David Manson (producer)
American film and television producer, screenwriter and director

David Manson (born 1952) is an American film and television producer, screenwriter and director.
He is perhaps best known for his work on a trio of acclaimed Netflix series: House of Cards, Bloodline, and Ozark, for which he has received multiple Emmy Award and Writers Guild Award nominations.
Early life
Manson was born in New York City to two musicians who had met as students at the Juilliard School. His father, Eddy Manson (né Eddy Lawrence Manson; 1919–1996), a harmonica virtuoso, moved the family to Los Angeles in 1965 to pursue his career as a film composer.
Manson attended the University of California, Santa Cruz on full scholarship before transferring to the University of California, Irvine, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Career
Manson began his career in the theater and worked in various capacities for such venues as the Mark Taper Forum, Playwrights Horizon and the Manhattan Theater Club.
He started in the film business at Dick Berg's Stonehenge Productions where he produced his first film, The Spell (1977), for NBC, at the age of twenty-four. As Senior Vice President of Stonehenge, he produced several movies and miniseries including the first major television miniseries about Vietnam, A Rumor of War (1980), which The New York Times called "unusually ambitious and admirable" and the Washington Post referred to "as true as a movie is going to get".
In 1980, Manson formed his own company, Sarabande Productions, aimed at creating a platform for prestigious writers. He has since worked with Pulitzer Prize winners including Michael Chabon, Donald Margulies and Jules Feiffer, and acclaimed screenwriters such as Joan Tewkesbury, Barbara Turner, John Sacret Young, and National Book Award recipient Denis Johnson.
The public source identifies “David Manson (producer)” as american film and television producer, screenwriter and director. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around David, Manson and producer.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5237106. VIAF identifies the subject as 35629276. The Library of Congress control number is no99001186. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1919, 1996 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Manson (producer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.