Shock at sudden departure of Disney boss

When he addressed Disney's first fan convention this month, Dick Cook could have been forgiven for basking in the warm glow of being master of all he surveyed.

The 59-year-old chairman of Walt Disney Studios was doing what he does best: getting chums such as Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage and Miley Cyrus to publicly declare allegiance to cinema's most storied franchise.

Today, as he sits at home mulling his sudden removal from office, he could be forgiven for wondering if he's about to wake up from the sort of bad dream on which Hollywood plots are premised.

On Friday, Cook called around 90 of Disney's most senior executives together at HQ in Burbank, and abruptly announced that he was leaving after seven years in the studio's top job.

Having helped, at various points in his Disney career, mastermind many of the biggest cinematic cash cows including The Lion King, Toy Story, and Pirates of the Caribbean, Cook felt his position had become untenable.

Long-running disagreements with Disney's chief executive, Bob Iger, had left him feeling like a square peg in a round hole.

The news, delivered in an emotional teatime address, had all the hallmarks of a classic film industry coup.

Messy, unexpected, and heralding a radical change for the most famous of Hollywood's "big six" studios, his departure set Blackberries buzzing across the Hills.

To the concern of shareholders and cinema audiences, it also leaves uncertainty hanging over some of Disney's most eagerly-awaited, and lucrative, future projects.

Though relatively unknown outside professional circles, Cook was one of film's most accomplished powerbrokers.

His close personal rapport with superstar directors such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Tim Burton, as well as a whole generation of A-list actors, brought an unparalleled array of talent into what he liked to call the "Disney Family".

The impact of his departure was laid bare in the reaction of Johnny Depp, who decided to telephone the LA Times in the middle of the night from London to inform them that he was "shocked and very saddened" at what had happened to "the sweetest man alive, and such a gent".

The actor said he was reconsidering his commitment to the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, threatening the billion-dollar centrepiece of Disney's plans for the next two years.

"There's a fissure, a crack in my enthusiasm at the moment. [The film] was all born in [Dick's] office," he said.

Depp's concerns are mirrored across the celebrity world, and among thousands of Disney staff who had come to regard Cook - the genial, slightly-eccentric and unassuming studio chairman who despite his lofty status was still prepared to wear Mickey Mouse ties - as one of their own.

Officially, his sudden departure - after nearly four decades rising through company ranks after starting out as a Disneyland monorail operator in the 1970s - is shrouded in mystery.

In a statement announcing the move, he would say only: "It's the right time for me to move on to new adventures ... and in the words of one of my baseball heroes, Yogi Berra: 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it'."

Unofficially, though, it revolves around a clash of personalities with Bob Iger, a more cerebral and perhaps corporate character who started out as a TV weatherman before rising through the ranks of the TV network ABC, and being appointed to the helm of the vast Walt Disney group in 2005.

Where Cook is an impresario of the old school, steeped in Disney's culture, Iger is an outsider who seems convinced that the firm needs to undergo a dramatic creative realignment to maintain any semblance of a stranglehold on a fragmented youth market.

Where Cook likes to play cards close to his chest, making films in near-total secrecy before dramatically unveiling them, Iger believes in a "team Disney" approach.

Speaking to financial analysts in May, Iger blamed Cook for a 97 per cent drop in earnings that saw the studio post a loss for the first time in four years. "It's about choice of films and the execution of films that have been chosen," he said.

- INDEPENDENT