David Paul Kirkpatrick has been a storyteller all his life. Most notably, David was production chief at Walt Disney Pictures and President of Paramount Pictures. He managed and oversaw over two hundred pictures over his seventeen years at Paramount.
At the age of 16, he sold his first screenplay to Paramount Pictures. A 1973 graduate of Cal Arts, David’s education was underwritten by grants from producer Ray Stark and the Walt Disney Foundation. At 25, he became story editor at Paramount Pictures, supervising such scripts as Ordinary People and Elephant Man.
Later as a Production Executive Paramount, he oversaw such pictures as Witness and Top Gun and franchises including Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Friday the 13th , and the Jack Ryan and Beverly Hills Cop series. At Paramount, he worked with a diverse group of directors including Peter Weir , Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese; and with motion picture stars, most notably Eddie Murphy and Harrison Ford.
In the years 1987 to 1988, he worked at Disney where he held unique positions as President of Production for both Touchstone Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures.
He is a Golden Globe award-winning independent film-maker with pictures including Big Night, and the HBO Television Miniseries, Rasputin. Here is David’s life in movies in 3 minutes:
In 2008, David co-founded the MIT Center For Future Storytelling in Cambridge Massachusetts. The center’s mission is to explore how technology and the arts can work together to elevate the human experience through the long-form narrative. He is the 2009 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from Regent University .
David is a member of the Producers Guild of America and of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
David is the author of The Address of Happiness. His new novel, co-written by Steve James Taylor, is the dog. It will be published in America and the UK in October of 2018. To learn more about the dog please visit the webpage by clicking on the book image below: