There is a job in the movies that never made anyone famous and made a great many films possible. It is called executive in charge of production — the person who keeps a studio’s money, its schedule and its nerve in one place while the names above the title take the bows. For a brief, improbable stretch when a British showman was trying to buy his way into Hollywood, that person was Richard L. O’Connor, and his ledger held a singing frog, Henry Fonda’s farewell and one of the costliest belly-flops the business has ever floated.

O’Connor, who has died in California, spent four decades in a role most moviegoers never notice and every production leans on. He was not the producer of The Muppet Movie — Jim Henson was — and he did not direct On Golden Pond. He was the studio man behind both: the executive who made the numbers work, absorbed the panic and signed off on the risk. Remember him and you remember a whole era of the medium that ran on people like him.

Lord Grade’s American gamble, seen from the accounting side

Line up the films O’Connor shepherded and a hidden pattern surfaces. The Muppet Movie, On Golden Pond and Raise the Titanic were not three unrelated hits and misses on a résumé; they were the marquee bets of a single doomed experiment — Associated Film Distribution, the venture Lew Grade’s ITC and EMI launched to push Grade’s pictures into American theaters on their own terms.

It was an audacious idea and a short-lived one. AFD promised a dozen films a year and left behind a catalog remembered mostly for its extremes. The Muppet Movie was the one true hit — Kermit’s cross-country origin story, funded through that same British ambition. On Golden Pond, whose financing ITC largely raised, became the company’s prestige triumph, carrying Fonda and Katharine Hepburn to Oscars in a single season. And then there was Raise the Titanic, the shipwreck epic that grossed a fraction of its cost and drew Grade’s rueful verdict that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic. The gamble was wound up almost as quickly as it began, and Universal took the pieces. O’Connor’s desk sat at the center of all of it.

The comparatist’s footnote to a beloved shelf

Watch these films against one another and his real contribution comes into focus. The same operation that could midwife a felt frog’s road movie could also back a chamber piece about two old people on a lake and a bloated adventure that helped sink a company — and it took someone steady enough to hold that range without flinching. That steadiness is the through-line of his career, and it long outlasted AFD.

He had come to it the old way. Born in San Francisco with his twin brother, Don, he served alongside him in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, then talked his way into the mail room at CBS Television City — the lowest rung of the business, and the one that used to lead everywhere. From there he built a production career that ran through Movie Movie, the Vietnam drama Friendly Fire and, later, television staples such as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. His one statuette came not from any of the features but from television: an Emmy for outstanding children’s program, for the NBC film A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story, with Alfre Woodard.

O’Connor died July 22 in Palm Desert, at 96; his family did not disclose a cause. A longtime resident of the Mendocino coast, he is survived by his wife, Brona, by daughters, stepchildren and four generations of grandchildren, and by the strange, incongruous, wonderful shelf of films he helped bring into being.

It is a fitting inheritance for a man whose job was to make impossible things affordable. The frog and the Titanic came off the same desk — and only one of them was ever meant to float.

Tags: obituaries, film producers, On Golden Pond, Richard L. O'Connor, The Muppet Movie