Yes, There’s Life Outside Hollywood : Former Columbia chief David Puttnam continues his mission in England with ‘Memphis Belle’

It is a wet, blustery day in the green and lowly rolling countryside of the west of England. David Puttnam, his visitor and the young couple who look after his country house trudge across the fields and over a footbridge toward a wire enclosure.

They carry cardboard cartons. The couple are back from a nearby game farm with ducks to add to the population of Puttnam’s pond. The ducks will pause in the enclosure long enough to get used to the new environment. In an adjoining pen Puttnam raises golden pheasants, their brilliant plumage looking sunlit even on a dark gray day.

It is a long way from Columbia Studios in Burbank, and it is just over two years since the mid-September evening in 1987 when Puttnam told a tearful audience in a Columbia screening room that he was leaving the studio after one of the shortest and most controversial tenures in the industry’s history.

Principal photography has just been completed at Pinewood Studios outside London on the first feature Puttnam has produced since his California days. It is “Memphis Belle,” a fiction film drawn from William Wyler’s World War II documentary of the same name about the English-based crew of a B-17 making its 25th and last mission before being relieved. Puttnam’s co-producer is Wyler’s daughter, Catherine, who began to develop the project when she was on Puttnam’s staff in Burbank.

“The interesting thing for me about ‘Memphis Belle,’ ” Puttnam says, “is that if there had to be a movie which precisely defined what I was trying to do at Columbia, it would be ‘Memphis Belle,’--an absolutely precise example of exactly what I wanted the studio to do and what I wanted to be part of. So, we’ll see.”

By its nature “Memphis Belle” aims to be a piece of suspenseful storytelling, but other elements caught Puttnam’s eye as well. He was astonished to learn how young the bomber crews had been. The average age of the bomber captains was 21, he says. The notion of teamwork, the total dependence of each of the 10 men in the crew on each of the others, also caught his imagination as a kind of spiritual antidote to the decade of all-for-me individualism. “It’s in a way my rather lame attack on Thatcherism,” Puttnam told writer Mary Blume not long ago. The movie will not lack a message, positive in the tradition of Puttnam’s “Chariots of Fire.”

“Memphis Belle” will be released by Warner Bros., probably in the autumn of 1990, timed to the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. It has been financed by Puttnam’s Enigma Productions (named for a teacher who called him an enigma when he left school at 16). Enigma has 50% Warners backing, from a production deal Puttnam had before his Columbia association and suspended during it. Thirty percent is from two English sources, National Westminster Bank and British Satellite Broadcasting, and 20% from Fuji-Sankei, the Japanese media conglomerate that underwrote Ronald Reagan’s recent visit there.

Burbank is two years in the past, but the echoes do not die. Another book on the Puttnam years, “Out of Focus” by Charles Kipps (Morrow, $22.95), is just coming out which takes a sharply adversarial view of Puttnam, reflecting the views of producer Ray Stark and agent Michael Ovitz. (Kipps’ next book will be a biography of Ovitz.)

In essence, the book complains that, beyond alienating Stark, Ovitz, Bill Murray and Bill Cosby, Puttnam imported too much foreign talent and concentrated on small, artful films that would at best yield small returns as against the big-ticket items that could have become money-spinning giants like “Ghostbusters.”

“I failed hopelessly at Columbia,” Puttnam says without hesitation. There are various measures of failure and for him the most painful aspect of failure was philosophical. “The industry needed someone to say that films aren’t getting any better. Can you think of any really awesome films after ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘The Godfather Part II’? The really sad thing is that I didn’t do anything to make the situation better.”

The people who run the industry, Puttnam says, are for the most part “very nice.” But, he adds sadly, “they’ve almost given up on engaging the mind as a fundamental of what they do. And they’ve settled, instead, for the engagement of the emotions. And while I think it’s absolutely legitimate to engage the emotions, the real brief that any film maker should give himself is to engage the mind and the emotions equally, because engaging the emotions gives you the opportunity to put over ideas, these notions you have.”

Puttnam was what the British call a school-leaver, finishing the equivalent of high school and going into the work force. He became fiercely and relentlessly self-taught in the great Anglo-American tradition, and the movies early and late were part of his education.

“I know what cinema did for me and my life,” Puttnam says. “I have to believe it did the same for other people all over the globe. I guess what I’m saying is that the world of ideas can’t afford the abdication of the major means of information in the world: cinema and television.”

Puttnam, who combines an impassioned earnestness with a disarming, change-of-pace sense of humor, pauses after the heavy thoughts and grins, adding, “There’s a wonderful Chinese proverb--it really is a Chinese proverb, not one that I made up--that says if you continue down the road you’ve purposely taken, you’re likely to end up where you seem to be heading.”

There are projects that he is proud of from the Columbia days, including “Punchline” (“Tom Hanks was wonderful”), John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” and “The Last Emperor.” It is interesting that among Enigma’s projects in development are two with directors he often mentioned as the kind of talents he hoped to recruit for Columbia.

With the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, he is developing a property called “Meeting Venus,” a sort of “Day for Night” set during the creation of an opera and based on Szabo’s own experiences directing opera in Paris.

He is also working with Czech director Jiri Menzel of the excellent “Closely Watched Trains” on “Fadeout,” a script by Aida Bortnik, who wrote “The Official Story” and “Old Gringo.”

Puttnam and his wife, Patsy, bought the Kingsmead mill property in 1981 at an auction conducted in a pub in nearby Malmesbury, an ancient wool market town. Their bid edged out a man who wanted to convert the whole place to dog kennels.

There was a mill on the property at the time of the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s inventory of his new country, in the 11th Century. The present mill dates from 1740 and there were also two cottages from about 1620 with an 1828 extension. Puttnam combined the buildings into one. A separate building has a complete editing room where “The Mission” and other Puttnam productions took final shape.

“We’re an island,” Puttnam says after the new ducks have been settled. The Bristol Avon (one of several Avon rivers in England) divides, one branch becoming the mill run beneath the house, then rejoining the main flow at a weir beyond the house.

The massive cogged wooden wheels of an early incarnation of the mill workings still occupy one end of what is now a stone-floored dining room. The mill, with a latter-day iron wheel, was actually operated until 1955. The constant sound of the water is curiously soothing.

One of the walls embracing the mill required extensive structural revision. The Puttnams solved the problem by replacing the heavy stone wall with a two-story-high picture window, which looks out on the millpond and the river and beyond to a small wood and a wide, deep meadow.

Puttnam designed a gazebo for the lawn beside the weir, the roof inspired by a drawing by Sir Humphrey Repton he found in the London Library, the rest a Scandinavian design. Anton Chekhov would feel at home in the gazebo, taking tea of a late summer afternoon and watching the sun set.

The place is neither baronial nor palatial but country gentry living at its most personal and comfortable. It is manifestly a fine place to recharge the batteries after the stresses of London, or of Hollywood. A visitor asks how Puttnam could ever have been lured away from the mill to California.

“To pay for it,” Puttnam says, grinning. “I mean, to begin to create a trust for our children (they have two, now in their 20s) so that when I’m gone they won’t face a terrible problem of how to maintain it.”

The equal lure of Columbia was, of course, to try to put into practice what Puttnam had been preaching about the missed potential of film, and about how a certain vital variety could be restored.

“There are moments,” Puttnam says. “ ‘Dead Poets Society’ was a marvelous film. Jeff Katzenberg has every right to be thrilled with himself. I’m told ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is terrific.

“But you could also ask where the failure lies. Does it lie in the ambition of writers, directors, producers? Are they just not coming up with the material? Does it lie within the financial areas where they don’t know how to respond to the material, or they’re nervous about it?

“I certainly found that the great reality of that damned job is that you’re making such an enormous bet every day. You do get scared. You really do.”

Puttnam thinks that the Academy and the American Film Institute should take the lead in organizing major seminars on the nature and the future of the movies.

“The one marvelous thing about Europe, for all its inadequacies, is that there is a constant, lively, ongoing debate about the role of information and the arts in society. The Academy, now that Karl Malden is heading it, and the AFI under Jean Firstenberg, should be party to a major public discussion. Get the attitudes out in the open. Let’s discuss reality. And if the reality is that the creative community have to go home and lick their wounds, so be it. On the other hand, if the concerns I’ve expressed have merit, then let’s see what can be done.”

In a quite different way from Ronald Reagan, Puttnam thinks the Sony buy-out of Columbia could be beneficial to the studio. “The Japanese believe in long-term thinking,” Puttnam says. “There’s not been enough of it in Hollywood. That could be very good. And they’re smart to go to Peter Guber and Jon Peters. They’re good and they’ll benefit from the long-term thinking.”

The denouement of the Columbia experience was painful and embarrassing but, two years after, Puttnam says, he is enjoying “the happiest years of my personal and professional life.”

In addition to his production activities at Enigma, he is president of the Council for the Protection of Rural England and has collaborated with author Derek Mercer on a recent book, “Rural England: Our Countryside at the Crossroads” (Macdonald/Queen Anne Press), which identifies the pressure points where the amenities are most threatened.

Puttnam is also an active chairman of National Film and Television School and a peripatetic traveler in the cause of film. “I’m a very political fellow,” Puttnam says, happy to note that after a long run “the skids seem to be under the Thatcher administration.”

He still sounds like the philosophical Puttnam of the Burbank days. “The small voice is getting squeezed out. To their great credit I think the studios and the agencies have never been more alert to the emergence of good young talent. They certainly want them. But having found them, they then harness them to the wheels of commerce and stifle their individual voice.”

The stifled voice is not to David Puttnam’s taste.