He got his chance to direct in early 1960, when he persuaded Paramount to hold back his newest comic vehicle, "Cinderfella" (directed by Frank Tashlin), until the Christmas season and agreed to give them something else to release in the summer.
Such a move would immediately upset the political order in Hollywood and return Mr. Diller to a level of prominence in the film business that he has not enjoyed since the 1980's, when he ran Paramount Pictures and, later, Twentieth Century Fox.
"We have a different way of responding to the world," he wrote of African-Americans in a 1990 Spin magazine article after he and Paramount could not come to an agreement.
But what he really loved, his widow, Anne, said, was watching his children, Lisa, 21, and Greg, 19, play sports, develop into respectful, disciplined people, and carry themselves with the same happy, family-oriented attitude that he deemed paramount.
He ran Paramount Studios in the 1970's, founded the Fox broadcast network in the 1980's and sold his USA Networks to Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal two years ago at the top of the market in exchange for a complicated bundle of shares and financial obligations.
The hotel, developed as a joint venture with Marriott International and its Ritz-Carlton brand, will stand out, Mr. Trapani said, both for its service, which he considers paramount, and its location in the middle of a large private garden near La Scala, the opera house.
But with his options plan Jean-Marie Messier is aligning Vivendi managers' interests with Vivendi owners' interests, coming back to Messier's mission, the theme he considers paramount: shareholder value.
Safety, he conceded, was "paramount," but he feared that the robots might encourage bad habits.
The former head of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said that although he believed the issue was paramount, he firmly believed it was not the job of central banks to address it.
In addition, "Experience is paramount," he said, noting that he did an internship with a computer forensics software company while getting his bachelor's.
Across the album, rather than making his style paramount, he's showing you that he can play in more than one way.
