David Korda had a long career of more than sixty years working at the heart of the international film industry. As an executive producer, who was head of production for RKO Pictures and then Cappella International during the 1980s and 1990s, the major films he saw into production included the Vietnam War drama Hamburger Hill, Wolfgang Pietersen’s first Hollywood film Shattered,and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. But he also made a hugely influential, behind-the-scenes contribution to the development of independent film-making in his work as a completion guarantor. It was his successful supervision of Outsiders and Rumblefish in the early 1980s that enabled New Hollywood’s great maverick talent Francis Ford Coppola to make a successful comeback after colossal overspending on Apocalypse Now and the box-office disaster One from the Heart.
If David Korda was quickly able to establish a rapport with Coppola, one reason why was the fact that, as a member of the Korda film dynasty, he already possessed life-long experience of having to deal with temperamental talents. His mother Joan Gardner had been a movie star in the 1930s. His father, Zoltàn, had shot one of the cinema’s greatest action epics, The Four Feathers. One uncle was the great painter and production designer Vincent Korda. Another, Sir Alexander, achieved international fame through making films on an epic scale in England, and was the producer of Coppola’s favourite movie, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which he would finish in General Service Studios, the very Los Angeles studio that Coppola bought forty years later as a home for his own company, American Zoetrope.
Born David Alexander Korda on 26 May 1937 in Hampstead, London, David had already seen pretty much everything there was to see in the movie business before he had even left school. When the war began, at the age of three he moved with his parents from London to Beverly Hills, where they lived in a house on Rexford Drive. His first memory of Los Angeles was his Uncle Alex turning up in a large limousine to take him on a tour of the town, then sending him home with a bag of silver dollars. Other early memories included playing with props from the Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Book.
After the war, Korda returned to England to study at the Lycée in South Kensington, then attended the International School in Geneva, Pomona College in California and Oxford, where he acted in plays for the drama society. After his dad died in 1961, Korda worked as an assistant on Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963), and for Ray Harryhausen producer Charles H. Schneer, he was tasked to find old footage to be redeployed for such films as Siege of the Saxons (1963), East of Sudan (1964) and Land Raiders (1969). After working as unit manager on Schneer’s big-budget musical production of Half a Sixpence for Paramount, David soon moved on to become a production manager and then a line producer. For Peter O’Toole’s company Keep Films, he produced The Ruling Class in 1972, and Man Friday in 1975.
Having built his career working on mostly Hollywood-financed films shot in England, during the late 1970s he worked as a production supervisor of several independently financed films that made use of international pre-sales and tax shelter money.For the British company Hemdale, he was associate producer of the Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), starring Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger, and the romantic comedy Sunburn (1979) with Farrah Fawcett-Majors, which were both shot in Mexico.
Keen to spend more time with his two children, he accepted an offer in 1980 to work as the London-based production executive for the completion guarantor Film Finances. Working closely with the company’s chief executive Richard Soames, David played a critical role in establishing the previously little known concept of the completion guarantee in Hollywood. In the following year, 1984, the company would go on to provide bonds for such successful films as The Terminator, Romancing the Stone and Nightmare on Elm Street.
With his children now grown up, he then moved to Los Angeles in 1990, where he became head of production and development for Capella Films. Perhaps in keeping with the cosmopolitan but family-conscious nature of the Kordas, there was always a tug in David’s life between the competing forces of Hollywood and Europe, and between business and the personal. So when his daughter Lerryn had a son, Kosmo, in 2002, it was the occasion to return to London: ‘I thought I’m not going to sit here and become one of those old guys in LA going to the Academy and seeing movies. I want to be with my children, and enjoying Europe. So I packed my bags and came home.’
But coming home did not mean retirement from the film business. Most of the next twenty years were spent working for Film Finances. He was still chairman of the British company when he died in September 2024. In his private life, he was a voracious reader and a keen connoisseur of painting. And were it not for the continuing demands of the film industry, he would surely have devoted more time to his ambition of writing a book about his father, whose complex character came increasingly to fascinate him. No one who knew David during his last years will forget the astonishing stoicism and courage with which he continued to work, despite considerable discomfort and pain, showing unflagging commitment to the business that he had helped to grow and prosper.
