Mark Shivas R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

From: Screen Daily



Obituary: Mark Shivas

UK producer Mark Shivas has died aged 70

Geoffrey Macnab in London

14 Oct 2008 19:34

http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDai...tStoryID=41384



Film-makers have paid tribute to British producer Mark Shivas, who has died of cancer aged 70.



Shivas, who died peacefully amongst family on Saturday October 11, was one of the principals in production company Headline Pictures. An immensely popular producer and one time Head of Films at the BBC, he worked with many of the best British directors of his era as well as with several international names.



His friend and colleague Stewart Mackinnon, chief executive of Headline said of Shivas, "He had a very good judgement of people. What is extraordinary is that he was liked and loved and respected by everyone in this business. That's what is so unusual. It is very difficult to go through this business without falling out with people."



Mackinnon revealed that Shivas had been working on new projects until close to his death. Among the last films that Shivas was helping develop was Reykjavik, a drama about the end of the Cold War that Ridley Scott has now signed on to direct. Shivas was also heavily involved in Quartet, a new film project adapted by Ronald Harwood from his play and developed with finance from BBC Films.



Other tributes included director Stephen Frears and producer Lynda Myles both of who worked with Shivas on The Van.



Myles paid tribute to Shivas' trust in those he worked with. "He left you space to develop and sometimes to screw up. It was never about ego, it was always about the work. He created an arena in which people could do their best work," she said.



Myles added that Shivas was receptive to projects that weren't to his own taste, provided that filmmakers could convince him of their quality. "That was why people wanted to work with him again and again."



Stephen Frears commented "He was on the side of the angels,".



Shivas' engagement with cinema began in his student days when he began writing film criticism for university magazine, Oxford Opinion. He was one of the founders of Movie, a British film magazine strongly influenced by Cahiers Du Cinema.



As a journalist, Shivas wrote film stories and interviews for the New York Times and directed and produced for Granada Television in the sixties. He produced and then presented Granada's weekly programme Cinema.



His credits as a drama producer for BBC Television in the 1970s included, Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes as well as several films by Alan Clarke, including To Encourage The Others and Funny Farm.



Shivas was producer or executive producer of such films as Nic Roeg's The Witches, Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply, Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting, Frears' The Van, Gillies Mackinnon's Small Faces and Tim Fywell's I Capture The Castle. He was responsible for starting BBC Films as a stand-alone operation in the early 1990s and for enabling many British filmmakers to make theatrical movies rather than being confined to working for the small screen.



In recent years, he was also instrumental in helping Headline secure the rights from Great Ormond St hospital to the Peter Pan book sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet.



Shivas leaves behind his civil partner of eleven years Karun Thakar.

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Mark Shivas

A film and television producer, his was the hidden hand behind a raft of classics of the modern era



by Philip Purser

The Guardian,

Thursday October 16 2008





Mark Shivas: 'a serious player who didn't take himself seriously'



In television's early days, the producer did everything from choosing the play or the topic to calling the shots as the show went out on the air. Only with the spread of video pre-recording in the 1960s and the adoption of film studio practices did the role of director emerge. It was he or she who now framed every scene you saw.



So what was left for the producer to do? The short answer was that his remained the main creative responsibility. Producers still chose or commissioned the script, supervised the casting and determined the whole tenor of the final work. But few exercised this function with the instinct, understanding and tenacity brought to it by Mark Shivas, who has died aged 70 of cancer.



No better example springs to mind than one which Shivas himself instanced on these pages earlier this year when paying tribute to Anthony Minghella (obituary, March 19). In 1985, Minghella, then known only as an occasional contributor to television series, brought him the script of a serial about a failed marriage and access to children. The father was allowed only one or two visits a week, when he would take the children to the park - hence the title, What If It's Raining? It was not the most alluring of subjects, but Shivas saw instantly that it was recognisable, touching and wryly funny. He put it into production there and then for Channel 4.



At the time of its screening (July 1986), I described the programme as "at once the truest and tritest, freshest and stalest, most boring and most gripping fiction of the summer. The voices ... utter dialogue so natural, so free from added histrionics, that it must come from the wholefood counter at Sainsbury's. What If It's Raining brings back to television some of the old virtues which have been blotted out by the lurid super-soaps."



Born in Banstead, Surrey, where his father was an English teacher and his mother a librarian, Shivas was educated at Whitgift school, Croydon, and read law at Merton College, Oxford. His initial contact with the scenic arts was as a critic and assistant editor for Movie magazine (1962-64), which also paid some attention to television, especially the spontaneous real-life drama which, despite being known as cinema-verité, was seen chiefly on television. A high point of his time on the magazine was interviewing Claude Chabrol.



In 1963, he landed a job as assistant to the head of the story department at Granada Television, followed by his appointment as a director-producer (1965-68), with a sideline as one of the presenters of Cinema, Granada's weekly review of new movies. At BBC Television, he was a producer of drama (1969-88), head of drama (1988-93) and head of films (1993-97). His last full-time appointment was with Southern Pictures (1979-81), though he continued to produce cinema and TV films, particularly for Channel 4.



For the BBC alone, the enduring achievements bearing his credit include The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Dennis Potter's Casanova (1971), Jack Rosenthal's semi-autobiographical The Evacuees (1975), Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes and Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (both 1976), Tom Stoppard's hilarious football-and-politics fusion, Professional Foul (1977), Telford's Change (1979) by Brian Clark, and Marjorie Wallace's uplifting and moving story of a thalidomide child, On Giant's Shoulders (1979). More recently came Cambridge Spies (2003), examining the milieu of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt.



For Channel 4, a landmark ahead of What If It's Raining? was a co-production with RTE in Ireland to yield The Price (1985), a subdued six-part thriller about an industrialist kidnapped and held to ransom by the IRA.



In the cinema, Alan Bennett's very funny tale A Private Function (1984) was set in the austerity years immediately after the second world war, when rationing was even grimmer than it had been during hostilities. Maggie Smith presided imperiously over the apportionment of a deceased pig - "very British", said a bemused American critic. The flawless little romantic fantasy Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), written by Minghella, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, was released successfully on the cinema circuit, with a television airing for the BBC's Screen Two series almost contemporaneously.



Other feature films ranged in mood from The Witches (1990) to Enchanted April (1992), or from the harrowing account of Siegfried Sassoon's mental plight from his time in the trenches of the first world war in Regeneration (1987) and Esther Freud's tale of two sisters and their hippy mother on the road from London to Morroco, Hideous Kinky (1998), to I Capture the Castle (2003), from Dodie Smith's novel (and West End matinee dramatisation) set in a dotty English stately home.



Over the years Shivas won three Baftas, two Emmys and a Prix Italia, this last for The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Italy was one of his abiding passions, as were swimming and cycling. In 2005, he set up his own production company, Headline Pictures. He leaves his civil partner of 11 years, Karun Thakar.



Alan Bennett writes ... Mark Shivas looked more like a don than a producer, and not at all like someone from the world of entertainment. But quiet and self-effacing though he was, he could be tough. He had the quality writers want in a producer: he was on your side and shielded you from interference by the bureaucracy and the money.



A Private Function was not an easy film to make, and not merely because of the pig(s). The financier, Denis O'Brien, had little faith in the project. He cut its budget to the bone before shooting started, and went on cutting while shooting was going on. Mark had to salvage the film from O'Brien's cuts, and from the consequent fury of the director, Malcolm Mowbray, and myself. Had we had someone less diplomatic, the film would never have been finished. Watching it, one sees the scars, but without Mark there would have been no film to watch.



The only other project we did together, Talking Heads 2 in 1998, was altogether happier, and it was a tribute to Mark that Thora Hird took the trouble to remember his name. She usually called all producers and directors by the generic name of Mr De Grunwald. But Mark wouldn't have minded that either.



Ronald Harwood writes ... I knew Mark Shivas for almost 30 years, but I realise now that I didn't really know him at all. Private and reticent, qualities unusual in a film and television producer, he was, in my professional life, unquestionably the most concealed person I have met. Not, I am sure, because he had any dark secrets to hide. It was simply that he shunned personal publicity or saw no need for it, and seemed determined to avoid talking about himself in any revealing way.



Slight and quietly spoken, he gave the impression of being either a little weary or, more often than not, secretly amused by life. Yet he exuded confidence, both in his own abilities and whatever project he happened to be overseeing.



We first met in the early 1970s, when he was asked to produce and I to write a film about Maria Callas. I remember flying with him to New York on Concorde and going to see a Broadway musical that evening. We both fell asleep in the theatre. The film was never made.



We lost touch till a little over a year ago, when Tom Courtenay asked if I thought it a good idea to make a film of my play, Quartet, about four elderly, retired opera singers. He had seen the play in London and thought he would be good casting for the tenor, while Albert Finney would be ideal as the extrovert baritone. And what about Maggie Smith for the grande dame soprano? My agent, Judy Daish, had known Mark for 40 years, and suggested we approach him.



He was immediately enthusiastic - but no, that may be too strong a word to describe his reaction; even cautiously encouraging may be a little strong. He said he would do his best to raise the funds to pay for the development of the screenplay. No progress reports came until, at last, he announced that BBC Films were interested. I then set about writing the screenplay. The only time Mark betrayed modest pleasure was when I delivered it. I was told later that he was genuinely excited, but his responses were never unnecessarily exuberant. The film is scheduled to begin shooting next year.



In June, he came to visit me in West Sussex, keen to get down to the nitty-gritty of producing Quartet. He refused lunch and departed. A few weeks ago he telephoned to say he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He gave the news in a flat, unemotional voice: no drama, no self-pity, just the fact.



He wanted so much, I believe, to make it possible for the film to be made in the best of circumstances. My fervent wish is that we don't let him down.



Kevin Hood writes ... The Headline chapter of Mark's career began when he met Stewart Mackinnon at a film festival and told him he was thinking about winding down, maybe writing a book between film projects. Set up a film company instead, said Stewart, and so Headline began - the name, like so much else, coming from Mark.



He was a distinguished man three times over. He knew everybody - from Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal as babies and as adults, to Saul Zaentz, via Anthony Minghella, Dennis Potter, Michael Palin, Frederick Raphael and on and on, hundreds of them. They all respected him, they all liked him and the vast majority admired him.



Unusually, Mark was a serious player who didn't take himself seriously. On one occasion, in BBC drama, a young woman asked if he had been there before. He smiled sweetly, shrugged, and said "once or twice", and she never guessed. Mark showed a special delicacy with young people. He understood them, their uncertainties and hopes. Perhaps remembering his own early years, he took time out to encourage, to guide, to recognise, to warn, to laugh with, to celebrate, and he did it for decades.



For all this he was no softie. He could get angry and sharp when the occasion demanded. His put-downs were often very much to the point, often funny and usually deserved. A warm man, witty and wise, he had just enough salt in his character to stop him being a saint and make him terrific company. There was no one you wanted to make laugh more.



Mark Shivas, film and television producer, born April 24 1938; died October 11 2008

[julian_craster]

From The Times

October 16, 2008

Mark Shivas: television and film producer





Mark Shivas was a television and film producer of great distinction. During a career in which he rose to be Head of Films with the BBC, he was responsible for some 70 productions. These included such successes as The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Evacuees, Rogue Male and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series, as well as such films as A Private Function (1984), Hideous Kinky (1998) and I Capture the Castle (2002).



Although he was invariably calm, courteous and circumspect, Shivas managed to make his productions turn out successfully while encouraging their writers and directors to think that the ideas were all their own — sometimes they were, sometimes they were not. His writers and directors knew that he would fight on their behalf with managements, which respected him for his loyalty and, above all, for his good sense.



For these virtues, and because the projects he chose managed to be popular and intellectually satisfying at the same time, he enjoyed the distinction — not shared by all successful producers — that his name came to be known to a wider public.



Mark Shivas was born in Banstead, Surrey, in 1938. From Whitgift School in Croydon, he went to Merton College, Oxford, to read law. He had always shown a strong interest in film, and his first job, in 1961, was as assistant editor of Movie Magazine. There he scored a coup by interviewing Claude Chabrol. He asked him: “Didn’t your last film cost a lot?” Chabrol replied: “No, it cost very little, but it lost a lot.”



In l964 Shivas joined Granada TV where he became a director, for the first and last time in his life, on What the Papers Say, and a producer and the presenter of Cinema. It was probably his quiet screen presence that caused some intelligent executive to recruit him to BBC drama four years later.



His first production for the BBC was The Six Wives of Henry VIII with Keith Michell, probably the best Henry before or since. This won Shivas the Italia Prize, for the first time. Later he produced Henry as a feature film directed by Waris Hussein.



In the next decade his output was unrivalled, and the directors Hussein, Alan Clarke and Michael Lindsay-Hogg flourished under his benevolent eye. Such writers as John Hopkins, David Hare, Howard Schumann and Kingsley Amis were pleased to work with him.



Of the many productions for which he was responsible until 1988, when he became Head of Drama, some are still vividly recalled, such as Casanova, the mini-series written by Dennis Potter, and The Evacuees, Jack Rosenthal’s play about his childhood, directed by Alan Parker. In the same year, 1975, he produced 84 Charing Cross Road, rated by many as better than the film and stage versions, and The Glittering Prizes, with Tom Conti as Frederic Raphael’s alter ego.



In 1977 Tom Stoppard wrote a play for International Refugee Year called Professional Foul. It was very funny, very moving and very irritating to the Eastern Bloc. Shivas produced it, Lindsay-Hogg directed it, and it was a great success. It should have been entered for the Italia Prize but it was rejected, possibly for fear of offending the Russians. It was shown all over the world except behind the Iron Curtain.



Many of Shivas’s best productions were destroyed. The 1970s were a period of puritanical destruction when tapes were removed to make room for more. Secrets, a farce written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, was destroyed, but fortunately Shivas had transferred the show on to VHS. Many years later it was tidied up and issued as a DVD in the Ripping Yarns series.



From 1980 Shivas became a freelance producer, working mainly for Southern Pictures, and one of his biggest projects was the eight-part series Winston Churchill, the Wilderness Years; Robert Hardy is still remembered as an unlikely but excellent Churchill with Siân Philips as his wife.



Shivas rarely experienced failure, so the reaction to another eight-part series, The Borgias, must have been a shock. The critics did not like it, nor did the viewers. Shivas remained calmly loyal to his cast and director. His reputation was secure enough to weather the criticism, and he did so with characteristic sangfroid. He then made Moonlighting, starring Jeremy Irons, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.



In 1984 Shivas produced Alan Bennett’s A Private Function with Maggie Smith and Michael Palin. He had never worked in theatre but in 1985 he produced for Patrick Garland, directing Alec McCowen in Kipling. Unusually, this was broadcast on Channel 4.



In 1988 Shivas was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC, working with Jack Clayton, Stephen Frears and Mark Rylands, and producing among other things Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Eventually, in 1993, he became the first Head of Films, and he executive-produced more than a score of feature films, including Priest, directed by Antonia Bird, Michael Winterbottom’s Jude and Hideous Kinky, starring Kate Winslet.



In 1997 he formed an independent production company, Perpetual Motion Pictures (a title typical of his wry sense of humour) and made The Cambridge Spies and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads 2.



In 2006 he formed Headline Pictures with Stewart Mackinnon and Kevin Hood; as chairman he made invaluable contributions to a range of film projects. However, he now began to be affected by the cancer that was to lead to his death. Typically, he remained passionately interested until the end in many projects, especially Quartet by Ronald Harwood. He will be much missed, especially by the actors, directors and writers whom he so greatly inspired.



Shivas is survived by his civil partner of 11 years, Karun Thakar.



Mark Shivas, television producer and Head of Films, BBC, 1993-97, was born on April 24, 1938. He died of cancer on October 11, 2008, aged 70

[batman]

Being one of the few people who enjoyed his prodcution of The Borgias in the 80s I wrote to him to tell him how good I thought it was. He sent a lovely personal reply. RIP Mr Shivas.

[cornershop15]

TVTimes interview, 24-30 August 1967

I watched Casanova, played by Frank Finlay, a few months ago. One of many notable credits in Mark Shivas' career.
He'd just become the new presenter of Granada's Cinema at this time, replacing Mike Scott (who also died in 2008):
[/B]

R.I.P.