The Jack Grossberg Project

I don’t picture Jack ever being “at rest”. Right now if Jack Grossberg is anywhere, it’s in the middle of a big picture with undoable special effects, impossible logistical problems and a first time director who Jack believes in but whom the studio wants to fire.

Right now, Jagro has infuriated the studio up there because he has found a location off the lot that he can rent for a song,

He’s made a killer flat deal with a transportation captain who owns his own honeywagons and makeup trailers,

He’s found a way to tap his electrics into city power but he’s got “a guy he knows” standing by with a couple a generators just in case some wise ass at Edison figures it out.

Right now, Jack is running interference between a Director who wants to shoot a scene all in one shot and a bankable actor who is using bogus cinematic arguments instead of copping to the fact that he just doesn’t know his lines ,

Right now Jack has paid off the neighbors and even made some of them extras so he can light up their neighborhood all the way to dawn,

He’s flattered a neurotic aging actress into believing she can do her closeup at 4 AM just so he doesn’t have to come back to this location tomorrow,

He’s found a craft service person who can make sushi, mini-burgers and homemade pasta because he knows the only way to keep a crew happy in overtime is to surprise them with some exotic food

He even has a thousand foot black tarp ready for dawn when the sun comes up and the director hasn’t finished his shot list.

And he’s doing all this, and he’s doing it every day, because he loves the logistics of making movies. Without guys like Jack Grossberg to handle the logisitics, movies just wouldn’t get made.

Jack Grossberg produced “They Might be Giants” and he was a giant himself. And he worked with many of the legends and giants of show business - Bogart, Brando, Nicholson, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Jackie Gleason, Anthony Quinn, George C. Scott, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow, Natalie Wood, Jean Simmons, Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges, John Travolta, Marty Ritt, Arthur Penn, Bob Zemenkis, Douglas Trumble, Dino Di Laurentis, Arthur Hiller, David Suskind, Paddy Chayefsky AND many many others. They all remember him, they didn’t all like him – because some of these people were or are just plain nuts, but they all respected him as the big guy who got things done, and someone who they didn’t and couldn’t screw around with.

Jack worked on some of the greatest movies of all time – like On the Waterfront, The Producers, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, King Kong, They Might Be Giants, Hospital, Missouri Breaks, Brainstorm, and Back to the Future. For more than 35 years, “Big Jack” was a player in this town and everybody knew it.

Jack loved steaks, cigarettes, Vodka Negronis and fast cars. He loved to laugh and he always had a new joke. He could make even the biggest comedians in the business laugh and he did.

Jack always picked up the check whenever you ate with him because he knew that whoever picked up the check sent a message to everyone at the table that they were the boss. And Jack was the always the boss, but he never stepped over the line. He never interfered with the director’s creativity, he never stepped into the DP’s frame or the Actor’s eyeline. He let everyone be a hero in their own department because he saw the big picture better than anyone else. He knew movie making was a collaborative effort and he was the ringmaster, making sure the big clunky,complicated machine worked.

To Jack, life was very black and white – you were right or you were wrong. You were either on his side of the line or the other side of the line. And for Jack the definition of “the line” was very simple. On one side of “the line” were the people trying to make a picture and on the other side were the people trying to stop a picture from getting made.

Jack always believed that even though they funded the movie, the studio was always looking for a reason to shut the picture down. Therefore, they were the enemy - “The suits”, the guys on the other side of the line.

I remember going into Paramount with Jack to meet the head of production when we were doing a picture and on the way in Jack told me the guy we were going to meet was “a real putz. He used to be a good guy, when he worked as an AD and a Production manager, but that he gone over to the other side” – he had become a “suit”, a studio executive and therefore, as far as Jack was concerned, an enemy.

Balance all this with the guy who burst with pride every time he talked about his son Michael, basked in his son’s academic achievements, and marveled at his son’s mathematical ability. (Actually, Michael’s mathematical ability came as no surprise to those of us who knew what Jack could do with the numbers in a movie budget.) Nevertheless, this Giant stood in awe of his son and his accomplishments, his blue grey eyes, twinkling with pride, with every word he said about his “darling Michael.”

Balance too with the Giant’s love for his little dog Bagel – a terrier who slept with him, showered with him and rode with him everywhere from local restaurants to remote locations. The Giant and his little dog, walking together. If you saw it, you wouldn’t forget it.

Also balance the tough guy film producer with the gentle man we all knew, who would literally give you the shirt off his back, and whose first question to you was always “Do you need anything?” or “is there anything I can do to help you?” And these weren’t just words. Jack would do it and did do it.

And balance all this with the loyalty Jack showered on those people he believed in - and they were many - the lengths to which he would go to help young people in their careers. If Jack believed in someone, he wouldn’t just make a call, he would hire them.

When Jack’s chain-smoking, hard-driving lifestyle finally caught up with him ten years ago, he went down hard, straight into Intensive Care, diagnosed with fungal pneumonia – a disease with a 95% kill rate. I visited him in the hospital and the doctor told me it was highly unlikely that Jack would walk out of the hospital. But Dr. Sue didn’t know Jack - that 5% chance was all Jack needed.

He’d been up against worse odds than that on many of his pictures. So he walked out of the hospital back then. But he had to retire from “the business” and retirement was the one enemy that Jack didn’t know how to fight. For a guy who had spent most of his life on location with Nicholson, Woody or George C. Scott, fighting against the incredible logistics and crafty studio moguls, sitting around in his condo in Woodland Hills or the pool at his place in Rosarita just didn’t cut it.

We all have fond stories about Jack, ways in which he touched our hearts, and we all mourn together today as we gather to acknowledge the passing of not just a man, not just a father, not just a friend, mentor, or producer, but a giant. Jack Grossberg, was a genuine giant, whom we were all lucky to know and privileged to call our friend.

Dave Thomas