New day on the Callender

By Steven Zeitchik

Our apologies for a few delays in posting; we've been in a transition larger than the McCain campaign's these last few days. The big news in the last twenty-four hours is Colin Callender's departure from HBO Films. (He'll be starting a company, he says; hey, isn't Chris Albrecht looking for a new gig?)

On the one hand, of course, Callender wasn't really a feature-film figure -- HBO Films most recent theatrical foray with Picturehouse ended with a fizzle, and many of the movies that the HBO Films wing of that company (as opposed to the New line or acquisition pipelines) were underperformers.

But Callender was unique in many of the projects he agitated for on the television side -- prestige minis, movies and longer-form series that television has either abandoned or was never really that serious in the first place. While some of them could tend toward the twee side, others, from "Empire Falls" to "Recount," were as sparklingly dramatic as anything on the big screen.

As is sometimes the case with pay-cable, it's hard to know exact cume viewership figures. But in an era when the gap between one-off theatrical features and television plays continues to be wide in everything from budgets to storytelling methods, HBO Films under Callender has worked to bridge them.

The network pledges continued support of the kinds of projects Callender championed, and indeed, one of the biggest projects on any screen is due as early as 2009 when Playtone's Asia-set World War II epic "The Pacific" hits screens. But the job has already split between two deputies, and it's hard to imagine the process being the same. Callender's volubleness in pitching his projects made him not just a known figure but reflected a unique role in which an exec could operate with comparatively little corporate interference. We'll see what the next pages look like when the Callender is flipped.