Guest Speaker David Brown

David Brown David Brown, in partnership with Richard D. Zanuck, produced some of the more memorable films of recent times, including Jaws, Academy Award winner The Sting, The Verdict and Cocoon. They launched Steven Spielberg on his maiden voyage in films, having produced The Sugarland Express, and engaged him to direct Jaws. Mr. Brown also served as Executive Producer for the Academy Award winning film Driving Miss Daisy, which Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck produced.

Mr. Brown also produced the critically acclaimed and award winning Robert Altman film, The Player, as well as Rob Reiner's Academy Award nominated A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Keifer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon. Currently in world-wide release is Brown's production of The Saint starring Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue and directed by Phillip Noyce.

Mr. Brown and Richard D. Zanuck are in production with Steven Spielberg on Deep Impact directed by Mimi Leder and starring Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Teo Leoni, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell and Elijah Wood. Mr. Brown and Joe Wizan have produced Kiss the Girls, a thriller starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, now in release world-wide.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, on March 25, 1991, awarded Mr. Brown and Mr. Zanuck the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given only by the Board of Governors of the Academy to "a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high qaulity of motion picture production." At that time, there had only been 27 such awards given in the Academy's then 65-year history. In addition, and also with Mr. Zanuck, Mr. Brown received from the Producers Guild of America the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award on March 3, 1993.

In addition, Mr. Brown has had a long career as a journalist, author and magazine editor (including having been managing Editor of Cosmopolitan in the pre-Helen Gurley Brown years), as well as a film executive. Mr. Zanuck and Mr. Brown headed film production for years at 20th Century-Fox and later at Warner Brothers. Mrs. Brown was Editor-in-Chief at Cosmopolitan for 32 years and is presently Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan's 36 international editions, which she launched.

Mr. Brown's first book was the critically acclaimed Brown's Guide to Growing Gray, published by Delacorte in 1987. This was followed by his memoirs, Let Me Entertain You, published by William Morrow to excellent reviews His next best-seller was The Rest of Your Life is the Best of Your Life, published by Barricade Books in 1991. He is also and occasional contributor to The New Yorker.

Mr. Brown was represented on Broadway as producer of Tru, A Few Good Men and The Cemetery Club and in London with Vanilla. He is preparing, with Ernest Lehman, a Broadway musical based on the classic film The Sweet Smell Of Success. John Guare is writing the book.

In television, Mr. Brown and William S. Gilmore produced an award-winning series for Home Box Office entitle Women & Men, starring Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Beau Bridges, Molly Ringwald and Peter Weller in classic short stories. Last year Mr. Brown produced a four-hour miniseries for CBS based on Dominick Dunne's best-selling book A Season in Purgatory, directed by David Greene and is developing with Max Rosenberg a television miniseries of John Dos Passos' triology U.S.A.

Mr. Brown is a resident of New York, a member of the Trustee Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art and Board of Visitors of Columbus University's Graduate School of Journalism.


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