David De Silva

De Silva was born in New York City on August 14, 1936, and attended school in the Bronx and Queens. In 1957, he graduated from Queens College with a major in history. However, he had a keen interest in theatre and began studying with Stella Adler.^[3]

For three seasons of Summer Stock, he was an apprentice actor at the Hampton Playhouse in Hampton, New Hampshire,^[4] before moving to Los Angeles, where he took supporting roles in TV shows including Bachelor Father.^[5] In 1961 he was hired as assistant to director Otto Preminger on the film Advise & Consent. His work with Preminger led him to work with Martin Baum, Head of Talent at General Artists Corporation, a major Hollywood talent agency at the time.^[6] In the early 1970s, he worked as a talent agent for Ashley-Famous and ICM, followed by several years as a personal manager managing such actors as Jerry Orbach and Inga Swenson.^{[citation needed]}

In 1976, De Silva began working on a project based on the lives of students at the New York High School of Performing Arts. Screenwriter Christopher Gore said that he was inspired to write Fame after "seeing a performance of A Chorus Line and hearing one of the characters speak about attending the High School of Performing Arts."^[7] and according to director Alan Parker, De Silva had the idea for the project after attending a stage production of the same play and hearing a reference to the school in the song "Nothing",^[8][3] though De Silva himself disputes this account.^[9] In 1977, De Silva met playwright Christopher Gore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He paid Gore $5,000 to work with him on a draft script titled Hot Lunch, and provided ideas for characters and the structure of the story, following the characters from the audition stage through to graduation from the school.^[3] De Silva and Gore later signed with the Creative Artists Agency to sell it.^[3] The script became the subject of a bidding war among a host of established film studios before De Silva took the project to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which acquired the script for $400,000,^[10] and gave De Silva a list of ten directors they would approve for the project, from which he chose Alan Parker.^[11]

Hot Lunch was among several scripts sent to Alan Parker following the release of his previous film Midnight Express (1978).^[10][8] Parker signed on as its director in February 1979,^[10] and after meeting with De Silva in Manhattan, New York, it was decided that Parker would draft his own script^[8] with Gore receiving sole screenwriting credit^[3] and Parker's colleague Alan Marshall being enlisted as a producer.^[8] The new script for Hot Lunch became significantly darker than what De Silva had originally intended. De Silva said, "I was really motivated and interested in the joy of what the school represented for these kids, and [Parker] was really much more interested in where the pain was in going to the school, and so we had our little conflicts based on that area."^[3] During filming De Silva and Parker received a note from MGM that there was a pornographic film titled Hot Lunch, and as a result the film was renamed Fame.^[12] The film was released in 1980.

Having retained the stage rights to the movie, in 1987 it was announced that De Silva was developing a stage version of the film.^[13] With a book by José Fernandez, music by Steve Margoshes and lyrics by Jacques Levy, Fame – the Musical was the first professional production at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, in 1988.^[14] The show then ran at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from March 25, through April 29, 1989.^[14][15] A Swedish version opened at the China Theater in Stockholm in 1993, and the show opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London in 1995. Fame - The Musical was the first stage production in the history of London's West End to open seven productions within one decade.^[16] The musical has since had productions in more than 25 countries.^[17][18]