Zack Norman, actor who juggled several professions, dies at 83

Zack Norman, who made his mark as an actor in films like Romancing the Stone and Cadillac Man and with appearances on television shows like The A-Team and The Nanny and who, as a producer, is also known for a cursed film that became a punchline of the show Mystery Science Theater 3000 died on April 28 in Burbank, California. He was 83 years old.

The cause of his death, at a hospital, was bilateral coronavirus-related pneumonia, his daughter Lori Zuker Briller said.

Although he is best known for his stunning supporting role appearances, Mr. Norman has always been more than just an actor. He was also a painter, real estate developer and art collector who, in the 1980s, rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Mr. Norman accumulated nearly 40 acting credits in film and television. He had a memorably menacing turn as the sidekick of Danny DeVito's antiquities smuggler in Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis' 1984 adventure comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.

He was very familiar to fans of independent director Henry Jaglom, appearing in many of Mr. Jaglom's films, including Sitting Ducks (1980), a comedy in which he was one of two fools who rob a gambling syndicate, and Hollywood Dreams. (2006), in which he plays a kindly film producer who takes care of a fame-obsessed starlet (Tanna Frederick).

The role was not a big step for Mr. Norman, who, under his real name, Howard Zuker, has produced or financed more than 40 films. Among the films he supported was Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis' historical exploration of the Vietnam War, which won the 1975 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

A far more obscure film that Mr. Norman helped produce, Chief Zabu (1986), entered pop culture in an unusual way: by disappearing for three decades.

Howard Jerrold Zuker was born on May 27, 1940, in Boston, the eldest of two children of Sydney Zuker, an attorney, and Evelyn (Bloomberg) Zuker, and grew up in nearby Revere, Massachusetts. Inspired by Lenny Bruce, he began doing stand-up comedy in local clubs in his late teens.

He began acting while attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville. But after leaving Vanderbilt, he discovered it was difficult to pay the bills as a beginning actor and comedian, so at age 23 he went to work at a cousin's real estate development company in Boston.

I became, in a year and a half, a millionaire, he said in an interview last year on the Not Real Art podcast. I realized that being rich was not the answer, he said. That’s how I returned to New York and got back into show business.

In 1965, he produced his first Off Broadway play, John Arden's Live Like Pigs. A year later, he toured Europe as a stand-up comedian. After a set at London's Playboy Club, Variety deemed him one of the funniest men to ever grace these shores.

Over the years, he continued to fund his career by developing properties in New York and Florida, as well as finding bargains in the art world. In the early 1980s, he purchased several early works by Basquiat for four-figure sums, long before prices for his works rivaled those on private islands in the Caribbean.

Chief Zabu, which Mr. Norman wrote, produced and directed with Neil Cohen, was another bargain, made on a shoestring budget of $200,000. Mr. Norman was also a star of the film: he played Sammy Brooks, a real estate tycoon who, with his friend Ben Sydney (Allen Garfield), pursues both financial and political ambitions in a grandiose scheme to take over a fictional Polynesian island.

The film fizzled in previews and was never released. For 30 years it was buried, but not forgotten, at least not for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the 1990s Gen bad B movies while traveling the world. cosmos.

On the show, whenever a character from one of those shockingly bad movies read a newspaper, Joel Hodgson, the original host, would wearily intone: Hey, Zack Norman is Sammy in Chief Zabu.

It was a conscious reference to an advertisement, featuring a stern photo of Mr. Norman, which he continued to publish in a dogged but playful manner in Weekly Variety every Wednesday for nine years. For what? Because it gave me great joy, he said in a 2016 interview with the Sun Sentinel of South Florida.

In addition to his daughter Lori, Mr. Norman is survived by his wife of 40 years, Nancy Zuker; his sister, Janie Krasker; his sons, Stephen and Michael Aron; another daughter, Tracy Aron Brittan; and 14 grandchildren. He was previously married to Norma Blumenthal Sommers.

Mr. Norman's trust in Chief Zabu ultimately paid off. He and Mr. Cohen released a new cut of the film in 2016, then took it on tour, performing it at comedy clubs. Still, it took them decades to realize that Variety's ad had become a cultural artifact.

In a 2020 interview with the movie website Skewed & Reviewed, Mr. Cohen said neither of them had heard about Mystery Science Theater 3000 until one afternoon in the mid-2010s, when they were walking down a Los Angeles street and saw a man wearing a Zack Norman t-shirt as Sammy in Chief Zabu.

We stopped the guy and said, Dude, what's going on? he remembers. And you can imagine his reaction when he saw that he was talking to Zack Norman, whose face was on his T-shirt.