PUTTNAM: HOLLYWOOD TAKES A LOSS

The jumped-fell-was-pushed-or-escaped resignation of David Puttnam as chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures is bad news for the motion picture industry. The industry will survive. It always has.

The phenomenal power of the movies as an art form is no way better illustrated than in their ability to outlast an industry whose favorite sport is Russian roulette.

Granted, Hollywood has been able to lose, in the face of television, four-fifths of the audience it had at its peak in 1946, in a total population half again as large as it was. Granted the studios did not so much lose as alienate most of those who had been its steady customers. But nobody’s perfect.

Puttnam’s chief problem, as has been widely reported, was that he did not believe in polite silence. He acted like a prophet in the wilderness, telling hard truths in a town that does not like to think of itself as a wilderness, or in need of hard truths.

One of his competitors (who ironically agrees with much of what Puttnam was preaching) said a few months ago he wished David would stop talking and get on with it. Puttnam had indeed been getting on with it, and had even tried to assume a lower profile, although instant candor comes as naturally to him as blather does to others.

Puttnam will continue to produce, for another studio, Warners, but his authoritative voice as the head of a studio will be at least somewhat muffled.

What was he preaching? That huge budgets, counted in the dozens of millions, are no substitute for creative imagination and may be dangerous to your fiscal health; that the swollen talent costs are preposterous; that the studios have unwisely surrendered far too much of their creative power to the big talent agencies and to a kind of interlocking directorate of producers and executives who prosper mightily, whether their films do or not.

Puttnam thinks the movies have ignored a large and growing segment of the population susceptible to being won or won back to the cinemas. He believes that the studios give too little attention to their own continuity, and his principal dream was to build a small, smart, friendly and dedicated creative team that would stay in place after he had done his three-year servitude in charge of Columbia and gone back to producing and teaching.

In his 15 months he had built such a team and generated an amazing amount of esprit throughout the studio. One of the mechanisms of esprit was a monthly screening he hosted to let the employees know what was coming.

When, at a studio screening Wednesday night of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” he quietly announced that he would shortly not be there to watch over Columbia, there were, a friend tells me, gasps, silence and the sound of tears.

It’s hard to think of another major studio executive whose departure could evoke such an emotional response, although it’s possible there may be one.

The loss to the industry is that Puttnam was almost alone among studio chieftains as having been an independent producer with years of hands-on experience with the creative process-- and a successful track record.

The irony is that he was anything but an elitist or anti-commercial producer. He has been as eager as anyone to reach a mass audience; it is just that he thinks you can do it with taste, originality and aptness of thought.

His early films, “Stardust” and “That’ll Be the Day,” were not box-office smashes here, but they will remain an incisive and knowing glimpse of an England in social ferment in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And “Chariots of Fire”--his venture from the initiating idea--demonstrated what can be made of materials seemingly so far off track as to be invisible. “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission” were, like them or not, bold, original and skilled undertakings.

The early assessment appears to be that Puttnam made friends who don’t have power and enemies who do. The parting was said to be amicable, but the better word might have been civilized , because Puttnam is nothing if not civilized.

In The Times on Friday, Jack Mathews quoted film makers who were upset at Puttnam’s departure, having been grateful for his informed support and his courageous choices of material. Elsewhere, those who did not appreciate his attempts to rock the sluggish luxury liner may be feeling real relief.

But Puttnam’s warnings against a competent, safe timidity in the kinds of movies that are made, and against the whole philosophy of the swollen blockbuster instead of the balanced diet, may yet prove to have been prophetic.

The trouble is that “I told you so” is a cheerless exit line.