David Manson (producer)

David Manson (born 1952) is an American film and television producer, screenwriter and director.

He is perhaps best known for having executive-produced and co-created (with playwright Bill Cain), the Peabody Award-winning drama Nothing Sacred (1997), and most recently, having been an executive producer/writer on the second season of Netflix's House of Cards (2013), which garnered thirteen Emmy nominations.

Manson was born in New York City to two musicians who had met as students at the Juilliard School. His father, Eddy Manson, a harmonica virtuoso, moved the family to Los Angeles in 1965 to pursue his career as a film composer.

Manson attended the University of California at Santa Cruz on full scholarship before transferring to the University of California at Irvine, where he graduated magna cum laude.

Manson began his career in the theater and worked in various capacities for such venues as the Mark Taper Forum, Playwrights Horizon and the Manhattan Theater Club.

He started in the film business at Dick Berg's Stonehenge Productions where he produced his first film, The Spell (1977), for NBC, at the age of twenty-four. As Senior Vice President of Stonehenge, he produced several movies and miniseries including the first major television miniseries about Vietnam, A Rumor of War (1980), which the New York Times called 'unusually ambitious and admirable' and the Washington Post referred to ‘as true as a movie is going to get’.

In 1980, Manson formed his own company, Sarabande Productions, aimed at creating a platform for prestigious writers. He has since worked with Pulitzer Prize winners including Michael Chabon, Donald Margulies and Jules Feiffer, and acclaimed screenwriters such as Joan Tewkesbury, Barbara Turner, John Sacret Young, and National Book Award recipient Denis Johnson.

In features, he executive-produced and developed the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize Winner Birdy (1984) starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. He then produced the Sting documentary, Bring on the Night (1985), directed by Michael Apted, which earned a Grammy Award for best long form video; he also executive-produced The Cemetery Club (1993), starring Ellen Burstyn, and produced the Drew Barrymore film, Mad Love (1995), both for Touchstone Pictures where his company was housed for several years.

...
Wikipedia