| John Heyman | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | producer |
| Years active | 1963-present |
John Heyman (born 1933 in Leipzig, Germany[1]) is a British film and TV producer, who since the mid 1980s has mainly been involved in film financing. Married to his wife Nizza since 1982, this is his second marriage. He has five children, David (1961), Lil (1965), Gabrielle (1971), Dahlia (1983) and Daniel (1987). His first wife was producer Norma Heyman.
His father, an economist and broadcaster who opposed Hitler, left Germany in January 1933, and seven months old, John and his mother arrived in England where his father had secured work as a journalist on the now defunct News Chronicle. During World War II, his father worked for the Ministry of Information, and after the war he became financial correspondent for The Economist, The Financial Times and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. John's mother, an avid suffragette, was both a teacher of Russian studies and a permanent student, collecting her seventh degree (in Economics) from the London School of Economics at the age of 70.
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Heyman was educated at Norfolk House in London, Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire, and finally at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.
After two years in the National Service, Heyman returned to Oxford to read law. During a summer vacation, he obtained free tickets to a Radio Luxembourg show. Having been chosen as a contestant he won £93, more money that he thought existed in the world, and he returned to Oxford as a question writer for the show Double Your Money which would run for thirteen years on the new Independent Television Network in England, to whom he also sold a number of television concepts he had written. In 1955, Heyman started full time work in the entertainment industry and, by the age of 22 had become Head of Public Relations at Associated Television,[2] one of the two founder companies of the ITV. By then he was already working on five television programs, three of which were rated among ITV's top ten.
In 1959, Heyman formed The International Artists Agency, which handled, among others, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Laurence Harvey, Trevor Howard, Shirley Bassey and Burt Bacharach. In 1961 the agency formed the subsidiary World Film Sales, the first company to pre-sell and license pictures on a territory-by-territory basis. In 1973, World Film Sales was sold to ITC.
In 1963, Heyman started to work as a film producer and has to date produced some 15 films,[1] among them The Go-Between and The Hireling, which both won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1965, he also co-produced the longest running Hamlet in Broadway history, starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud.
In 1973, he founded The Genesis Project, a project to create an audio-visual encyclopedia, atlas and dictionary. In 1976, it commenced translating the Bible onto film accompanied by a variety of educational materials. After completing the filming of Genesis and the Gospel of Luke (which, under the title Jesus,[3] became the most viewed film in history), The New Media Bible was sold to an evangelical organization, having failed commercially in the age before VHS or DVD.
In 1974, Heyman began to render financial services to major film studios, and is widely credited with creating "structured financing" in the film industry. As a result of his efforts, more than $3 billion has been provided to co-finance over 150 films and television programs see list including Awakenings (Columbia), Black Rain (Paramount), Chinatown (Paramount), Edward Scissorhands (Fox), Grease (Paramount), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (Warner), Heaven Can Wait (Paramount), Home Alone (Fox), Looking For Mr Goodbar (Paramount), The Man Who Would Be King (Allied Artists), Marathon Man (Paramount), The Odessa File (Columbia), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Fox), Saturday Night Fever (Paramount), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Paramount), Trail of the Pink Panther (MGM), Victor Victoria (MGM).
In 1990, Heyman co-founded Island World,[4] which produced and licensed film and television programs including The Cure (Universal), Eddie (Disney), Juice (Paramount), The Sandlot (Fox), Toy Soldiers (Tri-Star) and The War (Universal). Island World was sold to Polygram at the end of 1994, but Heyman retained control of the London TV production company World Productions which is still an active provider of British TV productions.
Heyman continues his financing activities and recently launched WtvP, which reformats hit shows in countries other than their country of origin. During 2011 production will commence of a Mandarin version of The Office[5] in China, and in the Middle East an Arabic language version of The Odd Couple. Production of a 12 part miniseries entitled The Forbidden City is scheduled for an October start date for RAI and a group of broadcasters around the world.