Jerry Weintraub, who has died aged 77, was not known for underestimating his own expertise as a manager, producer, talent agent and promoter. “If I had been around with Van Gogh or Melville,” he wrote, “they would not have had to wait so long for fame.” As a trailblazing concert promoter, he pioneered the arena tours that are now commonplace for musicians. He worked with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin, and was responsible for shaping the career of the musician John Denver, whom he shepherded to international stardom after seeing him perform in a tiny Greenwich Village club.
As a prominent supporter of the Republican party, Weintraub was close to the former presidents George HW Bush (about whom he produced a documentary) and Ronald Reagan. But he also counted among his friends the actors George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with whom he worked when he produced the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven and its two sequels. He relished the trappings of his lustrous life and took pride in being a film-maker; fittingly he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
His life was rich with stories that straddled the worlds of music, movies and politics. As an up-and-coming promoter, he was left with 5,000 unsold tickets for a Presley concert 24 hours before showtime, despite his deal with Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, being predicated on every last seat being filled. He solved that one by hiring prisoners from the jail next door to the venue to move the empty seats into the car park. This tale and others were collected in his bestselling 2010 memoir, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man.
A 2011 documentary on his life was titled His Way, invoking another showbusiness legend whose career he helped transform: Frank Sinatra, whose mid-1970s relaunch as a stadium act has been credited largely to Weintraub. “When I believe in something, it’s going to get done,” he said. “When people say ‘No,’ I don’t hear it. When people say ‘That’s a bad idea,’ I don’t believe them. When people say ‘It won’t happen,’ I pretend they’re joking.”
Despite his extraordinary tenacity and powers of persuasion, he knew when to hold back or trust a collaborator’s judgment. Though he did not understand the tangled screenplay for Nashville (1975), his first film as a producer, he trusted that its groundbreaking director, Robert Altman, did. Despite his scepticism about the casting of Pat Morita as the teacher Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984), Weintraub assented to the wishes of the film’s director, John G Avildsen, and later wisely stood up to Columbia Pictures when the studio wanted to cut an apparently superfluous scene pertaining to Mr Miyagi’s war record. The movie was a smash hit and Weintraub went on to produce three sequels and a lucrative 2010 remake.
Other successes as a producer included Oh God! (1977), which starred Denver opposite the veteran comedian George Burns as God; Barry Levinson’s popular, nostalgic comedy Diner (1982); and the acclaimed Behind the Candelabra (2013), which starred Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover, Scott Thorson. When the latter project was turned down by studios across Hollywood, it was Weintraub who found a home for it at HBO. He was chairman and CEO of United Artists for five months in 1985. A rare instance of failure came when his company Weintraub Entertainment Group, which he set up in 1986, filed for bankruptcy a few years later.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Samuel Weintraub, a travelling jewellery salesman, and his wife, Rose (nee Bass), who looked after Jerry and his brother, Melvyn. He was a restless child, running away from home “to see the world” and later signing up to the US air force rather than going to college. He left that in 1956 after being stationed in Alaska, far from the excitement he had anticipated.
He took acting lessons but soon gave them up to work in the mail-room at the William Morris talent agency. He moved into management work, assisting the great agent Lew Wasserman at MCA in the late 50s and then co-founding his own management company, Management III, in 1960. Among his acts was the singer Jane Morgan, whom he married in 1965. They separated in the 80s, but were never divorced.
His success as a promoter reached its peak in the 70s after he persuaded Parker that Presley should embark on a national tour. Taking over all booking and promotional duties, rather than leaving them to local outfits, he made himself a millionaire in under a month. His next big accomplishment was staging Sinatra: The Main Event, in which the crooner performed at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Weintraub produced TV specials for acts including Denver, as well as producing the telecast of the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The thrill of mounting ever more spectacular productions drove him on. “It’s very hard to leave the stage,” he said in 2010. “You want to go out on the top. But then you want to reach new tops.”
He was producing to the end, overseeing the well-regarded HBO series The Brink, the climate change documentary Years of Living Dangerously and a new live-action version of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård, due to be released next year.
Weintraub is survived by Susan Ekins, his partner of 20 years; by Morgan and their three children, Julie, Jamie and Jody; by a son, Michael, from an earlier marriage; and by five grandchildren.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion