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Executive Moves: Donna Langley becomes Co-Chair at Universal

posted by Women & Hollywood
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 12:12pm EDT

I guess we should look at this moment as a glass half full moment. Big congrats to Donna Langley the former president of production who recently returned from maternity leave to get promoted to a big new job co-chair of Universal Pictures.

While I think this is amazing and awesome, another woman with the ability to green light movies (and by the way if it weren’t for Donna Langley Mamma Mia never would have been made. She was the one who championed it and made it happen and it has made potloads of money for the the studio), why was she made co-chair and Adam Fogelson made chair?

While this might be viewed as semantics because in all the press materials it is made to seem that they will be a team, every article has made it clear that Langley will report to Fogelson and he reports to Ron Meyer.

Here’s the quote from Meyer about Fogelson in Variety:

Adam is a natural leader with a unique ability to anticipate our audience, understand our business and collaborate with our filmmakers to give us a competitive advantage.

There is no quote about Langley’s leadership.

It’s not that they haven’t had a woman in the chair position before. Stacey Snider was chairman of the studio for a number of years before she left to run Dreamworks.

So I guess my question is if Langley and Fogelson are going to be partners in running the studio operations, why don’t they have equivalent titles, and why is she reporting to him?

These things do matter.

Fogelson, Langley to top Universal (Variety)