The Producer and His Fine Madness

‘There are certain words that Saul Zaentz has asked me not to use on this stage today,” says Anthony Minghella, director of “The English Patient,” a mischievous glint in his eyes. “The first one of them being ‘stingy.’ Another one being . . . “

Before Minghella could finish, Zaentz rose halfway out of his seat in the audience, cupping his hands together to make himself heard: “You could say ‘parsimonious’!”

Zaentz’s retort earned a knowing smile from Minghella, who was at a recent symposium honoring the directors of films nominated for best picture Oscars. Having spent four years with Zaentz struggling to make a notoriously difficult novel into a film, the Oscar-nominated director appreciates the wily 76-year-old producer’s cost-saving zeal as much as anyone.

When “The English Patient’s” financing deal with 20th Century Fox fell apart barely a month before filming was to begin, Zaentz turned to Miramax, which put up $27.5 million (with an additional $5 million from Zaentz) to bail out the film. To preserve the film’s 127-day shooting schedule, much of it in scenic Tunisian and Italian locales, corners were cut everywhere. Zaentz persuaded the entire cast and crew to defer half their salaries until the film recouped its negative costs.

Minghella worked even cheaper, deferring 75% of his salary. “The whole film was made with glue and bits of string,” the director of the sumptuous-looking picture explains in an interview conducted on the day he won the Directors Guild of America’s award for best feature film director. “There was no fat. If there had been, Saul would’ve cut it out. He’s extremely frugal--that’s the kindest word for it. Saul’s not interested in indulging anybody.”

With his white beard and ample girth, Zaentz is often described as jovial and paternal--one writer described him as a bohemian Father Christmas. He quotes as easily from Milan Kundera as from Darryl Zanuck. Against long odds, he’s self-financed an array of classy, ambitious pictures, nearly all made from novels deemed too dark or complex to be made into films.

“Saul is a wonderful mixture--he’s a street-smart guy from Jersey who has impeccable taste,” says Michael Douglas, who produced “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with Zaentz and views him as a mentor. “There are a lot of people in this town who pretend to have both toughness and good taste, but with Saul it isn’t pretense. His power comes from his joy and enthusiasm for a project.”

Zaentz is guaranteed one trip down the aisle Monday, to receive the coveted Irving G. Thalberg Award for excellence as a movie producer. This month he also received the Producers Guild of America’s producer of the year award. If he wins for “The English Patient,” he’ll have the rare distinction of earning a best picture Oscar in three consecutive decades, having already won for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which swept the top five awards in 1975, and “Amadeus” in 1984, which won eight Oscars overall, including best director, actor and picture.

“You don’t make movies to be art movies,” he says over lunch, eating a Cobb salad, a napkin tucked into his shirt to catch any stray crumbs. “You make movies that move you emotionally because if you’re going to commit five years of your life to a movie, you need something to keep you going.”

Born in New Jersey, Zaentz ran away from home at age 16, supporting himself hawking peanuts at the St. Louis Cardinals training camp in Florida and gambling at cards. He served in North Africa and Sicily during World War II, but never held a steady job until he moved to San Francisco at age 26, where he went to work for legendary jazz producer Norman Granz. In 1967, Zaentz bought Fantasy Records, eventually making millions from the label’s Creedence Clearwater Revival hits, which funded Zaentz’s first forays into the film business.

Today, the Fantasy music catalog--which includes the John Fogerty-penned Creedence hits, such jazz labels as Riverside, Prestige, Milestone and Pablo Records, plus a portion of Stax Records--has been valued at between $60 million and $70 million. The company is based in a seven-story Berkeley office building that Zaentz has often mortgaged to help raise money for his films. In addition to the Oscar winners, they include “Payday,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.”

But don’t be fooled by Zaentz’s hearty, Kris Kringle countenance. You don’t make it on the margins in Hollywood by being a soft touch. “Saul loves being answerable to nobody,” says John Lithgow, who became a friend after spending five months with Zaentz in the jungles of Brazil making “At Play.”

“Being on the set, playing hearts with Saul, I realized the secret to his success: He can spot everyone’s strengths and weaknesses right away. He was a killer. He’d shoot the moon three out of every four games.”

Owner of an Italian villa with 400 olive trees on the property, Zaentz proudly boasts that the label on his private stock reads: “Not one lira of profit from this olive oil will go to any worthwhile charity.” He conducts business in a similarly flinty fashion.

When Fogerty had a bitter fight with Zaentz over songwriting royalties, attacking him with songs titled “Mr. Greed” and “Zanz Kant Danz,” Zaentz sued Fogerty for slander, eventually winning an undisclosed settlement. However, Zaentz lost a copyright infringement suit filed against Fogerty, which claimed that his 1985 song, “Old Man Down the Road,” plagiarized “Run Through the Jungle,” a song Fogerty had written years earlier for Creedence. Fogerty and Zaentz haven’t spoken in years; today, Fogerty says, “I would like to resolve the issues,” but the two haven’t been able to come to an agreement.

Zaentz also had a falling out with “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” director Phil Kaufman, who claimed Zaentz reneged on a promise to boost his salary if the film was made with a higher budget. Zaentz disputes that account, but ended up paying Kaufman roughly $150,000 after a Directors Guild arbitration.

“Saul is a great filmmaker,” says one Hollywood executive who has worked with him. “But he’s hell to make a deal with--he’s the most stubborn SOB around.”

As one of the few remaining independent filmmakers who fund movies with their own money, Zaentz has a very personal stake in his projects’ box-office success. “At Play’s” failure cost him $20 million, forcing him to find outside backing for the first time to make “The English Patient.”

When Movieline magazine ran a story last fall deriding “The English Patient” as an “expensive, tony, Oscar-begging crapshoot,” Zaentz fired back a scathing letter, blasting the piece as “contemptible and ignorant, if not stupid.”

Even Minghella, who seems devoted to Zaentz, has no illusions. “He can be very cantankerous, especially if he thinks you’re doing something that doesn’t make sense,” the director says. “The image I have of Saul is that of a bull patrolling the perimeter of the film. He has so much energy and power--he’s not a bull you want charging in your direction.”

Zaentz is nothing if not a stickler for accuracy. When Minghella says during the Directors Guild symposium that the film production needed a convoy of 40 trucks to ferry equipment into the Sahara desert, Zaentz leans over and corrects in a whisper: “Just so you know--it was 54 trucks.”

Minghella first met Zaentz when the producer came to London and phoned up the director. He told him he’d liked his new film, “Truly Madly Deeply,” so much that he’d gone back to see it three times, which he thought qualified him for a dinner. Zaentz spent much of the evening regaling Minghella--a jazz fan--with stories about various jazz greats. A week later, Minghella got a package of CDs by Art Pepper and Bill Evans in the mail.

So when Minghella fell in love with a new novel by Michael Ondaatje called “The English Patient,” he phoned Zaentz and had him buy a copy. Zaentz was smitten. A week later, he and Minghella met Ondaatje and made a pitch for the film rights.

“We were very frank with Michael--we told him we weren’t going to do this book word by word,” Zaentz says. “We felt the love story would have to be the central focus. I told Michael--it’s your choice. But remember, people are going to tell you anything to get the rights. So do your homework.”

As luck would have it, Ondaatje was friendly with “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” author Peter Matthiessen, who vouched for Zaentz’s fidelity to his project. The rights went to Zaentz, who beat out 11 other bidders.

Zaentz is admired by filmmakers because he respects the creative process. “Saul gives you wonderful ideas, but he never forces them on you,” says Milos Forman, who directed both “Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” “He never meddled in my sphere--the creative decisions.”

In fact, after Minghella turned in a 225-page first draft of his script, Zaentz invited Ondaatje to work with Minghella on three subsequent drafts, a hands-on involvement novelists rarely enjoy in Hollywood. “Anthony could still say ‘no’ to anything,” Zaentz explains. “But often the novelist brings great ideas to the process too.”

Minghella recalls Zaentz watching quietly as he and Ondaatje wrestled with a raft of thorny story dilemmas. “Saul has an enormous security of judgment, so he would go for hours listening to us, never speaking unless he had something to say. His lack of hubris encouraged Michael and me to see each other as allies.”

However, when Zaentz began shopping the completed script, he found no buyers. Part of the problem was concern over Minghella’s lack of experience with a big-canvas film. Zaentz remembers saying: “Look, Vermeer only painted small paintings. Does that mean you wouldn’t let him paint a bigger one?”

Zaentz finally negotiated a deal with 20th Century Fox which disintegrated at the 11th hour, prompting a bitter dispute that has been portrayed in press accounts as a classic instance of studio philistinism. In Zaentz’s version, the deal collapsed because of Fox’s insistence on casting a star in the Kristin Scott Thomas role, Demi Moore being the name most bandied about.

“Fox kept saying, ‘We love the script’ in that Hollywood way,” he says. “So we negotiated and we finally had a deal where Fox would distribute the film worldwide. The budget would be around $30 million. They said they’d put up $26 million and we’d make up the difference.

“But the next day they were backpedaling, saying they’d put in less than $26 million. We got a note from them saying, ‘Did we think we’d made a deal?’ ”

Zaentz says that Fox insisted that Thomas (now up for a best actress Oscar) submit to a screen test. “They claimed they were worried about the chemistry between her and Ralph,” Zaentz says. “But everyone told me that was just a ruse. What they really wanted to do was get rid of her and cast a famous actress.”

Fox executives dispute this account, saying the deal fell apart over Zaentz’s inability to raise money to cover his end of the financing. “The words ‘Demi Moore’ never came out of our mouths,” responds one executive, saying it was Minghella who had discussions with Moore and Emma Thompson about the role. Minghella acknowledges only that he spoke with several actresses but would not name anyone specifically.

“I keep reading that we walked away from this deal and that’s absolutely not true,” says Fox chairman Bill Mechanic. “When we discussed the original deal, Saul said they would have a star in the Willem Dafoe role--he had Al Pacino as a leading candidate. We were willing to make the movie without stars, but our anticipation was that we would work together on casting. Instead, Saul cast the movie his way, without consulting us.

“We still made a deal for limited financing, but when Saul didn’t have [the additional] money, we felt we couldn’t make the picture. It was a wonderful script, but we felt that unless it won a lot of Oscars it wouldn’t make its money back.”

(Since Thanksgiving, the film has earned more than $60 million in domestic box-office receipts.)

Mechanic insists that the studio acted “in good faith” by requiring Thomas to do a screen test. “We wanted to see her and Ralph together. If you’re making a love story, you need to know whether the romantic chemistry works or not.”

Zaentz doesn’t buy it. “It was their way of saying, ‘[Expletive] you’ to the picture.” To make sure you get the point, Zaentz extends his stubby middle finger in the air. “That’s what they were saying--[expletive] your picture.”

Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein snapped into action when he got a call from Fiennes, saying something had gone awry with “The English Patient’s” financing. “I’d told Saul if there were ever a hiccup in the deal to let me know,” Weinstein recalls. “So I told him if he could get a letter [from Fox] saying you’re free, we’d do the deal.”

In a gesture that even Zaentz describes as “a kind thing to do,” Mechanic waived Fox’s rights to the film, providing Zaentz got an offer in excess of $26 million. Miramax put up $27.5 million, and gave Zaentz a wide berth during filming. The producer was obligated to deliver a film no longer than 140 minutes, but Weinstein says when he saw the film he waived the clause.

“We let everything go--this was Saul’s baby,” Weinstein says. “After five minutes with him, I knew I was the student and he was the maestro. We just tried to not get in his way.”

Zaentz offers a slightly more colorful account of the film’s running-time issue. He says he showed Miramax a 173-minute version of the film, then went to lunch with Weinstein.

“Finally, 90 minutes after the movie had ended, Harvey got around to asking how long the picture was,” Zaentz recalls. “I told him it was 163 minutes long. And he says, ‘You’re lying. It was longer.’

“I said, ‘OK, but if you waited 90 minutes to ask me how long it was, it couldn’t have bothered you that much.’

“Harvey nodded his head and said, ‘OK, but you are going to shorten it a little, right?’

“And I replied, ‘We will, as long as it doesn’t hurt the picture.’ ” The movie was released at two hours and 42 minutes.

That’s what ultimately counts with Zaentz: protecting the film. Film editor Walter Murch, who is up for an Oscar for “The English Patient,” says working with Zaentz has always reminded him of the Chinese proverb that says: “That general leads best whose soldiers say, ‘We did it ourselves.’ ”

For Minghella, Zaentz was a producer who used his knowledge and experience to empower his creative team. “Saul is the perfect sentry for a filmmaker. He’s not intrusive at all; he’d never come to the editing room without being invited. Yet I asked him about everything, because if you don’t feel threatened by your producer, you bring him even closer.”

Zaentz’s filmmakers also respect his indomitable will. As Harvey Weinstein puts it: “He’s like an Israeli general--he leads by example.” During the filming of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” Zaentz and his crew spent months in the steamy Amazon jungle, sleeping in makeshift cabin boats.

“I don’t know if it was the giant bugs or the humidity, but I couldn’t sleep for weeks,” recalls Lithgow. “We had terrible weather and horrible actor-director arguments, but Saul was unflappable. He went through all the same hardships we did, but he behaved as if there were no other place he’d rather be.”

Since the release of “The English Patient,” Zaentz has been a tireless promoter of the film. He arrived in Los Angeles after a whirlwind flurry of trips that took him to the Far East, then the Berlin Film Festival, London, Los Angeles, back to London, Greece, back to Los Angeles, Paris and then back to Los Angeles before returning to his home in San Rafael. He wears a watch with two faces, set to the time zone of his two most recent stopovers.

“I personally canceled his trip to Greece,” says Weinstein, who has offered Zaentz a two-picture deal with Miramax. “I said, ‘You’re 76 years old--I won’t be responsible for killing you.’ Saul said, ‘Fine,’ but as soon as I got off the phone, he rescheduled the trip around me.”

Zaentz says he has no intention of slowing down. The producer loves to tell the story of meeting his idol, Akira Kurosawa, who was in Paris when Zaentz was making “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” there. Zaentz asked Kurosawa, then 76, if he was working on a new film. Kursosawa answered, “Yes, I’m doing a small picture, but after that, I’m doing a big picture.”

Zaentz was impressed. “You’ve already got two pictures going?” Kurosawa replied: “Why not--people like us, we should die on the set.”

Zaentz’s face glows. “If you have to go, why not go trying to make a good movie?” he says. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

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The Oscar Race

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