David De Silva

David De Silva (born August 14, 1936) is an American film writer and producer, best known for the 1980 MGM movie Fame. De Silva retained the stage rights to the film, and, conceived and developed Fame - The Musical, becoming known as "Father Fame", and launching a foundation called the Father Fame Foundation to promote theatre arts.

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.

For three seasons of Summer Stock, he was an apprentice actor at the Hampton Playhouse in Hampton, New Hampshire, before moving to Los Angeles, where he took supporting roles in TV shows including Bachelor Father. In 1961 he was hired as assistant to director Otto Preminger on the film Advise and Consent. His work with Preminger led to an opportunity to work with General Artists Corporation, a major Hollywood talent agency at the time. 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.

In 1976, De Silva attended a stage production of A Chorus Line and noticed that one of the musical numbers, "Nothing", had made a reference to the New York High School of Performing Arts. The musical inspired him to create a story detailing how ambition and rejection influence the lives of adolescent students. In 1977, De Silva travelled to Florida, where he met playwright Christopher Gore. He paid Gore $5,000 to draft a 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. De Silva and Gore later signed with the Creative Artists Agency to sell it. 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.

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