David Brown died he was 93

David Brown, an urbane New Yorker whose publishing background was the foundation of a producing career in Hollywood, with films like “The Sting,” “Jaws,” and “The Verdict,” and on Broadway, died Monday at home in Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was kidney failure after a long illness, said a friend, Alexandra Mayes Birnbaum.

A bon vivant, Mr. Brown was known equally for his mannerliness, his fine wardrobe, his distinctive mustache and his wife — Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. He was said to be an unusually courtly presence in the film business and a fan of writers.

“He had a great story sense,” said Richard D. Zanuck, his producing partner from 1972 to 1988, “and great connections with publishers and agents.”

Mr. Brown began his professional career as a journalist, contributing to magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s and Collier’s before becoming an editor himself. Before his wife landed there, he was the managing editor of Cosmopolitan. During the 1940s, he was also editor in chief of Liberty magazine.

In 1951, Richard Zanuck’s father, the producer Darryl F. Zanuck, hired Mr. Brown to head the story department at Zanuck’s studio, 20th Century-Fox, and Mr. Brown eventually rose to become executive vice president of creative operations. He and the younger Mr. Zanuck left Fox in 1971 for Warner Brothers, but the following year they set out to form their own production company.

“The Sting” (1973), was among their first films, and with George Roy Hill directing and Paul Newman and Robert Redford in leading roles, it won seven Academy Awards, including best picture. (The film was identified as “a Richard D. Zanuck-David Brown presentation,” though the two were not credited as producers.)

The following year they produced an early Steven Spielberg feature, “The Sugarland Express,” and hired Mr. Spielberg to direct a thriller about a predatory shark, adapted from a Peter Benchley novel, “Jaws.” It was a megahit in 1975 and is often cited as the movie that begat the idea of the summer blockbuster.

Together, Mr. Brown and Mr. Zanuck were the producers or executive producers of more than a dozen other films, including “The Verdict,” a legal drama directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Paul Newman; “Cocoon,” a fantasy directed by Ron Howard about senior citizens who stumble upon evidence of an alien visitation that functions as a fountain of youth; and “Driving Miss Daisy,” the adaptation of Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in the South of the 1950s, about an elderly Jewish woman and the black chauffeur who becomes her friend and confidant. Starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman and directed by Bruce Beresford, it won four Oscars, including best picture.

Even after the partnership dissolved and Mr. Brown started his own company, The Manhattan Project Ltd., he and Mr. Zanuck remained close. Mr. Brown’s other credits include “Chocolat,” “Angela’s Ashes,” “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider.”

“He always said his job as a producer was to get the project to the point where it could attract a director,” said Kit Golden, a producer who worked with Mr. Brown at the Manhattan Project. “Once the director came aboard it was the director’s picture.”

Mr. Brown was born in Manhattan on July 28, 1916. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother. He graduated from Stanford, where he intended to study physics but ended up in journalism. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia and worked for The Wall Street Journal and Women’s Wear Daily. He served in the Army during World War II.

Mr. Brown’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He met Helen Gurley in Los Angeles, where she was an advertising copywriter. They married in 1959; over the years he continued to use his journalism skills at Cosmopolitan, where his wife enlisted him to write the saucy cover blurbs. In addition to her, he is survived by a half-brother, Edward, of Montecito, Calif.

Mr. Brown’s stage credits came late in his career. Among them, on Broadway he produced “Tru,” a one-actor play about Truman Capote starring Robert Morse, and the musicals “Sweet Smell of Success” (2002), based on the Hollywood film about a press agent and a powerful columnist, and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2005), adapted from a movie with Steve Martin.

Mr. Brown became involved in the theater serendipitously. He had just finished making “The Verdict” and was interested in doing another courtroom film when an agent sent him “A Few Good Men,” a play about a military trial by a young, unknown playwright, Aaron Sorkin. Mr. Brown tried to buy the film rights, but Mr. Sorkin demurred, saying that that would make the stage rights less attractive for another producer. So Mr. Brown bought the stage rights, too.

The play, which starred Tom Hulce, opened in November 1989 and ran for nearly 500 performances. The film version, with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, was released in 1992,

“He was the last great gentleman producer,” Mr. Sorkin said in an interview Monday. “You’re not going to see his kind again.”

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