COLUMBIA’S NEW CHIEF SETS HIS CREATIVE GOALS

Hollywood, like the Spanish Inquisition, has a tendency to wear good people down. It changes their attitudes, rearranges their priorities, gets them believing that pandering to the tastes of teen-agers is no vice and that art for art’s sake is no virtue.

British film producer David Puttnam, a man of immaculately mature tastes, recognized all that years ago and has never hesitated to give his opinion. Hollywood, he said, was a place he could neither live in or with.

Thursday, after being formally named the new chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures, Puttnam smiled at a question about his past exhortations on the System and its locale and said, “I’ll have to take back a lot of what I said.”

But the bearded 45-year-old Puttnam wasn’t taking everything back. He chided the “me-tooism” mentality of contemporary Hollywood--the scramble by the studios to duplicate each other’s hits--and promised that under him, Columbia will create films “that are humanist without being sentimental, and commercial without being condescending.”

Puttnam, whose recent films have included “Chariots of Fire,” “The Killing Fields,” and “Local Hero,” assumes the role vacated in April by Guy McElwaine. In what appears to be an attempt to cut through the managerial layers that reportedly helped drive McElwaine and his predecessor Frank Price away, Puttnam also has been named a senior vice president of the New York-based Columbia Pictures Industries.

In recent years, Columbia’s leadership has operated under repeated rumors of corporate interference from its parent Coca-Cola Co. Specifically, the studio’s marketing division was said to be bogged down in Coke-supervised audience research studies--one of the “me-tooism” trends that Puttnam seemed to be admonishing.

Puttnam, acknowledging that he had signed a 3 1/2-year contract with Columbia, will be in charge of worldwide production for the studio and will report to CPI President Richard Gallop. Puttnam had 20 months to go on an independent production contract with Warner Bros., which co-owns the Burbank Studios with Coca-Cola.

Warner Bros. released Puttnam from his contract, but is negotiating with him for projects previously OKd. This fall, Warner Bros. will release Puttnam’s “The Mission,” director Roland Joffe’s first film since “The Killing Fields.”

Puttnam would not discuss the terms of his contract (a trade paper reported that he would be getting $1 million a year), but he said that he could put the deal in perspective.

“When I got married, I was making $100 a week,” he said. “The next year we had a baby and I got a raise to $133 a week. That money was 10 times more significant to me than this.”

In announcing Puttnam’s appointment Thursday, CPI Chairman Fay Vincent referred to him as a “man of civility, taste, intelligence, grace and integrity.” It’s easy to understand why a corporation like Coca-Cola would be interested in a man with those traits, but they don’t exactly predispose a person toward success in Hollywood.

Puttnam, acknowledging that he may prove himself to be naive, said he is coming to Columbia with the attitude that movie taste is a function of diet, that the audience appetite for quality films can be stimulated by more frequent feedings of them.

Puttnam said that the person he is today--with all the dreams and attitudes accompanying him--was formed in dark theaters when he was a kid and movies were good. He worries about the people who may be having their personalities formed in theaters today.

“I believe in cinema,” he said. “I trust the audience.”

The appointment of Puttnam is a bold stroke for Coca-Cola, and one that ought to earn the studio immediate support from both film makers and industry critics. In an era where studios are being led mostly by former agents, lawyers or graduates of television programming, having a legitimate film maker in charge gives hope for the product.

When McElwaine, a former agent, left Columbia, it appeared that the studio--with the input of TV-wise Coca-Cola--would begin making movies that would appeal mostly to television audiences. With the video aftermarket now a major profit center for the film industry, it’s hard to see the difference between a movie written for the screen and one written for television.

Perhaps because Coca-Cola receives 65% of its income from foreign territories, that thinking has turned around. If Columbia is to gather a larger share of the foreign theatrical film market (Puttnam said Thursday that he believes the domestic market has reached a plateau, while the foreign market is ripe for growth), then the kind of strong humanist-theme features that Puttnam is known for may be on the way.

The next three years will tell whether David Puttnam can produce David Puttnam films on a mass scale. All that Coke has bought until now is a man with a record, a good reputation and a film maker’s philosophy.