Learning as He Goes

LOCH FYNE, Scotland —  It’s been a long, eventful and remarkable career--but David Puttnam is planning to get out of the film producing business.

We may yet see four more Puttnam-made pictures in the next few years, but he is already starting to phase himself out of the confines of movies. He is passionately interested in education and the effect the audiovisual industry could have upon it in the coming years; his energies, he says, will be directed there.

He was named Lord Puttnam by Britain’s new prime minister, Tony Blair, earlier this month, and intends to play an active role in the House of Lords at Westminster. Puttnam was recently named a member of Britain’s Standards Task Force, set up by Blair’s new Labor government and chaired by a cabinet minister, education secretary David Blunkett. The task force aims to spread good teaching practice in the three Rs.

“I’m very keen to move my center of gravity away from the movie business to what I call the education business,” said Puttnam, 56, over lunch at a hotel on the shores of this picturesque Scottish lake, which is the primary location for his next film, “World of Moss.”

“The next big industry that will be affected by the cinema industry is education. Education, intellectual copyright and the creative economy are crucial to Britain. In areas like this we’re good at creating but bad at exploiting. I find these challenges more interesting and more relevant to being 60 years old than the movies.”

Specifically Puttnam would like Britain to stake a claim quickly in the education and information business and to thwart any attempt by American entertainment conglomerates to establish the same sort of stranglehold over education and information that their movie divisions exert over worldwide distribution channels.

Thus he is prematurely bringing down the curtain on a career as a mover behind several movies: “Chariots of Fire,” which won the Oscar for best picture 15 years ago, “The Killing Fields,” “Midnight Express,” “The Mission,” “Local Hero” and “Memphis Belle.” His producing career spans 27 years.

In 1986 he became the first European-born boss of a Hollywood studio, Columbia, but he resigned as chairman and chief executive after a stormy 15-month reign.

Puttnam’s acknowledgment that he is switching careers coincides with the British publication of his book “The Undeclared War” (to be published by Knopf in the U.S., probably in March), an account of how Hollywood attained preeminence in international film production and distribution, despite attempts of European countries through the years to rival its share of the world market. Puttnam details the history of cooperation between Hollywood and successive U.S. governments in promoting American movies abroad as a propaganda tool.

Having outlined this history up to the present, Puttnam, in the book’s last two chapters, makes an impassioned plea for Europe (and especially Britain) to take a lead in the burgeoning education and information industries.

“The book’s about the impact of movies on our whole life,” he said. “The point is movies are no longer just about what’s playing at the local cinema. They’re the locomotive which pulls entire sections of the world economy, and the power that the movies have allowed to accrue to a relatively small sector of the cultural world in Hollywood.

“We’re now moving toward an information and education age in which the values and skills of entertainment are destined to affect and infect other areas of the economy. If we end up going down the same road in those two critical sectors that we’ve gone in movies, the implications for the world economy, and even elements of the world’s stability, are serious.”

Puttnam does not subscribe to the view that what non-Americans call “cultural imperialism” in the form of exported Hollywood movies is malevolent. Rather, he says studios often sell their product worldwide in a clumsy, heavy-handed manner.

“For instance,” he said, “if we think Islam is going to sit back and see its world altered because of the omnivorous nature of these other [Hollywood] pressures and values, that’s nonsense. At some point or other they’re going to react, perhaps badly.

“India is another example. As a country it’s so sensitive, it can’t deal with the insensitive drumbeat of American culture. [Hollywood] drives a coach and horses through all sorts of suppositions in India, some of which may not be valid, but some of which are also keeping 900 million people living cheek by jowl reasonably peacefully.”

For all this, Puttnam is not anti-Hollywood, and the book’s first 18 chapters deal evenhandedly with the struggle for control of the world’s film industry between Hollywood and other nations. “There’s so much double-think in Europe,” he noted. “One view says that most American films are pap. Wrong. But if a respected director like Martin Scorsese, say, makes an overtly commercial film, it’s still assessed in Europe as a cultural phenomenon.”

Puttnam has no idea how “The Undeclared War” will be received in America: “I tried not to take sides but to set out a context. I think it’s a valuable tool for film schools. As a primer, it allows anyone who wants to get a degree [in film studies] to move on and choose their area. It’s a useful addition to a school library--and gratifyingly, not one single film [British] historian has challenged any of the facts.”

He related all this in a genial, relaxed mood, and despite his avowed intention to switch careers, he was clearly enjoying producing “World of Moss.” It reunites him with Hugh Hudson, who directed “Chariots of Fire,” for the first time in 15 years. The film, with a script by playwright Simon Donald, is based on “Son of Adam,” the memoir of veteran British TV executive Sir Denis Forman, and deals with a young boy growing up in the 1920s in a large Scottish manor house, surrounded by an eccentric family; his father (played by Colin Firth) is a crackpot inventor. Malcolm McDowell also stars.

“I read the book, loved it and thought it would work,” Puttnam recalled. “I waited a year for another writer to deliver a screenplay, which didn’t work. But Simon got it absolutely right. I also felt there were elements in Hugh’s own background that he wouldn’t have to strain to understand this story at all--he comes from a well-off family who spent part of the year in Scotland.”

Puttnam was equally bullish in discussing his three “last projects” that detain him from quitting movies immediately. They are: “Serenade,” a musical set in Las Vegas, directed by Taylor Hackford, with a book by British playwright William Nicholson (“Shadowlands”); “Fadeout,” about a Czech actress at a Nazi-controlled film studio in Prague in the dying days of World War II, to be directed by Anthony Minghella; and an adaptation of a French novel acquired by Puttnam, “A Very Long Engagement” by Sebastien Japrisot, about a young Frenchwoman who sets out to discover the fate of her fiance, a soldier in World War I.

“I feel real enthusiasm about them all,” he noted. “I’d love to see these three scripts get made. And my relationship with Warner Bros. is still fantastic.”

Puttnam is not a man to dwell on lost opportunities or wrong decisions, but admitted that if he could rewind the video of his life he would not have taken the Columbia job.

His tenure there was marked by his own combative stance toward Hollywood. Puttnam disliked the overwhelming power of agents in the industry. He resented what he saw as cozy deals existing between the studio and veteran producers like Ray Stark. He came to the job with actors Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty already hostile to him for past grievances, then alienated others including Bill Murray and Bill Cosby. Finally, he was critical of how Hollywood movies were conceived and made, and railed against the corruption of the producer’s role.

“People constantly ask me what I got wrong at Columbia, and the first thing I forgot was that I wasn’t American,” he recalled. “A lot of the things I said, I look back now and think, ‘they were coming from the voice of a foreigner.’ Imagine the Katzenberg memo [which warned in 1991 about the spiraling costs of making studio films] delivered in a French accent. But back then, I didn’t see it that way.

“There was a moment when I’d agreed to [take the job] and [Warners Bros. studio chiefs] Terry Semel and Bob Daly said no. I was in Terry’s garden and I said I’d shaken hands on the deal. They told me to tell Columbia that I was still under contract to Warners, and that they wouldn’t release me. If I were to replay my life, I’d probably have stayed [in Britain].”

The experience at Columbia, Puttnam says, also triggered a chronic bout with encephalomyocarditis, a viral disease affecting the skeletal and nervous systems, which remains with him. “I got so ill, and I’d like to have avoided that. It’s sort of blighted my life, and four or five times a year it recurs to remind me it’s there.”

This post-Columbia period saw Puttnam return to independent production, though his films “Memphis Belle,” “Meeting Venus” have seemed less glittering than his successes in the 1980s. Yet in the last six or seven years Puttnam has also worked behind the scenes for the Labor Party, and has close friendships in high circles: Blair and his family were guests over the New Year’s holiday at one of Puttnam’s houses in west Cork, Ireland. Tellingly, former Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock’s daughter Rachel is running the production office on “World of Moss.”

Puttnam has a famous weakness for titles; it had long been rumored that Blair would make him Lord Puttnam. He clearly has skill as a back-room briefer; he said Blair’s government had accepted his vision of Britain at the hub of a creative economy “hook, line and sinker.”

Puttnam may yet come to miss producing films, but also has no desire to continue into old age. “It’s a young man’s game,” he admitted. “And unless you’re prepared to believe all the b.s., there’s a certain way in which you just can’t do it. I’ve gone to the Cannes Film Festival for 25 years, and this year I sat on a hotel balcony watching these kids in their 20s and 30s, rushing up and down the Croisette with mobile phones, all with a sense that their next meeting could change their lives.

“If you reach a point when you know it won’t change your life, you’re already stepping back. The movie world ought to belong to young people. The fact I was three or four floors up watching them says it all.”