Jack Brodsky, 69; Movie Producer and Publicist

Jack Brodsky, a Hollywood publicist and producer of such popular films as “Romancing the Stone” and its sequel “The Jewel of the Nile,” starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, has died. He was 69.

Brodsky, who had recently produced the Eddie Murphy movie “Daddy Day Care,” planned for release later this year, died of a heart attack Tuesday at his Los Angeles home.

Equally adept at publicity and producing, Brodsky segued between the two, working as an executive for 20th Century Fox, Filmways, Columbia, Morgan Creek and Rastar after starting in the New York office of Warner Bros. in 1957.

As executive producer or producer, Brodsky helped bring to the screen the two Douglas-Turner romantic comedies, Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” and Jules Feiffer’s very dark comedy “Little Murders.”

Among his other credits were the comedy “King Ralph,” starring John Goodman, Martin Lawrence’s “Black Knight,” and “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams” which won Joanne Woodward the new York Film Critics Award as best actress.

The Brooklyn-born Brodsky worked in New York for a decade before moving to Hollywood, where he became an important player who was often consulted about changing movie marketing techniques.

He gained perhaps his greatest fame with his efforts to generate publicity for the scandalous 1963 “Cleopatra” as on-set head of publicity for 20th Century Fox.

During filming in Rome, the extravagant epic picture hit the international gossip columns before the entertainment news when stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, both married to others, famously fell in love. The production broke up both their marriages and proved so expensive it nearly bankrupted the studio.

Financing “Cleopatra” at more than $42 million [at least $200 million in current dollars] forced 20th Century Fox to sell off about 300 acres of its back lot, now the site of Century City.

Brodsky, with his assistant Nathan Weiss, wrote a book on the behind-the-scenes machinations of the disastrous movie: “The Cleopatra Papers: A Private Correspondence,” published in 1963.

“The redeeming quality of the book from the reader’s point of view,” former Times book editor Robert Kirsch noted in his review, “is that its authors have a certain sense of humor which enabled them to watch all this insanity with detachment.

“Their position ... was to protect each other and to survive. This they did.... Brodsky and Weiss played it carefully, watching the angles, retaining their personal sanity by what might be called private, punitive and therapeutic laughter.”

Brodsky also appeared in a documentary, “Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood.” It was seen on the American Movie Classics cable channel in 2001 and included in the “Cleopatra” DVD package released that year.

As publicist for the Barbra Streisand film “Funny Girl,” Brodsky at times served as personal publicity agent for Streisand and her former husband, Elliott Gould, with whom he worked on “Little Murders.”

He co-produced the Woody Allen sex comedy.

The ever-loyal Brodsky, a writer who occasionally contributed to such publications as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, in January 1992 wrote for Calendar’s Counterpunch column a scathing rebuttal of Times critic Kenneth Turan’s comments on Streisand’s movie “The Prince of Tides.”

“Turan, in an admittedly mixed review,” Brodsky wrote, “hit two special sore points: one, the idea that movies be judged by the novels from which they are adapted, and two, the subject of Barbra Streisand’s ego.... Streisand’s ego has come into question as it relates to how she serves herself as an actress through her direction.”

Warren Beatty, Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin were never criticized for multiple roles as star, director and producer of their films, Brodsky said, adding: “Beatty, Olivier, Chaplin -- linked with the name Streisand? Absolutely.”

Brodsky is survived by his wife, Dorothy; two sons, Richard and Peter; his mother, Shirley; and two grandchildren.