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fellowship focus
You’ll need a magnifying glass, but in the tiniest print alongside the copyright line at the foot of interminable credits for each film in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy is one for The Saul Zaentz Company.
Though happy to explain the complicated rights process by which the Tolkien project passed from him to – eventually – the present production set-up, Zaentz
is quick to disclaim any credit for the current success of the saga. He will, however, proudly
admit he was one of Peter Jackson’s earliest champions and even recalls telling the powers- that-be that “Peter could make a great picture... but you have to do the whole book.”
That proviso, and the reason for this early detour into Middle- Earth, becomes more significant when you remember that Zaentz had his own crack at Tolkien’s tale back in the late 70s. His two- hour animated version, which ended rather abruptly after cov- ering just one and-a-half of the books, was a box-office bust and critically savaged.
Zaentz, cinematically much better known as producer of that justly celebrated Oscar-winning hat-trick, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient, is nothing if not painfully honest about one of his rare failures:
“I never thought we served the book as well as we could. Other ones that didn’t do business [The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, At Play In The Fields of The Lord] I thought we did a decent job on. This one didn’t have the emotion and heart that you can get with live action. Mind you, it’s very hard with animation.”
Ironically, because of the new interest whipped up by Jackson’s spectacular epic, Zaentz’s 25- year-old cartoon is now a firm video store favourite.
This round-about recap of Zaentz’s small but (mostly) per- fectly formed filmography – just nine films in 30 years – offers another useful clue to his usual modus operandi.
Apart from just a couple of credits, including his first, Payday, a gritty original drama about a country-and-western singer, all his films have been sourced from already acclaimed works.
A deliberate policy? “No,” he explained, “although it has per-
haps ended up looking deliber- ate. Where do you find original scripts that can come up with the amazing stories told in things like Amadeus or The English Patient? As far as I’m concerned the only good script that ever came via the usual route was The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. By the time we responded, it had already been sold to TV.
“You have to remember that we’re based in Berkeley, California and from Los Angeles 400 miles away they tend to view us as ‘those assholes up in Berkeley. No kidding. After Cuckoo’s Nest, I said I wondered what we were now? Probably ‘those lucky assholes up in Berkeley.’
Born just over 82 years ago in Passaic, New Jersey to Russian- Polish parents, Zaentz first arrived in San Francisco via wartime serv- ice in the army and a spell in St Louis, Missouri where he wor- shipped the local baseball team and attended business college.
Another constant passion has been jazz and after some years on the road managing concert tours for the likes of Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz, he went to work for Fantasy Records. Twelve years later, in 1967, along with a few investors he bought the company.
Though principally best known as a jazz label, Zaentz broadened Fantasy’s appeal by signing up an unknown ‘swamp rock’ band who eventually became global chart- toppers after a change of name to Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Film is the third of his lifelong loves and as early as 1968, Zaentz had set his heart on making One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest but the rights issue involving Kirk Douglas was simply too compli- cated at the time.
When he finally did get to hook up with Kirk’s son Michael Douglas in 1974 to film Ken Kesey’s novel, the result was, of course, extraordi- nary – winning, for only the second time in history, the American
class act
Saul Zaentz, award-winning film producer and BAFTA’s newest Fellow, talks to Quentin Falk
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