Carl Stanley Cornyn was an American record label executive and the author of Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group. He also wrote three privately published family genealogy books.
Career
Cornyn began working for Warner Bros. Records in 1958. He left the Warner Music Group in 1990 to live an office-free life. During his Warner years, he'd advanced to Executive VP of Warner Bros. Records; then to Senior VP of the Warner Music Group; and finally Founder and CEO of Warner New Media within Time-Warner. He is widely remembered for his years heading up Warner-Reprise's Creative Services department, writing innovative ads, and other marketing approaches, including the storied Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders series. He was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes in 1966 for Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night and again in 1967 for Sinatra at the Sands. He was nominated again in 1968 and 1969 for his work on Sinatra and Duke Ellington's Francis A. & Edward K. and Sinatra and Antônio Carlos Jobim's Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim recordings, beaten both times by Johnny Cash. His work gained one additional nomination in 1974 for Sinatra's Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back. The literary qualities of his liner notes are discussed in A Storied Singer: Frank Sinatra as Literary Conceit in a chapter entitled "The Composition of Celebrity: Sinatra as Text in the Liner Notes of Stan Cornyn." He also co-authored the screenplay for Warner Bros.' 1970 film The Phynx. In 1989, while heading Warner New Media, Cornyn introduced a new multimedia format called CD+Graphics, or CD+G. Stan also envisioned “The Whole Megillah.” As a result, Stan's people at Warner New Media built a Megillah Project demonstration system, which was widely viewed within Warner Communications, and resulted in patent 5161034. This patent was later linked to Time Warner’s DVD work. WNM also published several interactive multimediaCompact Discs, such as “How Computers Work” and “Desert Storm.” In 1991 he was asked to lead the short-lived computer games division of Media Vision, Inc., and was named executive vice-president and co-head of Media Vision Multimedia Publishing, heading its Westlake Village offices.
Cornyn was twice married. First, in 1965, to Gail MacCrystall, by whom he fathered son Christopher Cornyn; then again, in 1971, to Theadora Davitt, by whom he has son Tom Cornyn. Cornyn is nephew to William Cornyn, previously the chair of both the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and the Russian Area Program at Yale University; and John Cornyn II, father to U.S. Senator John Cornyn III. Cornyn lived in Carpinteria, California, with longtime companion Meg Barbour. He died on May 11, 2015 at his home in Carpinteria at the age of 81.
