Dick Guttman Dead: Longtime Hollywood Publicist Was 93

Dick Guttman, the longtime Hollywood publicity executive and screenwriter who worked with clients including Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood and Jay Leno, died Sept. 19 in Los Altos, Calif. He was 93.

Over his many decades in publicity at Rogers & Cowan and his own firms Guttman and Pam and Guttman Associates, he represented Hollywood notables including Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Gene Hackman, Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor, William Shatner and many, many more.

Guttman moved to Los Angeles from St. Louis, Missouri, with his family after WWII. As his official biography recounts, he rode L.A. streetcars to wait by the soundstage doors of popular radio dramas, collecting used scripts and autographs. He started out in journalism while still at Fairfax High covering high school sports for the Los Angeles Examiner.

While attending UCLA, he worked part-time for Rogers & Cowan PR, then became a unit publicist in Europe, where he worked on films including “Paris Holiday” and “The Key.” He met his wife Gisela while in Paris as unit publicist on Billy Wilder’s “Love in the Afternoon,” and they married in 1956.

When Guttman returned to Los Angeles, he worked at Rogers & Cowan for more than a decade, representing top actors at the time when actors weren’t under contract to studios and “press agents,” in his preferred terminology, became pivotal to successful careers.

He partnered with Jerry Pam in 1971 to form Guttman & Pam, which became one of Hollywood’s top agencies over two decades. Guttman formed his own agency, Guttman Associates, in the early 1990s, repping dozens of top stars as well as promoting films such as “Unforgiven,” “Dirty Harry,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Conversation,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “All That Jazz,” “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “The Man Who Would Be King,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Artist,” “Shakespeare in Love and “The…