R.I.P.: Music and Film Producer Jerry Weintraub

Jerry Weintraub

Jerry Weintraub, a consummate showman whose up-and-down career touched musical entertainers as grandly diverse as Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Led Zeppelin and screen artists who included Steven Soderbergh, Robert Altman and Michael Douglas, died of cardiac arrest on Monday in Santa Barbara, Calif.

He was 77, according to The NY Times.

Once best known as a concert promoter and a music manager, Mr. Weintraub became a force in the film business with Mr. Altman’s “Nashville,” Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and Carl Reiner’s “Oh, God!” He joined in producing those movies in the 1970s and ’80s, before a crippling business failure temporarily halted his Hollywood career.

Weintraub skipped college to join the Air Force and, after serving, got a job as a page at NBC. Soon he was working as an assistant to Lew Wasserman at MCA, the talent agency. But climbing rungs was not his style. By 1964 he had struck out with a couple of friends to start a management company.

How exactly he got involved with Elvis Presley is a story that changed at his own telling and retelling over the years. This much is true: Mr. Weintraub somehow gained the confidence of Colonel Tom Parker, who managed Presley, and helped engineer a successful concert tour — so successful that, by 1968, Mr. Weintraub was similarly working with Sinatra.

By the early 1970s, Mr. Weintraub’s roster of music clients had grown to include Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues and John Denver. Mr. Denver, with George Burns, starred in “Oh, God!,” enhancing Mr. Weintraub’s film career, though they eventually parted acrimoniously.

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