Jerry Weintraub, one of the last of Hollywood’s great old-school impresarios, died on Monday at age 77 in Santa Barbara, his publicist confirmed.
In a colourful and iconoclastic career that spanned half a century, Weintraub proved a force in music, television and film.
He made his name in the 1960s as a music manager and concert promoter, working with such high-profile acts as Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin.
Transitioning to the movie business in the 1970s, he produced director Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville and went on to produce such hits as The Karate Kid, Diner and Ocean’s Eleven with its two sequels. His credits as a TV producer included the 2013 Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra and, most recently, the HBO comedy series The Brink.
“I have the most important phone book in the world,” Weintraub told The Times in 2012. “I can get anything done, anywhere, at any time.”
One of Weintraub’s most compelling productions was his own life story. Having worked his way up from a working-class childhood in New York to the pinnacle of show business, he chronicled his colourful, Runyonesque escapades in his 2010 memoir, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man. The next year, he was the subject of a documentary titled His Way.
In a statement after Weintraub’s passing, actor George Clooney — who starred in the Ocean’s films and became a close friend of Weintraub — nodded to the producer’s reputation as a world-class raconteur.
“In the coming days there will be tributes, about our friend Jerry Weintraub,” Clooney wrote. “We’ll laugh at his great stories, and applaud his accomplishments. And in the years to come the stories and accomplishments will get better with age, just as Jerry would have wanted it.”
Born in 1937 in Brooklyn, NY, Weintraub was raised in the Bronx, where his father was a gem dealer. Weintraub’s mother instilled a love of movies in him from an early age, and after a stint in the Air Force, he found his way to Hollywood. He worked in the mailroom at William Morris before becoming an agent at MCA, where he was mentored by the formidable agent Lew Wasserman.
But Weintraub had bigger ambitions, and before long, he had launched his own management company. One of his earliest clients was the actress and singer Jane Morgan, whom he married in 1965.
Weintraub’s first major foray into the music business came at age 28 when, after a year of cold calls, he convinced Elvis Presley’s manager to let him produce and present Presley’s next national tour. Weintraub’s strategy centralised booking and promotion, circumventing the traditional, localised network of concert promoters.
The model proved efficient and lucrative (“In three weeks, I was a millionaire,” Weintraub told Vanity Fair in 2008), and his firm Concerts West went on to produce tours by Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra and help usher in the era of arena-size concerts. With his talent management company Management III, Weintraub discovered John Denver and managed acts including the Pointer Sisters, Dolly Parton and Neil Diamond.
‘It was all new’
“There were no rules — we were inventing everything as we went,” Weintraub told The Times in 2011. “Every night was something no one had ever done. I think about taking Led Zeppelin into Madison Square Garden [in 1973] and John Bonham stealing my suit, coming out, putting my jacket on, ripping the sleeves off and playing drums and Robert Plant screaming. It was all new.”
In 1973, Weintraub met director Robert Altman at a party, and Altman suggested he try his hand at producing movies. Weintraub took him up on it and produced Altman’s Nashville, a sprawling, country-music-infused drama that would become one of the era’s defining films.
Over the next 40 years, Weintraub would go on to produce a number of successful movies, along with his share of flops, and serve as chairman of United Artists for a brief time in the 1980s. He is one of the few independent producers to have his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In a 2011 interview with The Times, Weintraub credited his success in the film business to a simple matter of good taste and the ability to cultivate and leverage relationships. “I’m creative enough to have great material and friendly enough with enough actors, directors and writers — which is what this is all about — to get things made,” he said.
Outside his work in show business, Weintraub was a major contributor to arts organisations including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Music Centre in Los Angeles.
Weintraub was also active politically. A self-described centrist, he was a longtime friend of President George H.W. Bush and produced a documentary about him for HBO.
Weintraub continued working in film and television his entire life. Most recently he produced the comedy series The Brink, currently in its first season on HBO. His last film as a producer, a big-budget, live-action production of Tarzan, is set for release in 2016.
“It’s very hard to leave the stage,” Weintraub told The Times in 2010. “You want to go out on the top. But then you want to reach new tops.”
