kidman and Hillary Swank pictures) tanked, he was reassuringly doing background chats averring that Jodie is a movie star, even internationally, and a very good bet for pictures in the $50-60 million range.

Truth is, Robinov has an eye for talent, among directors as well as actors, and did a fine job wooing the like of Brad Pitt and George Clooney to cut their prices for passion projects. (Mind you, The Assassination of Jesse James director Andrew Dominik ended dup in a standoff with the studio as that picture headed to poor box office (and some very warm reviews), and Clooney's The Good German suffered a similar fate. (Director Steve Soderbergh worked for far below his quote, albeit with a giant back end--for what that was worth. Meanwhile, Clooney has brought glory if not huge bucks with Michael Clayton.) He also stroked Vince Vaughn, who was a fan of the Speed Racer material and touted it to him, and won the studio a big summer tent pole and good relations with a new comedy star. Zack Snyder was the guy who had dropped out of directing S.W.A.T. when Robinov, on the basis of an earlier calling card film, hired him to bring his oddball vision to 300, winning the studio another hit. He chased Peter Weir to direct Shantaram, which won Johnny Depp's participation--until the writers' strike back-burnered that for now.

Robinov's inability to get on the same page with Mark Gill, briefly head of Warner Independent Pictures, didn't seem to damage him. They had an actual case of what Hollywood likes to fictionalize as creative differences, and the chapter was closed quietly. (New indie head Polly Cohen can hardly be blamed for the box office failure of Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, a virtuous and for many peoples' money entertaining piece of topicality.)

Factor those successes in with the notion, (raised to me by the head of a competing studio with no dog in the fight) that Universal's Ron Meyer was scouting Robinov as a replacement for Stacey Snider when she went off to DreamWorks, and you have a pretty good array of reasons to reward Robinov with a fiefdom alongside home video head chieftain Kevin Tsujihara and Warner Bros. TV Group chief Bruce Rosenblum.

This puts Robinov in place, Horn said after the announcement, as the day to day chief of "the third leg of the stool." It's a utilitarian metaphor, but one that team player Robinov fits quite neatly.

(George Clooney greets Jeff Robinov at the Toronto premiere of Michaal Clayton, September 7; photo by Eric Charbonneau)