What Fantasy and OJC CDs did you buy?

[Chuck Nessa]

Just checked my database and I bought 59 since Jan 1. Hate to think how many I bought last year.

[Eric]

Just checked my database and I bought 59 since Jan 1. Hate to think how many I bought last year.

This is precisely why I do not employ such a system

[kh1958]

I don't know but I have almost 500 OJCs and OBCs now.

[jazzbo]

I've still got a bloody long list!

MG

I'm glad I had paid OJCs more attention than most members - I already had all the Don Patterson, Gil Mellé, Blue Mitchell, Kenny Burrell, Herbie Mann, Sonny Rollins (Riverside and Contemporary) CDs, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Ernie Henry on LP, as well as the Monk (both), Modern Jazz Quartet, Wes Montgomery, Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans Riverside, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins Prestige box sets - that helped quite a bit.

Oh yes, I had nearly all those and many more. . . but the catalogs are so deep. . .(and I find that the cds from lesser "giants" are so great!) there's still many that I might get, but with hundreds of OJC discs already, I'm pretty well set. . . .

Still a shame that the "good thing has come to an end," OJC cds in stock all the time.

[LAL]

Bought about 550 in the past 3 years. Still have about 180 titles in the wishlist. Most recent additions being a dozen discs from the Legends of Acid Jazz series and titles by Jimmy McGriff, Hank Crawford and Sonny Rollins (Nucleus, The Way I Feel, Next Album, G Man, Don't Stop The Carnival). I really enjoy these latter-day Rollins recordings.

[RDK]

Prior to buying about 70-80 over the last year or so since the Concord sale, I did download about 500 titles from emusic. Just got another dozen last week from Newbury.

[Kalo]

Bought about 550 in the past 3 years. Still have about 180 titles in the wishlist. Most recent additions being a dozen discs from the Legends of Acid Jazz series and titles by Jimmy McGriff, Hank Crawford and Sonny Rollins (Nucleus, The Way I Feel, Next Album, G Man, Don't Stop The Carnival). I really enjoy these latter-day Rollins recordings.

Ooooh-Wheee! Didn't know they even made that many!

Prior to buying about 70-80 over the last year or so since the Concord sale, I did download about 500 titles from emusic. Just got another dozen last week from Newbury.

Ahh, those pimps at Newbury! God bless 'em.

For my part, I probably got at least 40 or 50 of the damn thing in the past several months...

[GA Russell]

As I recall, it was about a year ago, give or take a few days, that the thread alerting us all to the Concord Blowout Sale was posted. I've looked for it, but I can't find it.

Ah, memories!

I bought 33 single CDs plus the Bill Evans Riverside box at the blowout sale. I don't think that I have bought any CDs since then except Boogaloo Sisters, my dccblowout.com purchase of five CDs and my monthly purchases from Your Music.

I have yet to open many of my Blowout Sale items. I opened up Lem's Beat by Lem Winchester last Monday. It's a good blowing session on New Jazz with Oliver Nelson.

[jazzbo]

Here's one of the threads:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...hl=concord+sale

[jazzbo]

Here's another:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...hl=Concord+sale

[jazzbo]

I THINK this is the thread that started it all:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...8102&st=690

[sal]

I've bought around 40 since all this started. Not too bad.

[GA Russell]

Lon, nope. The thread that started it all was other than the three you linked. I remember that I was traveling on business at the time, and most of you had already placed your orders by the time I got home.

[Niko]

there is also the older thread (the thread folks around here mean when they say Nessa warned us )

Before OJCs go away, what to buy:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=15173

Edited August 13, 2007 by Niko

[jazzbo]

Lon, nope. The thread that started it all was other than the three you linked. I remember that I was traveling on business at the time, and most of you had already placed your orders by the time I got home.

I still think the third thread is the one that started it all. . . it certainly was the first place I noticed the sale, and I kept reading that thread. . . look at posts 13-15. . . mgraham's post 15 was the one that started me on the blowout sale.

[Hot Ptah]

Have most of the titles in fact been deleted? Was the concern justified?

[Stefan Wood]

From the Concord sale, most of those are OOP.

Edited August 13, 2007 by Stefan Wood

[kh1958]

SAUL ZAENTZ

Big Music Big Movies

'Goya's Ghosts' producer Zaentz on how it was to steer a golden era of Bay Area indie filmmaking and rock and jazz recording

Jesse Hamlin

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Times

The way Milos Forman tells it, Saul Zaentz's partners at Fantasy Records thought he'd gone mad when he mortgaged their Berkeley building to make a movie about a mental hospital, directed by a Czech whose only American film had flopped.

"They wanted to commit him," says Forman, the celebrated director of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the 1975 film starring Jack Nicholson that scored five Oscars, made a fortune and put him and the fledgling producer on the map.

"Milos is crazy," Zaentz says with affectionate admiration. Nobody at Fantasy suggested sending the boss to the booby hatch, Zaentz said. "He's making the story more dramatic, more humorous."

A determined guy who spends years developing movies he wants to see, Zaentz has fed Forman's gift for bringing dramatic and funny stories to the screen. In 1984, he produced another longshot hit that earned them second Oscars again, "Amadeus," about Mozart and his jealous rival, Antonio Salieri. After winning that one, Zaentz - a one-time New Jersey chicken farmer who learned to gamble as a kid playing the card game briscola on the street corners of Passaic - stopped renting tuxedos and bought one.

"I wasn't sure. Why be stuck with a tuxedo?" says Zaentz, 86, a frank, funny and unpretentious man who personifies the old-school independent producer who trusts his gut and throws his money into films he cares about. Zaentz wore the new tux in 1997, when he won his third Academy Award for producing another unlikely hit based on a novel, "The English Patient," and was given the Irving Thalberg Award for the consistent high quality of his films. David O. Selznick, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock are among the recipients.

"Good company," says Zaentz, sitting in the living room of the elegant 1927 Pacific Heights apartment he shares with his partner, Chika Kujiraoka, a sports photographer he met in Tokyo. A sturdy man with a white beard, tan pate and steady brown eyes - he gives Kujiraoka some of the credit for his slimmed-down physique - he's his usual casual self in a gray cable-knit sweater, khakis and gray sneakers. There's a big photo of young Bob Dylan, banging out a song at the typewriter, waiting to be hung and a Benny Bufano cat print on the wall. A wall in what Zaentz jokingly calls "the media room" is filled with photos from movie sets, red-ribboned Oscar envelopes and a sketch of Zaentz by Jean-Claude Carrière, the French writer with whom Forman wrote the screenplay to Zaentz's first film in a decade, "Goya's Ghosts." It opened last month to mixed reviews ("auteurism run amok," wrote the New York Times critic).

The pad affords a fine view of the bay and fog-shrouded city Zaentz fell for on his first visit in the late '30s, and where he has played a major role on the music and movie scene for 40 years. As the head of Fantasy Records - whose treasured catalog was sold three years ago to Concord Music - and the now-closed Saul Zaentz Film Center, he created a loose, collegial place for artists to work, helping shape what many consider a golden era in Bay Area independent filmmaking and jazz and rock recording.

Directed by Forman, "Goya's Ghosts" is a tale of fanaticism, brutality and art, set in late 18th century Spain during the last gasp of the Inquisition and the arrival of revolutionary ideas with Napoleon's invading army. Carrière made "Taking Off" and "Valmont" with Forman and two films with Zaentz: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the 1988 film directed by San Francisco's Philip Kaufman, and the 1991 Hector Babenco-directed adaption of Peter Mathiessen's "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," an Amazonian tale of mercenaries, missionaries and Indians.

Zaentz pulls a hardbound copy of the novel from the bookshelves lining the hallway - filled with Twain, Flaubert, Richard Ford, Muriel Spark, Upton Sinclair - glances at the author's inscription and pretends to read it.

"You can screw up my book," he jokes. His movie version bombed, losing about $20 million. But Zaentz hits more than he misses.

"You win some, you lose some, of course," he says. "But you don't go in that way. You always think you got it, you're going to make a good picture." When it doesn't come off, "you feel terrible. You really feel terrible. You wanna know what you did wrong. You want to know how you could've made a better picture, and why you didn't make a better picture." Maybe the casting wasn't right.

"Goya's Ghosts" features Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard as the great Spanish artist who portrayed royals and aristocrats and the grim lives of ordinary people, and Spaniard Javier Bardem as the duplicitous priest whose zeal for the Inquisition gives way to a fervent embrace of democratic ideals. The movie sometimes looks like a Goya come to life. As Forman likes to say, it's not a romantic comedy.

He and Zaentz hatched the film after feasting on the artist's work 23 years ago in Madrid, where they were promoting "Amadeus." As a student in 1950s Czechoslovakia, Forman had read about the Spanish Inquisition and was stunned by stories of people confessing to crimes they hadn't committed, being tortured and executed for heresy. The same things happened in his country under the Communists. Seeing them in Goya's pictures set off the desire to make a movie, one that, as it turned out, wouldn't be shot for nearly 20 years.

"I was thinking about making 'The English Patient' first," says Zaentz, sipping a small blue cup of black coffee. "You can't do two pictures at once. At least I can't."

He and Forman talked about Goya over the years. Eventually Carrière, who had made his name working with Spanish master Luis Buñuel on films such as "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire," came into the picture. He and Forman wrote the screenplay at the director's Connecticut home.

"They realized when they were writing that it was boring to do it like a semi-bio pic," Zaentz says. Instead, "Goya became a witness, which is what he said of himself."

As always, Zaentz did a lot of research, reading books, traveling to Spain with Forman and Carrière, talking to Goya scholars and Spanish historians. They visited palaces owned by descendants of the Duke of Alba, whose forebears had commissioned portraits from Goya in the 18th century. Carrière's wife, novelist Nahal Tajadod, tried on the very collar the Duchess of Alba wears in the Goya portrait hanging on the wall. In the library they saw one of Columbus' diaries from his first voyage, a letter from Cortez to the king of Spain, a first edition of Cervantes' "Don Quixote."

"Oh, it was unbelievable," says Zaentz, who loves the adventure.

"Saul read as many books as we did about Goya," says Carrière, on the horn from Paris. "He was totally involved. He was on the set from morning to night. He doesn't speak much. He carefully reads the script, every version. We don't go any further without him looking. Then he comes and says a very few phrases, but all of them are very bright, and right to the point."

Carrière got to know Zaentz well in 1987, when he stayed at the producer's home while working on "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." "He introduced me to American football, which I like very much," the screenwriter says. "It was the great time of the 49ers. Joe Montana, my God!" Another thing Zaentz taught him "is that you can make money with quality, that quality pays, one way or another. He's a very clever businessman who deals with quality."

Carrière can still picture the then-hefty septuagenarian traversing a fallen tree across a river in the Amazon rain forest on a three-hour trek to a remote Brazilian Indian village. The anthropologist guiding them insisted they return before nightfall, so they hoofed it all the way back through the snake-filled jungle to the clearing where a plane was waiting. It was too late to take off, so they had to spend the night. "I'm dead," said Zaentz, lying down on a table and falling fast asleep.

"That's a real producer," Carrière says. "He's really with you."

For Forman, trust is the key to his fruitful relationship with Zaentz.

"If Saul says to me, 'Milos, sorry, I can't do this,' I know that this man would do everything to give it to me. If he says no, I believe him," the director says on the phone from Connecticut. "And he trusts my artistic decisions. That's the basis of our collaboration. What I appreciate enormously is he sits there next to me, watching the monitor, but unless I ask what he thinks, he won't say anything. When I realized that, I started to ask him all the time. And he was very candid. When he didn't like something, he told me. If he was right, I was very happy to correct it, and if I didn't think he was right, I say, 'I don't think so,' and he accepted it. That's very rare, very rare."

Zaentz, Forman adds, "takes a risk with every film. None of the films we made together on first thought is commercial. A loony bin story. Who would want to see it? But Saul believed in them and stubbornly fought for them as long as it took."

Zaentz says his job is to make the best picture they can, and make sure everybody does the right thing. He pauses. "Of course, I'm saying that therefore I know what the right thing is," he says with a laugh. My favorite line from Walt Whitman is, 'You say I contradict myself? Of course I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.' And I believe that. I'm allowed to change my mind. If you come and say, 'You're full of s-, Saul,' this is not working,' I'll listen. Why should I be right, just because I have the power? So you have to go back and see what someone's saying."

Watching "Goya's Ghosts," with its depiction of torture, war and religious fanaticism, you can't help thinking of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and jihadists beheading infidels. There's even a line in the film about the Spanish people welcoming the "liberating" French army with flowers. It's a direct quote from Napoleon; Carrière found it and put it in the screenplay months before Vice President Dick Cheney used the same words on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Forman has to keep telling people the script was written a year before the Iraq war. "It was a reflection of my life experiences, what I saw myself living around the Communists, and the Nazis before them." (His parents were killed at Auschwitz.)

The imagery is so harsh, Zaentz says, "that it makes what we do look not as a harsh in a way. But of course that's what we do."

Zaentz got into books and movies early on. He was crazy for the comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, W.C. Fields. The first film he recalls seeing was "The Phantom of the Opera" starring Lon Chaney. He was 4. He sat next to his brother Bernie, one of four siblings, who was 6 at the time.

"I was so scared we ended up sitting on the same seat together," says Zaentz, who never figured he'd end up in the motion picture business. He bought his movie tickets with pennies and nickels earned playing briscola, a trick-taking Italian card game in which partners exchange signals. His street smarts served him well, and he thanked the gang from Myrtle and Monroe streets when he got his third Oscar. He still talks with the tang and rhythm of northern New Jersey.

Zaentz's parents, Morris and Goldie, came from a Jewish shtetl not far from what's now Belarus. They knew from Cossacks. His father arrived solo and worked for a year, saving the $45 needed to buy Goldie's passage to America. Morris Zaentz was a carpenter who got a job at the Manhattan Furniture Co. in Passaic. He spoke several languages and liked to talk to people, so the boss made him a salesman. He worked there 32 years, selling suites of furniture to people like pilot Ace West, who gave sky rides for a quarter.

"My father knew quality," Zaentz says. "He would go into a room and he couldn't help it, he'd run his hand under the drawers." In those days, he adds, "you bought your furniture for life. If something happened, they would send somebody out to fix it. It was before planned obsolescence."

Zaentz drove to San Francisco with a friend to catch the '39 World's Fair, and, naturally, the beauty of the place got to him. "I decided if I ever had to go to work for a living, I'd do it here," Zaentz says. He also owns a house in Tuscany, and he and Kujiraoka are fixing up a Manhattan apartment at the foot of Fifth Avenue.

Zaentz enlisted in the Army when war broke out and rose to the rank of sergeant major. Spending three years aboard a troop transport, chugging in and out of battle zones, he had time to read and ponder his future. Chicken farming somehow seemed appealing. So he got a degree in animal husbandry at Rutgers on the GI Bill.

But why chickens?

"It was a way to make a living. I'd be my own boss," Zaentz says. "If I could make $100 a week for the rest of my life I'd be thrilled." But after working for a spell on a poultry farm, he scratched the plan. The birds didn't bug him, but "you had to work 10 to 11 hours a day, and that was a short day. You got half a day off every other week. I knew it wasn't for me."

A Cards fan, Zaentz went to St. Louis and studied at business college before heading to San Francisco, where an employment agency sent him to a record distributor called Melody Sales. He spent five years learning the ins and outs of the game before jazz impresario Norman Granz hired him. One of his life's great pleasures was managing a Jazz at the Philharmonic tour with Duke Ellington's Orchestra and the small bands of Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan.

In '55 he landed at Fantasy Records, a freewheeling South of Market operation run by Sol and Max Weiss (Max, who died earlier this year, was a colorful character known to keep a pistol in his desk drawer). The brothers owned a plastics business with a small record-pressing plant. In 1949 they recorded Brubeck on the label they named after a sci-fi magazine, and then other West Coast musicians like pianist Vince Guaraldi, comedian Lenny Bruce, poet Allen Ginsberg. Fantasy was the kooky Frisco label that pressed red, yellow and purple LPs. Zaentz ran sales and the office and produced records. In 1958, Celia Mingus, a Greek woman from Fresno who'd studied with the great blind pianist Lennie Tristano, took a job at Fantasy. She'd separated from the volcanic bassist-composer Charles Mingus. She and Zaentz eventually married.

The couple, who split in the '70s, raised four kids: Athena, a painter who lives in Oregon, and three musician sons, Dorian, Jon and Josh, who wrote some of the music for "Goya's Ghosts." Dorian's biological father is Mingus, but he call Zaentz Dad.

"He's the man who's done everything for my life. He got me out of some serious situations," says Dorian, 49, a San Diego guitarist and bassist whose recent CD is titled "Detriment of a Fantasy." He calls himself Zaentz but uses the name Dorian Mingus for professional purposes. He was 9 when he learned that Mingus, who kept a bass at the Zaentz's Berkeley home for years, was more than just a family friend. Dorian was at Berkeley's Live Oak Park one night when Celia told him Mingus was his father.

"No he's not, dad's my dad," Dorian remembers saying. "I kept repeating, 'dad is my dad.' "

Dorian got to know Mingus some before the great man died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1979. Dorian is a big guy who resembles Mingus physically and inherited some of his passionate temperament. But in recent years, he says, he's mellowed into Zaentz's way of "just being in life. I only heard him really angry once." When Dorian put out his first CD, the guys in his band wanted him to call himself Mingus to draw attention. "But I felt it was disrespectful to my dad, to Saul." He went to Zaentz's office and explained his dilemma. Use Mingus, Zaentz said. "It makes good business sense." Then he pulled out his address book, picked up a pencil and asked, "So, Dorian Mingus?"

"No, Dad," he replied, "Zaentz."

Around 1967, with rock eclipsing jazz, the Weisses decided to sell Fantasy. Orrin Keepnews, the famed record producer who'd made classic discs with Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk and others on his Riverside label, was sent from New York on behalf of a buyer to scope out Fantasy. He called on Zaentz, whom he'd never met.

"The plan was to ship all the inventory back East and eliminate the San Francisco presence," recalls Keepnews, 84. He's lunching at an Indian restaurant in Albany, not far from where he's set up house with his new bride, North Beach clothier Martha Egan. "And there was no place for Saul in the plan. He was going to get shut out, and I represented the people who were going to shut him out. And he couldn't have been nicer! And there was no damn reason for him to be nice to me. He explained everything to me, told me the good and the bad, and he insisted the only place to eat in the area was Original Joe's."

After that deal blew up, Zaentz put together some investors, including record distributors like Ralph Kaffel, who would run the company, and bought Fantasy. "What Saul did was absolutely unheard of," says Keepnews. "The relationship between a record company and its distributors is rarely the kind of friendly give-and-take beautiful thing where a guy can go and ask, 'Hey, you wanna put some money in with me to buy this company?' That Saul pulled that off identified him as a remarkable man in the record business."

Flush after hitting the jackpot with Creedence Clearwater Revival - the East Bay bayou-rock band that cut a string of huge-selling albums for Fantasy from 1968 until the band's fractious split in '72 - the company built a home in South Berkeley with three top recording studios. And it began buying modern-jazz labels such as Riverside and Prestige, with its timeless Miles Davis and John Coltrane sides. Keepnews was hired to run the ever-expanding jazz reissue-and-recording program. In 1980, the year he left Fantasy's employ, the label put out the first box set, a lavish 12-disc box of Davis' complete Prestige recordings. Zaentz had given Keepnews and others a little piece of "Cuckoo's Nest," although Keepnews had nothing to do with it.

"It was a gesture I appreciated, because it wasn't necessary," says the producer. "I don't know John Fogerty," he says, referring to the former Creedence leader whose bitter legal battles with Zaentz and Fantasy made headlines for years. "But I don't know anybody with a scowl on his face and a chip on his shoulder saying, 'That son-of-a-bitch Saul Zaentz.' And that's pretty unusual."

Fogerty might not agree, but he declined to comment. In 1985, Zaentz filed a defamation suit against the rock star, who'd recorded a song called "Zanz Kant Danz," about a money-stealing pig named Zanz, on his hit comeback album "Centerfield." Warner Bros. had Fogerty change the song title and lyric to "Vanz Kant Danz" on later editions of the album. In an out-of-court settlement, Fogerty reportedly paid Zaentz about $650,000. Fantasy lost a copyright infringement suit that claimed that Fogerty ripped off a song he'd written but Fantasy owned. He went to the Supreme Court to recover legal fees.

A few years ago, Zaentz was going through customs and the agent recognized his name. "I know who you are," the guy said.

"Who?" asked Zaentz.

"Creedence Clearwater Revival."

Says Zaentz: "You can't escape it. But that's good music, bona fide stuff." He calls Fogerty "a great rock 'n' roll artist, a great one." But he felt compelled to sue. "Why should someone have the right to say things that aren't so? If somebody says something about you, and your kids read it, no, I'm not going to let him get away with it." After Concord took over, Fogerty re-signed with Fantasy.

"Saul's got a lot of balls," says Al Bendich, a onetime American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who defended Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1957 when the poet-owner of City Lights was charged with publishing and selling an obscene book, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Zaentz hired him in '67 and Bendich has been his lawyer and a partner ever since. "I thought I needed an employment contract, but I quickly realized that a handshake with Saul was better than any contract."

The way Bendich remembers it, he and Zaentz were driving to Fantasy's West Oakland offices around 1970 in Zaentz's Chrysler station wagon when he asked his friend what he'd really like to do. "He said he wanted to make movies," the lawyer recalls. There were two books Zaentz loved and thought would make great films: Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord."

Zaentz laughs about his naivete at the time.

"I thought you could just buy the book," Zaentz says, "pay the full retail price, you know? $8.95 or $14.95, and then go make the picture. Without thinking, not even knowing about rights." Bendich set him straight. Zaentz learned that Kirk Douglas, who'd played the rabble-rousing Randle P. McMurphy in the stage adaptation of "Cuckoo's Nest" on Broadway, owned the movie rights and wanted to do it himself. Then Ralph Gleason, critic and Fantasy executive, brought Zaentz a screenplay by San Francisco writer Don Carpenter about a self-destructive country and western singer. Zaentz said yes, and in '73 Fantasy made its first movie, "Payday," starring Rip Torn. It got good notices but died at the box office. No matter. Zaentz was hooked.

Douglas agreed to sell Fantasy the rights to "Cuckoo's Nest" if Zaentz would co-produce the picture with his son, Michael, then starring in the TV series "The Streets of San Francisco." The two novice producers set out to make a movie nobody in Hollywood would touch. They'd loved Forman's Czech films like "Fireman's Ball" and his only American movie, "Taking Off." Zaentz and Douglas had dinner with Forman at the Miyako Hotel and knew he was their man.

"We closed the place," Zaentz recalls. "Waiters were emptying ashtrays. It was like a bad movie. Or a good one. Milos told us what we wanted to hear, which can be poison sometimes. What we wanted to hear was that this was real, that it had to be real, that you believed everyone who's up there on the screen. And in 'Cuckoo's Nest,' we did it. Michael says when were talking with Milos he and I were in tears. I don't know if that's true, but I know it could be true."

Initially, Forman wanted to cut the scene from Bo Goldman's brilliant "Cukoo's Nest" script where Nicholson springs the other patients and takes his timid disciples fishing. Forman had a theoretical idea that the film should be confined inside the hospital walls, "claustrophobically," until the final liberating scene when the Indian hurls a stone sink through the window and escapes. Zaentz urged him to shoot the scene. He agreed, but said if he didn't like it, he wouldn't keep it. But "it turned out to be a wonderful, important scene."

Why did Zaentz push for it?

" 'Cuz it's real," he says. "The thing about mental patients is, almost with exception, without the aberration they're there for, they're normal. They could be talking to you about anything - 'And the salmon was this big!' I wanted to show they were more normal than we think they are."

Zaentz was later married and divorced from Lynda Redfield, whose late husband, Billy, played the priggish patient Harding in "Cuckoo's Nest." At the suggestion of a kid in the Fantasy office, the filmmakers first showed the movie at the Salem, Ore., hospital where it was shot. Zaentz asked one young guy, a depressive of some sort, what he thought of the picture. The guy liked the movie, but what really struck him was the way the fillmmakers, during the shoot, "had yelled at each other, but it didn't mean we didn't care about each other," Zaentz says. "He realized that he could get out of there. Other guys saw that life was not that rigid."

With the profits from "Cuckoo's Nest," Fantasy built an $11 million, seven-story film production facility with studios equipped with the latest editing and sound-mixing technology. Along with Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope and George Lucas' Lucasfilm, it established the Bay Area as a vital center of filmmaking outside the Hollywood orbit. When it opened in 1980, the Fantasy facility became a magnet for other filmmakers, among them David Lynch, Lee Grant, Gus Van Zandt, Robert Duvall and Peter Jackson (Zaentz, who made an animated version of "Lord of the Rings" in 1978, withheld permission to let another filmmaker take it on until the brilliant Jackson came along). A lot of local documentarians rented space.

"The independent film community tenants were paying below-market rates," says Deborah Kaufman, a filmmaker and founder and former director of the Jewish Film Festival, who's been in the building since 1985. The three documentaries she and partner Alan Snitow have made "were all produced in this building in part as a result of what I would call the generosity of Saul Zaentz. He was always very low key about what he was doing in terms of creating this community."

But the technology changed, Hollywood studios upgraded and expanded their own post-production facilities and business slid back south. Zaentz and his partners decided to close the film center in 2005 and sold the building this year to Wareham Development for about $20 million. The Saul Zaentz Co. is the now the seventh-floor tenant. The new owners raised rents, but they're still within reach, Kaufman says, and most of the filmmakers, and a film school, have stayed. "Now it's an office with a lot of media makers who are working hard. But it's not the creative atmosphere that Saul Zaentz fostered. It was definitely a golden era in Bay Area filmmaking."

Mark Berger, who's won Oscars for his sound work on "Amadeus," "The Right Stuff," "Apocalypse Now" and "The English Patient," agrees. "But a lot of the work that used to be done at a mix studio can now be done on a computer," he says. "And it became more and more difficult to attract feature films to keep the film center viable."

Zaentz, with whom Berger has made seven films, "was great at putting together directors, actors, stories and crews and then getting out of the way and letting them do their thing. Some producers are very insecure about whether they've got a good film or not, so they do this incredible amount of testing and previews and start interfering if the numbers are not high enough. But Saul knew a good story when he came across it, has his vision of it and let the director make his film."

Not always successfully, adds Berger, who worked on what he jokingly calls "At Length in the Fields of the Bored." "Saul doesn't do well in the jungle," Berger says with a laugh, referring to that ill-fated picture and the not-so-successful "Mosquito Coast." Still, "Saul was a major force in the Bay Area, bringing quality works of literature to the screen."

Zaentz's former employees at Fantasy Records, meanwhile, are anxiously awaiting their fate. Concord is mulling what to do with the studios where everyone from Sonny Rollins to Carlos Santana recorded, but word is they will be shut and the equipment sold off in September unless a buyer steps forward or some other deal is made. The studios are still being booked - Counting Crows worked there recently - but it's an expensive operation. Fantasy owned the building but now L.A.-based Concord has to pay rent. Most of the master tapes that filled Fantasy's archives have already been shipped to a Southern California storage facility called Iron Mountain.

"Sad does not begin to describe it," says Stuart Kremsky, Fantasy's longtime archivist. A slight cat with a gray beard and long hair draping his dome - Keepnews calls him "the gnome-like wizard" - Kremsky is standing in the second-floor space that once housed a half-century of great music. Now the gray-steel shelves are all but empty. Among the smattering of stuff still to go are the master tapes of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Nina Bombardier, who's managed the recording studio for 25 years, loved to take visitors into the archives and share their awed pleasure at being surrounded by so much musical history. Now, "it gives me the shivers," says Bombardier, who felt part of the family and calls Zaentz "a big teddy bear." Bill Belmont, who's worked at Fantasy for 32 years handling international licensing and other matters, puts it this way: "Saul is like everybody's favorite uncle."

Zaentz tucks a napkin under his chin and sits down to a lunch of curry chicken and Farmer Sam's peaches prepared by Kujiraoka. "The iPod is the thing that really hurt the record business," says the producer, who's proud of the music and movies he helped put out.

These days, he's developing a film called "Seven Deadly Sins," a comedy based on an original screenplay Anthony Minghella wrote for Jim Henson's about a man facing a spiritual crisis. Stanley Donen may be involved. When not working, Zaentz hangs out with his lady friend, takes walks or catches a movie if they can find something worth seeing. Asked how the movie business has changed, he ponders for a few moments then replies: "It's all about money. Yeah, it was different. You look at guys who made pictures, the older guys, you could see they read their books. Billy Wilder was a giant, a giant."

Zaentz read about a Harvard study that showed that people who win Oscars live four years longer than nominees who don't. "I have three," he says. "I don't want them to run concurrently. Can I pile them on top of each other? Let's see, the 12 years were up yesterday," he says with a laugh. Taking home one of those coveted statues doesn't do much for business, Zaentz says, "but it's nice. It's not like somebody walking up and hitting you. People finally figure out that you've been around here for a while."

[BruceH]

When the panic broke out, I looked over my collection and decided I already had pretty much all the OJC's that I want/need right now, so for me, the answere is none. I'm sure that if there are any I decide I want in the future, there'll be some way to download or access them, perhaps using some nifty device that makes the ipod look like a victrola.

[RDK]

Have most of the titles in fact been deleted? Was the concern justified?

The concern is definitely justified, but I think in this case (and not to get too semantical about it) it depends on what you consider "deleted." The way I understood it was that, at least for the OJC Limiteds, Fantasy only pressed one batch of discs that they warehoused for years (15-20 in some cases) and sold very slowly. Since they never intended to press any more (and wouldn't sell enough to do so anyway), they essentially went oop/deleted from the start, with only the existing inventory remaining. And honestly, before the blowout sale of '06 and all the fear of these discs being unavailable in the future, they'd no doubt still be available now since almost nobody was buying them. Interesting strategy to maybe debate in another thread, but is it better for Fantasy/Concord to keep things in print indefinitely and thereby sell their wares very slowly because everyone takes their availability for granted or is Blue Note's strategy better by deleting even popular titles on a regular basis only to build up demand and rerelease them again in another (remastered, for example) format?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Thanks for posting that excellent read on Zaentz, KH1958!

MG

[jazzbo]

Well. . . it's not just "Limited Editions" which are out of print, but other regular items. . . .

I guess it's a relative matter of concern depending on your tastes and how long you've been collecting. If your main interest is in the hardbop sessions and the big names. . . you're probably okay now and in the future; Concord will repackage this stuff if you don't have it now.

If you're interested in traditional jazz and more obscure items and have been collecting some decade or two. . . you're probably okay and have gotten the bulk of what you would be interested in. If you have the same interest and are a new collector, you may be hard-pressed to find these titles in the future, they're hard to find now. . . . I'm sorry to see that situation, but can certainly understand why I'm seeing it.

Edited August 13, 2007 by jazzbo

[GA Russell]

I still think the third thread is the one that started it all. . . it certainly was the first place I noticed the sale, and I kept reading that thread. . . look at posts 13-15. . . mgraham's post 15 was the one that started me on the blowout sale.

Lon, you're right! I didn't notice that your link opens the thread at page 47.

It was felser's post #11 of July 12 regarding the Blowout Sale that got the ball rolling, along with Chuck's post #17 of the same day regarding $2.98 CDs that woke me up.

Actually, I remember that I had gone a week without visiting the board, and I first noticed a thread by Soulstation 1 regarding spending money on this that got me looking for this thread to see what all the excitement was about.

[Chuck Nessa]

From the Concord sale, most of those are OOP.

To understand the results of the Concord takeover, go to Amazon and type "OJC" in the music search. Anything not available from "Amazon", but available from "others" has been deleted. Some few titles are still available from the Concord site but these are just minimal leftovers. The OJC search only covers those - many more titles on Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary, etc are gone too. Hundreds of titles.

I originally posted about this eventuality in this thread on Dec. 1, 2004 http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...c=15173&hl= .

FWIW I got 3 more in the mail today.

God bless Saul Zaentz and Ralph Kaffel.

[jazzbo]

Amen!