Bruce Davis obit

Bruce Davis Dies: Longtime Academy Of Motion Picture Arts A Sciences Chief Executive Was 83

 

He was not on the list.

Bruce Davis, who served as chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences for more than 20 years, died Saturday, Sept. 5 surrounded by family at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.

Davis joined the Academy in 1981, following a position as chair of the theater department at Pennsylvania’s Juniata College. He was named executive director in 1989, a role in which he remained until his retirement in 2011.

“I don’t think I’ve been bored for a minute in 30 years here,” Davis told The Associated Press upon his retirement. “I feel like such a rube sometimes. To this day, when I get out of the car on Oscar night and step up there onto that carpet, you get that rush of energy. The lights are popping — not that anybody’s aiming at me — but still I think it’s one of the great rushes, emotionally speaking, that a person can have. I have never gotten tired of that.”

Born March 10, 1943, in Washington, D.C., Davis received an undergraduate degree in English at Juniata College, followed by a masters degree in Medieval Literature from the University of Maryland.

Under his leadership at the Academy, the organization expanded, thanks in large part to two major achievements in film preservation. Davis worked with Beverly Hills officials and Academy president Robert Wise to acquire the rights to the city’s 1928 Waterworks building, transforming it into the home of the Margaret Herrick Library. He also oversaw the acquisition of a sprawling 1948 television studio complex in Hollywood, and its conversion into the Academy Film Archive, along with the development of the Nicholl fellowship, the revival of the Science and Technology Council and the return of the Academy Awards to Hollywood. He was one of the earliest proponents of the Academy museum, which finally was realized when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 2021.

Davis was beloved at the Academy for his sharp wit, his engaging writing, and for establishing a tradition called Friday Lunches, where he would invite staff members at all levels from different departments to join him for a casual meal and conversation.

In 2022, his monumental history of Hollywood’s film Academy was published. Part memoir and part chronicle, The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was 12 years in the making.

One of the many interesting nuggets of info in the book was a possible solving of the mystery of who coined the name Oscar for the Academy Awards statue, with evidence pointing toward Eleanore Lilleberg, an assistant in the early days of the Academy. His research brought him to a small museum, in Green Valley, CA, named for and devoted to Eleanore’s woodcarver and gemologist brother Einar. In an unfinished autobiography, Einar explained that Eleanore appropriated the name “Oscar” from a Norwegian army veteran they had known in Chicago. Like the statuettes, he always “stood straight and tall.”

Davis went on to find a 1944 newspaper interview with one colleague and another’s oral history lending support to the Eleanore Lilleberg theory. “Unsought though it was, the credit for originating one of the world’s best-known nicknames should almost certainly belong to her,” he wrote.

Davis is survived by his wife Joann and their four daughters Brangien, Alexandra, Archer and Roxanne.