Saul Zaentz--Producer From the Old School

It has been obvious for years that the most grievous shortage in the film industry has been of creative producers. Producers, that is, who are more than simply deal-makers or financiers who could not tell a dolly from a doll or hitchhikers on whatever bandwagon appears to be moving at the moment.

There are creative producers around, men and women with the courage of their strong convictions about material and who should handle it and how. The thing of it is, such producers are so scarce these days that you could list them all on the bottom of a small popcorn container.

Yet it was the producers--Irving Thalberg, Arthur Freed, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Hal Wallis, Pandro S. Berman and dozens of others, greater and lesser deities all--who made Hollywood what once it was.

In a manner of speaking, Saul Zaentz is not a Hollywood producer: He lives in Berkeley and spends as little time in Hollywood as he can help. But he is a devoutly independent producer in the tradition of Goldwyn and Selznick. He only makes films he intends to be very proud of, but he also makes them pay off, usually against what had seemed to be long odds.

Having prospered in the record business but grown weary of its nervously cyclical nature, Zaentz decided at the start of the 1970s to try his hand at the movies, which he had always loved.

He first backed a taut, tough, atmospheric piece about a nasty country singer, played by Rip Torn. It was called “Payday” and it has become a minor classic for its hard-edged look at the pop music world (Don Carpenter wrote it; Darryl Duke directed).

Zaentz then won Oscars for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which Kirk and Michael Douglas had tried unsuccessfully to get financed for 10 years, and for “Amadeus,” a sumptuous production and a thriller, even if the scholars thought Salieri got a bad rap.

This year Zaentz seems certain to be in Oscar contention again in several categories for “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” another bravura project, from the Milan Kundera novel, which more traditional Hollywood heads considered uncommercial if not unfilmable and probably both. The film has not yet played widely, but Zaentz has no doubt it will be in profit in two to three years.

Now, Zaentz is in keen pursuit of Peter Matthiessen’s novel “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” The 1965 thriller about soldiers of fortune, a team of missionaries and their wives and a tribe of headhunters in the Amazon jungle is a project Zaentz has been dreaming of for 20 years. Off to South America this month to open “Unbearable Lightness” there, Zaentz will meet with Hector Babenco (“Kiss of the Spiderwoman” and “Ironweed”) to discuss the Matthiessen property.

When Zaentz starts to make a film, he mortgages his building in Berkeley and, since he is spending his own money, he minds it very carefully indeed. Despite its multiple locations here (briefly) and in Europe, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” came in for less than $20 million. If a film should flop, “the worst that could happen,” he said, “is that we might not be able to make another film for a few years.”

Zaentz is a hands-on producer and he doesn’t take his hands off until a film has opened worldwide. “To do the job right, you can’t leave anything to anybody else. Everybody at the distributor’s has good intentions. But yours is still only one film and they’ve got others to worry about. They can’t see it as I do and why should they?”

In the older tradition of producers, Zaentz is confident of his own tastes and ideas about production. “I have to differ with Kirk Douglas,” Zaentz remarked. “He has said I felt he was too old for ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ He’s wrong. He wasn’t too old, he was too big. My philosophy then and now is that in certain parts you can’t have a star.”

The star’s own fame and persona can submerge the character. Not using a star is a calculated risk. “If a film hits, then a star can help. But a star doesn’t make a film and we’ve seen that time and time again. ‘Heartburn,’ ‘Ironweed,’ ‘Ishtar.’ ”

The decisions to hire the stars and pay their presently inflated salaries are often, Zaentz has no doubt, “made out of fear, or because some executive is covering his tail with his stockholders. ‘How could we miss with Joe Blow?’ ”

Zaentz is also scornful of audience research, especially the kind that seeks to have the viewers tell you what they want to see before they’ve seen it. “There’s no way an audience can do that.

“I’ve put it in my contracts with distributors,” Zaentz said, “that I won’t pay for any surveys, absolutely won’t have them charged against the picture. I guarantee you that 90% of all previews are for political purposes, to mollify a producer or the director or somebody.”

Zaentz, who was born in Passaic, N.J., went to work for a music distributor right out of school and has been in the field ever since. He soon joined promoter Norman Granz, handling everything east of the Mississippi for Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic presentations.

Granz was doing concerts that featured Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. “It was a wonderful package, and it bombed,” Zaentz said, sadly. He was, and is, a jazz fan.

In 1955, Zaentz joined the Fantasy label here on the West Coast. It had started in 1949, with Brubeck and Cal Tjader as its principal artists. Eventually, Zaentz took over the label and got into later sounds with Creedence Clearwater Revival. (The label and Creedence Clearwater’s John Fogerty have recently been involved in acrimonious lawsuits, one of which has yet to come to trial and which Zaentz cannot discuss.)

Over the years, Zaentz has bought up a number of jazz labels, including Granz’s own Pablo, plus Riverside, Galaxy, Prestige, Contemporary and Good Time Jazz. “I try to keep all the good stuff in print, now on CDs,” Zaentz says. It appears to be another area, like film, in which following his own tastes and preferences has worked out very nicely.

“The record company had its best year in ‘87,” he said, “and we’ll do even better in ’88.”

But these days Zaentz leaves most of the record side to his associate, Ralph Kaplan. Being a hands-on producer keeps your hands full.