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This case recounts the appointment in October 1986 of British producer David Puttnam as Vice-President and CEO of Columbia Pictures and his subsequent resignation only eleven months later. To this day, his mandate remains one of the shortest in the history of American cinema. Yet, it is arguably the most debated. The case aims at expounding its main controversies and at pointing towards several frames of interpretation of what occurred inside the studio from October 1986 till September 1987. It accordingly reports key events in the career of David Puttnam and the corporate history of Columbia Pictures. Similar to Akira Kurosawa''s eponymous movie (Japan, 1950), the Rashomon case relates the events that made David Puttnam leave the studio from diverging viewpoints. Around the central themes of the relevant locus of change management in a network-based industry and of the confrontation of an individual to a system, it deals with the structural and institutional challenges of change and with the relationship between changing strategy, changing organisation and changing formal and informal rules in a given sector.