NEW YORK - David Brown, whose legendary career as a movie producer and executive spanned six decades, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 93.
Mr. Brown was nominated four times for an Academy Award and produced box office smashes such as Oscar winners “The Sting’’ and “Jaws,’’ along with classics like “Cocoon’’ and “Driving Miss Daisy.’’
Married for more than 50 years to Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown, Mr. Brown and his wife have been celebrated as anchors of both the Hollywood film and New York publishing communities.
Before heading to Hollywood to join the film industry in 1951, Mr. Brown enjoyed a successful career as a journalist, including a stint as managing editor of Cosmopolitan, which his wife later made famous as its editor in chief. A prolific writer, Mr. Brown also authored a number of books, including his most recent, in 2006, “Brown’s Guide to the Good Life Without Tears, Fears, or Boredom.’’
“David Brown was a force in the entertainment, literary, and journalism worlds,’’ said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and chief executive officer of Hearst Corp.
Along the way, Mr. Brown brought Elvis Presley to the big screen for the first time in “Love Me Tender,’’ launched director Steven Spielberg’s career, and is credited with talking George C. Scott into playing General George S. Patton.
Born in New York City, the film producer who would go on to, as one interviewer put it, “make half of Hollywood famous,’’ went west to Stanford University intending to be a physicist.
Quickly discovering that physics and higher math were not his strong suits, Mr. Brown majored in what he described as “the softest discipline I could think of, which was journalism.’’ He graduated from Stanford in 1936 and headed home to New York to earn his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University the following year.
After apprenticeships in the 1930s at a San Francisco newspaper and The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Brown became a copy editor and theater critic at Women’s Wear Daily. .
Mr. Brown also wrote short stories and articles for national magazines like Collier’s, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post and for The New York Times. The future movie mogul held editorial positions at the Milk Research Council and the American Medical Association and served as a first lieutenant with US Army Military Intelligence during World War II.
With his eclectic journalism résumé and a clear sense of narrative, Mr. Brown caught the eye of legendary Hollywood studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, who hired him in 1951 to head the story department at 20th Century Fox.
To prepare for his second move west, Mr. Brown, who then preferred plays to movies, had to take what he called “a crash course in movie going.’’
From 1952 to 1971, Mr. Brown rose in Fox’s executive ranks, surviving two firings, one of which briefly took him to Warner Bros., where he was executive vice president and a member of the board of directors. Twice divorced, he married Helen Gurley, then an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles in 1959.
While at Fox, Mr. Brown began his longtime friendship with Richard Zanuck.
In 1972, Mr. Brown and Zanuck formed their independent Zanuck-Brown production company. Until they dissolved the company in 1988, the Zanuck-Brown team consistently produced films that packed theaters. One of their first, “The Sting,’’ starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1974.
That year, the team launched Steven Spielberg’s directing career with his first feature film, “The Sugarland Express,’’ and went on to hire him for “Jaws.’’
According to Mr. Brown, Spielberg at first did not want to do the 1975 flick about a giant shark terrorizing beachgoers in a summer resort town.
“He said, ‘There are movies and there are films, and I want to make films.’ And we said, ‘Well, if this works, you can make films.’ ’’
The movie was such a smash hit that it led to the now-standard “summer blockbuster’’ release and Spielberg’s extraordinary industry success. Mr. Brown and Zanuck produced its sequel in 1978.
The pair went on to produce more films, including director Sidney Lumet’s “The Verdict’’ (1982), Ron Howard’s “Cocoon’’ (1985), and Robert Altman’s “The Player’’ (1992), which won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Picture.
In 1988, Mr. Brown founded and became president of his own production company, The Manhattan Project Ltd., continuing his success with such films as “A Few Good Men’’ (1992), “Deep Impact’’ (1998, with Richard Zanuck), and “Angela’s Ashes’’ (1999).
Other successes were “Kiss the Girls’’ (1997), “The Saint’’ (1997), “Along Came a Spider’’ (2001), and “Road to Perdition’’ (2002). He received another Best Picture Oscar nomination as producer of “Chocolat’’ in 2001.
Once asked how he had commanded Hollywood without making enemies or succumbing to its excesses, Mr. Brown said: “I keep my word, even when I make a mistake. I never lived beyond my means, and therefore, I never had to be a slave to Hollywood.’’