David Puttnam

David Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, FRSA, (born 25 February 1941) is a film producer and politician. He sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.

Film career

After an early career in advertising (see Collett Dickenson Pearce) and acting as agent for the photographer David Bailey, he turned to film production in the late 1960s. His successes as a producer include Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, The Duellists (Ridley Scott's feature film debut), Chariots of Fire (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Local Hero, Memphis Belle, and The Killing Fields and The Mission with Roland Joffé, mostly in association with Goldcrest.

He was Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Columbia Pictures from 1986 to 1988. During his time at Columbia he was criticised for what some saw as a condescending attitude toward the Hollywood film industry, and for not sufficiently exploiting the studio's few box office hits. This strategic failure contributed to the sale of the studio to Sony.

Politics

He was knighted in 1995 and created a life peer in 1997, as Baron Puttnam, of Queensgate in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. In 2002 he chaired the joint scrutiny committee on the Communications Bill, which recommended an amendment to prevent ownership of British terrestrial TV stations by companies with a significant share of the newspaper market. This was widely interpreted as being aimed at stopping Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation from buying Channel 5. When the government opposed the amendment, Puttnam brokered a compromise — the introduction of a "public interest" test to be applied by the new regulator Ofcom, but without explicit restrictions. Puttnam is currently a trustee of the think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research. In May 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Association with education

He was chairman of the National Film and Television School for many years, and taught people such as Nick Park. He founded Skillset, which trains young people to become members of the film and television industries. In 2002 he was elected UK president of Unicef.

Lord Puttnam has been the chancellor of the University of Sunderland since 1997 and was appointed as chancellor of the Open University in 2006.^[1] His final duties at Sunderland will be to preside over the July 2007 graduation ceremonies. He was also the Chairman of NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) from 1998 until 2003. He is also on the Board of Trustees of Futurelab.

BAFTA Fellowship

In February 2006, he was awarded the Orange BAFTA Fellow of the Academy. He made the occasion notable by delivering a particularly moving homage to his late father who had died before he received his Oscar for Chariots of Fire.. He also congratulated contemporary filmakers (specifically George Clooney) for making films with integrity: the lack of such films being produced had been the reason for his retirement from the film industry in the late 1990s.^[2]

References

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