Saul Zaentz

• 1. Introduction

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  Saul Zaentz won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, a feat almost no one else in Hollywood has matched. Born on the 28th of February 1921, in Passaic, New Jersey, he was the youngest of five children of Polish Jewish immigrants. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, then studied at Rutgers on the GI Bill. His first industry job was at Jazz at the Philharmonic under Norman Granz, managing concert tours for musicians including Duke Ellington and Stan Getz. That path ran through a record label in San Francisco and years of legal combat. It also wound through a series of novels that others refused to film. His journey into the music business began in 1955, when he joined a small San Francisco jazz label called Fantasy Records.

• 2. Fantasy Records and CCR

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  By 1967, Zaentz and a group of partners had purchased Fantasy Records from its founders, Max and Sol Weiss. By then, the label had established itself as one of the largest independent jazz labels in the world.

  The new ownership signed a roots-rock group called Creedence Clearwater Revival, fronted by a former Fantasy warehouse worker named John Fogerty. Fantasy held both the distribution and the publishing rights to every CCR recording.

  Fogerty's original deal with Fantasy was already restrictive. When he tried to walk away, the legal situation pushed him to sign over even more than the contract had first required. Zaentz and Fantasy made investments they characterized as acting on the group's behalf. Fogerty maintained those investments caused devastating financial losses for CCR. The group later recovered some of what it had lost through legal proceedings.

  By 1985, Fogerty had released a new album called Centerfield, and two of its tracks were thinly veiled attacks on Zaentz. 'Zanz Kant Danz' and 'Mr. Greed' made the feeling plain. The lyric 'Zanz can't dance but he'll steal your money' prompted a defamation lawsuit from Zaentz. The case settled, with Warner Bros. and Fogerty agreeing to rename the song 'Vanz Kant Danz' and revise the lyric. Fogerty then countersued for his legal costs. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and in Fogerty v. Fantasy, 510 U.S. 517, decided in 1994, Fogerty won.

  Zaentz also pursued a plagiarism claim. He alleged that 'The Old Man Down the Road,' another track on Centerfield, had borrowed its melodic line from 'Run Through the Jungle.' That song appeared on CCR's 1970 album Cosmo's Factory, with Fantasy holding the copyright even though Fogerty had written it. Zaentz sought $140 million in damages. In Fantasy, Inc. v. Fogerty, a jury found Fogerty not liable.

  After Zaentz eventually sold his interest in Fantasy Records, Fogerty almost immediately returned to the label as a recording artist.

• 3. The Forman Partnership

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  Zaentz entered film production in 1972, with Payday, directed by Daryl Duke. In the early 1970s, a stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was playing at a theatre in San Francisco's Jackson Square area. Zaentz attended a performance and decided to produce a film adaptation.

  He brought in actor Michael Douglas as co-producer. Milos Forman directed. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which Zaentz and Douglas shared. That sweep of the top prizes had not been seen at the Oscars in 41 years.

  In 1980, Zaentz established the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California. It offered editing and sound-mixing services for his own productions as well as for independent filmmakers and major Hollywood studios.

  In 1984, Zaentz and Forman collaborated again, on Amadeus, an adaptation of Peter Shaffer's stage play about composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Zaentz's second Best Picture. A soundtrack album from Amadeus became a bestseller, distributed through Fantasy Records.

  The book Zaentz chose to pursue next was Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Bringing it to screen would become the most fiercely contested project of his career.

• 4. The English Patient

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  Zaentz had acquired the rights to the still-unpublished novel in 1992, working up a scenario with the author from the start. His financial backers wanted a more commercially viable cast. They proposed Demi Moore for a leading role. Zaentz refused, and chose Kristin Scott Thomas for the part instead.

  Anthony Minghella wrote the screenplay and directed. The film received twelve Academy Award nominations at the 69th ceremony and won nine of them. Minghella took Best Director, and Zaentz collected his third Best Picture Oscar.

  At the same ceremony, Zaentz accepted the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in film production.

• 5. A Reader's Cinema

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  The Mosquito Coast, directed by Peter Weir on location in Belize, starred Harrison Ford in the leading role. Paul Theroux had written the novel it came from.

  In 1988, Zaentz produced The Unbearable Lightness of Being, taken from the Milan Kundera novel. Philip Kaufman directed, working from a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere.

  At Play in the Fields of the Lord came from a Peter Matthiessen novel, adapted for the screen by Jean-Claude Carriere. Hector Babenco shot it in the Amazon rainforest. The film continued a theme from Mosquito Coast: both examined the tension between Western values and a radically different way of life.

  Zaentz was a prolific reader who typically chose film subjects from existing novels, not from original scripts. His final production, Goya's Ghosts, was the exception. Jean-Claude Carriere and Milos Forman co-wrote an original screenplay, centering it on events in the life of Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard as Goya, and Randy Quaid as the king of Spain made up the cast. The film shot on location in Spain, was edited in New York, and released in late 2006.

  Since 1976, Zaentz had held the film and stage rights to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

• 6. The Tolkien Empire

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  United Artists had originally purchased those rights directly from Tolkien, eight years before Zaentz stepped in. The deal covered film, stage, and merchandise rights for both novels. It also gave Zaentz matching rights over two additional Tolkien works. If Tolkien's estate moved to film The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth, Zaentz's company could match any offer. Television was the one area the agreement excluded: Zaentz held no rights for shows of more than eight episodes.

  In 1978, Zaentz produced an animated version of The Lord of the Rings. Peter S. Beagle wrote the screenplay, and the animator Ralph Bakshi directed.

  In 1982, Tolkien Enterprises granted an exclusive tabletop game license to Iron Crown Enterprises. It was the largest such licensing deal the tabletop game industry had seen at that time.

  Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, was the first person set to direct a live-action Hobbit film. His production company, Wingnut Films, questioned New Line Cinema's accounting practices and eventually filed suit. New Line executive Robert Shaye declared his company would never work with Jackson again. Jackson said he could not proceed while the litigation remained active.

  Zaentz had his own dispute with New Line. In December 2007, Zaentz sued the studio, alleging that New Line had refused to make its records available for his profit-participation review. By 2010, the disputes had resolved enough for Peter Jackson to be confirmed as the director of The Hobbit films.

  In 2011, Zaentz's company filed legal actions against small businesses in the United Kingdom. Among those targeted was the Hungry Hobbit cafe in Sarehole, Birmingham. A pub in Southampton that had traded under The Hobbit name for twenty years also received a legal notice. The writer Stephen Fry publicly described the campaign as 'pointless, self-defeating bullying.'

  On the 18th of August 2022, Embracer Group announced an agreement to purchase Middle-earth Enterprises from The Saul Zaentz Company.

• 7. Death and Remembrance

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  Michael Douglas paid tribute in The Hollywood Reporter. 'He was the epitome of an independent,' Douglas said, 'with an incredible sense of material, and the courage to see it through.' 'I owe everything to him,' he added. 'I was 28 years old and he gave me my first producing opportunity. I'll miss him dearly.'

  John Fogerty marked Zaentz's passing on his Facebook page. He posted the music video for 'Vanz Kant Danz.'

  In 2003, Zaentz had been made a Fellow of BAFTA in recognition of his film career. His personal life included two marriages, both ending in divorce. His first wife was Celia Mingus, formerly married to jazz musician Charles Mingus. His second wife was Lynda Redfield, the widow of actor William Redfield.

  The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation launched in 1997. On the 17th of May 2016, Harvard's Graduate School of Education announced a gift of $35.5 million from the foundation. The school called it the largest gift in its history dedicated to advancing early childhood education.

  The Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley was one of only three major film production facilities in Northern California. Along with American Zoetrope and Lucasfilm, it served Bay Area filmmakers for more than two decades. After renovation, it was renamed the Zaentz Media Center. The complex was sold in 2007, and Fantasy Studios, which had operated within it, closed in 2018.

  Zaentz's moving image collection is now housed at the Academy Film Archive.