MOVIES - July 5, 1990

Saul Zaentz Says No to Czech Festival: Producer Saul Zaentz has declined an invitation by Czechoslovakia’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to show his “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the 1988 Philip Kaufman-directed film, based on the novel by Czech expatriate Milan Kundera. The movie dramatizes the erotic encounters of a surgeon, set against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of the Czech capital of Prague in 1968. Berkeley-based Zaentz, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, said that the chief of the Czech film office, Jiri Janousek, was of no help at all when Zaentz and crew wanted to shoot exteriors for “Unbearable” in Prague. At the time, Kundera and his novel were banned in Czechoslovakia. Now that the Czech government has changed, Zaentz accused Janousek of wanting to show the film as a way “to impress” the new, liberal government of Vaclav Havel, and to secure his position with it.