David Lloyd Wolper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Wolper

Mr. Wolper produced hundreds of films and television shows, including the hit 1983 mini-series “The Thorn Birds,” a romantic drama set in Australia, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. But the work with which he was most closely associated was “Roots,” shown in eight parts on ABC in 1977.

The saga of an African-American family’s journey from Africa to slavery and emancipation, based on the best-selling book by Alex Haley, “Roots,” with a cast including LeVar Burton, Ben Vereen and many others, was not the first mini-series, but it was the first to have a major influence not just in the ratings but in American culture. One of the highest-rated entertainment programs in television history, it went on to win nine Emmy Awards and ignited a lively national discussion about race.

Another of Mr. Wolper’s productions, “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), a film concerned with mankind’s real and imagined difficulties with insects, won an Academy Award.

Mr. Wolper was also a tireless showman and a flamboyant organizer of major events. He oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, replete with sky divers, break dancers and 84 pianists playing music by George Gershwin. He again dazzled an international television audience when he choreographed a celebration in New York Harbor on July 4, 1986, to observe the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, in which several thousand rockets were set off amid a backdrop of hundreds of tall ships gracing the harbor around the statue.

Mr. Wolper initially made his mark as a producer of documentaries and later focused on fictionalized accounts of historical events. He drew his share of criticism: it was sometimes suggested that his documentaries were not sufficiently probing, that his so-called docudramas took too many liberties with the facts, that he was more showman than historian. In 1966 Jack Gould, the television critic of The New York Times, noted that some financiers and government officials had been permitted an advance look at Mr. Wolper’s CBS documentary “Wall Street: Where the Money Is.”

“Wolper is incredibly naïve if he fails to understand the consequences of allowing participants in a controversial news story to have the right of advance approval,” Mr. Gould wrote. Mr. Wolper admitted that he had let the officials see the film or read his script before it was broadcast, but insisted he had made no deletions and was not asked to make any.

Critics were also cool to many of his big-screen productions, which included “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), “I Love My Wife” (1970) and “One Is a Lonely Number” (1972), although he received good reviews for some, notably “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971) and “L.A. Confidential” (1997), which won two Oscars.

“The Bridge at Remagen” (1969), about a World War II battle in Germany, was probably the Wolper movie that attracted the most attention — not for what was on the screen, but because his production company was run out of Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Army invaded.

Mr. Wolper scored an early success in 1963 with the television documentary “The Making of the President 1960,” based on Theodore H. White’s best-selling book about John F. Kennedy’s quest for the White House. It won four Emmys, including program of the year.

Other noteworthy television projects in the 1960s included the series “Biography,” “Hollywood and the Stars” and “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”

In the 1970s he branched out into sitcoms, producing “Chico and the Man” and “Welcome Back, Kotter” with James Komack. David Wolper (he had no middle name, but used the middle initial L to distinguish himself from an uncle also named David Wolper) was born on the East Side of Manhattan on Jan. 11, 1928, the only child of Irving S. Wolper, a businessman, and the former Anna Fass. As a teenager he spent a lot of time watching movies, and people noticed that he had a knack for selling things.

Upon graduation from Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, he entered Drake University in Des Moines, remained there a year, then transferred to the University of Southern California for two more years. He left the university at the end of his junior year because he thought he could make money by purchasing old movies and selling them to television stations all over the country.

He was right.

In 1958, sensing that the footage shot of the Soviet satellite Sputnik would be worth something, he purchased 6,000 feet of it from Artkino, the official Soviet distributor, and used it as the basis for a documentary, “The Race for Space,” which he sold to more than 100 stations in the United States after all three networks turned it down.

Making documentaries for television, he soon learned, was not easy. The networks had large news and public affairs departments staffed by seasoned journalists, and network executives tended to be wary of documentaries produced by outsiders.

Undaunted, Mr. Wolper began Wolper Productions on a shoestring. The company’s early projects included “The Rafer Johnson Story” (1961), “Hollywood: The Golden Years” (1961) and “D-Day” (1962). Reviews were mixed, but viewers were receptive. By the mid-1970s Wolper Productions had grown from two people in a one-room office to more than 200 employees using 40 cutting rooms.

In 1971 Mr. Wolper produced “Appointment With Destiny,” a series that mixed historical footage with dramatic re-enactments. John J. O’Connor, writing in The Times, criticized it as “pure fiction cleverly masquerading as reality.” Mr. Wolper responded in a letter to the editor: “How else can we approach the past? Shall we leave it, defeated and ignorant, because we cannot fully reconstruct it any more than we can relive it?”

Married three times, Mr. Wolper is survived by his wife of 36 years, the former Gloria Hill; two sons, Mark and Michael, and a daughter, Leslie, by his second wife, the former Margaret Dawn Richard; and 10 grandchildren.

Mr. Wolper remained active as a producer of mini-series and documentaries well into the 1990s. Besides “The Thorn Birds,” his noteworthy later productions included “North and South” (1985). In 2002 he revisited his most famous production with the television special “Roots: Celebrating 25 Years.”

Mr. Wolper was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1989. In 2003 he published his autobiography, written with David Fisher. Its title was “Producer.”