Producer’s Image Rides ‘Memphis Belle’ : Hollywood: David Puttnam needs a box-office hit to erase his ‘semi-art film’ past.

Three years ago, the Hollywood establishment got a taste of producer David Puttnam. It puckered, as if it had bitten into a lemon, and spit him out. After just one year as chairman of Columbia Pictures, Puttnam was unceremoniously ejected.

The thing about David Puttnam, as any number of irate movie types would tell you, was the way he railed against Hollywood for making too many violent, overpriced and amoral movies. The way he droned on about social responsibility. The way he snubbed the stars and the moguls.

As if David Puttnam’s productions ever made real money. Yes, “Chariots of Fire,” “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission” won acclaim, but you can’t run a studio on Oscars.

When Puttnam took over Columbia, half the town was drunk on the hope that he would bring some sense of elegance to the movie business. The other half was already gagging on Puttnam’s style and rhetoric. Upon Puttnam’s sudden departure from Columbia, his enemies joyfully pointed out that the studio was in a multimillion-dollar quagmire. So much for David Puttnam.

Now, Puttnam is back, with “Memphis Belle,” a film developed during his tenure at Columbia and made for Warner Bros. In Washington for the premiere, he takes his usual moral tone and denies that he thirsts for vindication. But he wouldn’t mind shedding his image as “a semi-art film producer” by proving that he can make a hit movie. “No one sensible wants to be placed in a box and forced to live in it,” he said. “It’s diminishing.”

He discerns a toxic effect in the Persian Gulf, where, he says, war may break out because the public has been imbibing too much Rambo.

Puttnam heard a U.S. military type complain on television that Americans have been watching too many movies. That was a moment for him to savor. “I felt I had some actual ammunition, instead of being this person who wails and moans about cinema,” Puttnam said.

Cinema. Puttnam can use that word, since he’s British. And his name is on the very short list of film producers who are charming dinner companions. He uses an occasional expletive, but in a crude world he projects an unaccustomed fastidiousness.

The one scene in “Memphis Belle” that bothers Puttnam shows one of the young heroes standing at a urinal and then shuffling off without washing his hands. Puttnam blames director Michael Caton-Jones for that. “It really irritates me, because he’s standing by the wash basin,” Puttnam said. “I thought, ‘Oh, Michael, it just shows where you were brought up!’ ”

The most notable Columbia film while Puttnam was there was one that did not get made, the much-anticipated “Ghostbusters II.” The story goes that Puttnam destroyed all hope of getting that movie made when he denounced Bill Murray for greed at a Hollywood luncheon. Murray then refused to work for him. (Puttnam denied the alleged remark, and a debate raged for months over whether he ever said it.)

At 50, Puttnam purports to have mellowed. His fences in Hollywood, he says, are almost rebuilt. Still, he finds it “a little bit alarming” that his time at Columbia was, like writing on a blackboard, so quickly and permanently erased.

He doesn’t envy two of his most powerful enemies: producer Ray Stark and agent Michael Ovitz. “Do I want to be Ray?” he asks. “Do I want Mike’s anxieties? . . . Why should you get neurotic? They have to live out their lives.”