Legendary Movie Producer Jerry Weintraub Dies at 77

By Carmel Dagan

Jerry Weintraub, the colorful and controversial producer of films ranging from Nashville and Diner to the Ocean’s Eleven films, died Monday in Palm Springs. He was 77.

The producer of The Karate Kid and The Brink had been in poor health recently.

Starting as a music-industry tour promoter and manager of such talent as John Denver, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and Led Zeppelin, in the 1970s he segued into the motion picture business with Robert Altman’s Nashville and later such hits as Oh, God! and The Karate Kid series.

MGM/UA owner Kirk Kerkorian hired him to take over the reins at United Artists, but that job lasted only a few months. He subsequently raised and borrowed almost $500 million to create the Weintraub Entertainment Group, an independent production company that slid into bankruptcy after only three years. Weintraub then jumped over to Warner Bros. as a producer on such films as The Specialist, starring Sylvester Stallone.

An ambitious self-starter from working-class roots in New York, Weintraub was known for his largesse. A confidant of President George H.W. Bush, whom he met through his wife, singer Jane Morgan, Weintraub relished being a Hollywood player and its attendant perquisites.

Starting in the mailroom of MCA, he quickly worked his way up to assistant agent and then agent in the 1950s and ’60s. By the early ’70s he had built a large business, Concerts West, co-owned with Tom Hulett, that booked talent as diverse as Sinatra, Dylan, Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. His management firm Management III handled Denver, Diamond and Dolly Parton, among others. Weintraub was an innovative music-business showman — he was among the first to book top talent into concert tours held in sports stadiums — and he became rich for his efforts. He also packaged television specials featuring Denver (whose 1974 Rocky Mountain Christmas special won an Emmy), Diamond, Frank Sinatra, the Carpenters and Pat Boone.

But after jumping into film production on Altman’s Oscar-nominated Nashville in 1975, Weintraub did not look back, subsequently losing many of his major clients to the lure of the moviemaking siren. Weintraub’s second film, in 1977, was one of his biggest hits, Oh, God!, starring Denver and George Burns. Other films included All Night Long, 9/30/55, Cruising, Diner and Happy New Year, but it was the sleeper 1984 hit The Karate Kid that helped convince Kerkorian, then owner of MGM/UA, to hire Weintraub to revive the moribund UA unit. Weintraub also bought a minority stake of UA in 1986 but found himself on a collision course with the equally strong-willed Kerkorian. Several months later he was out of a job and vowed not to work as an employee ever again.

In 1987, with $461 million in backing raised through various public and private sources, Weintraub launched Weintraub Entertainment Group in an attempt to create a rival to the major Hollywood studios. This quixotic venture, in which Weintraub controlled 76% of the stock, produced such unmemorable films as “My Stepmother Is an Alien,” “The Big Blue,” “Troop Beverly Hills” and “She’s Out of Control,” but the company was out of control too, quickly losing top executives and the confidence of financial institutions. Weintraub tried to safeguard the company by purchasing the foundering Cannon Group’s 2,000-title movie and TV library for $89 million and some stock in WEG (the library had once been the Thorn-EMI library). It proved to be a wise investment but not enough to save the company from bankruptcy a short three years later and shareholder antipathy soon thereafter.

Weintraub retreated to a safe haven of producing films at Warner Bros. and churned out three more Karate Kid titles with decreasing degrees of popularity — though he had a significant hit years later with a reinvention of the material in the form of 2010’s The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith — Pure Country, an failed attempt to put country star George Strait on the movie map; Stallone action vehicle The Specialist; and Vegas Vacation, in which he also appeared.

After a very bad year in 1998, which saw two producing efforts fail miserably, the disastrous film adaptation of the 1960s cult TV series The Avengers and the little-noticed Kurt Russell sci-fi vehicle Soldier, Weintraub exec produced the 2000 comedy The Independent, an amusing indie film starring Jerry Stiller as a documentary filmmaker that also featured cameos by a variety of Hollywood directors as themselves.

Weintraub soon surged back into successful, high-profile filmmaking with the remake of Ocean’s Eleven (the original had been a vehicle for his client Sinatra and his fellow Rat Packers). He had held the remake rights for years — though Weintraub professed to not having been very impressed with the 1961 film — and had a script written, but then he brought director Steven Soderbergh together with an extraordinary cast topped by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts. The witty, stylish 2001 film grossed $451 million worldwide.

The notably sloppy 2004 sequel Ocean’s Twelve — everyone appeared to be having so much fun onscreen that they didn’t really bother with a script — made $362 million worldwide, and third entry Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), which returned to the tighter approach of the first film, took $311 million. Weintraub made appearances in all three films (as well as in Clooney’s Confession of a Dangerous Mind and Soderbergh’s Full Frontal).

Nancy Drew, an adaptation of the beloved children’s mystery series directed by Andrew Fleming and starring Emma Roberts, did not, however, find much success in 2007.

Weintraub produced Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed Liberace biodrama Behind the Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, which aired on HBO in 2013 and was an enormous success come Emmy time.

He told Variety in 2007, “I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve been an independent guy all my life. I love doing what I do.  I love the movies, I love actors, I love directors, I love writers, I love working with the studio, I love the marketing, I love the whole process.”

Weintraub also exec produced a documentary, 41, on his friend George H.W. Bush, that aired on HBO in June 2012, and he was producer, with James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, of Showtime docu series Years of Living Dangerously, which aired in April 2014 and featured a host of celebrities, including Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford, warning about the dangers of climate change.

The producer shepherded HBO limited series The Brink, starring Jack Black and Tim Robbins, which takes a darkly comic approach to a geopolitical crisis, and premiered in June, as well as a limited series adaptation of the 1970s hit fantasy adventure film Westworld starring Ed Harris and Anthony Hopkins. He also had a Tarzan feature, starring Alexander Skarsgard, Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz, set for release in 2016 and had a variety of other projects in development.

Jerome Charles Weintraub was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. As a teenager he enlisted in the Air Force, where he served as a radio operator.

Douglas McGrath’s 2011 HBO documentary His Way, produced by Steven Soderbergh and Graydon Carter, among others, took a look at Weintraub’s professional and personal life; interviewees included George H.W. and Barbara Bush, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and Bruce Willis.

In March 1991, President Bush appointed Weintraub to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

With the success of Ocean’s Eleven, Weintraub was showered with laurels. He received the Kodak Award at 2001’s ShowEast confab for a lifetime in film, and in 2002 he was honored in France with the Deauville Festival of American Film’s Coup de Chapeau honor for lifetime achievement in film. The festival also unspooled a retrospective of his work. He also received Hollywood publicists’ Motion Picture Showmanship Award in 2002. The Zurich Film Festival paid tribute to Weintraub with its Golden Eye career achievement award in 2012.

Weintraub’s memoir, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man, was published in 2010.

Weintraub was a substantial contributor to arts organizations including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Music Center, as well as to charities including Chabad, whose L’Chaim: To Life telethon he exec produced in 2005.

Weintraub married former singer Jane Morgan in 1964, but while they never divorced, he lived with girlfriend Susan Eakins for two decades. In addition to Eakins, he is survived by four children by Morgan: Michael, Julie and Jamie, all of whom assisted their father on films, and Jody, a TV producer.