ROGER L. MAYER (1926–2015)

Sam Roberts reports in the New York Times that Roger L. Mayer—a film executive who was central in preserving and restoring many classic movies and who also stirred controversy by coloring some black-and-white ones—died last Tuesday in Los Angeles.

At the 2005 Oscar ceremony, Martin Scorsese presented Mayer with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his chairmanship of the National Film Preservation Foundation, which had saved more than 2,100 movies that were abandoned by their copyright holders. Mayer also served on the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board, which each year chooses twenty-five “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” for preservation.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Mayer went to work as a lawyer for Columbia Pictures. He joined MGM in 1961 and rose to senior vice president for administration and president of MGM Laboratories.

From 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Mayer was also president and chief operating officer of the Turner Entertainment Company, which acquired thousands of films from Warner Bros. and RKO as well as from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Mayer was an executive for twenty-five years. He also helped develop the Turner Classic Movies cable channel.

Among Turner Entertainment’s first major ventures was to transform some of the black-and-white movies in its collection into color features. This process of digital colorizing started a fierce debate among many directors, film purists, and congressional hearings, but Mayer defended the method saying it provided an alternative format, rather than a substitute, that could attract younger audiences.