Independent filmmaker and producer Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. passed away on January 9, 2015, in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at age 88, of congestive heart failure.

The son of Samuel Goldwyn (b. Schmuel Gelbfisz, 1879-1974) and his second wife Frances Howard (1903-1976, they were married from 1925 till 1974), he was a creative force on his own. While Mr. Goldwyn Sr. sort of invented Hollywood with his then brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky by producing and financing “The Squaw Man” (1913), the first feature made in Hollywood, his son’s Samuel Goldwyn Company, founded in 1979, was a very significant distributor of independent films in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 2000s, Sam Jr. relaunched his company as Samuel Goldwyn Films, and over the years, as an independent filmmaker, the tall and silver-haired heir to a Hollywood dynasty backed new directors such as Kenneth Branagh (“Henry V,” 1989), Anthony Minghella (“Truly Madly Deeply,” 1990) and Ang Lee (“The Wedding Banquet,” 1993; “Eat Drink Man Woman,” 1994).

His final producing onscreen credit was the 2013 Ben Stiller remake of his father’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1947) starring Danny Kaye.

This is the interview from 2000 I did with Mr. Goldwyn—the man who dangled on Clark Gabe’s knee as a kid—at his Los Angeles office, when he was working on his latest film “Tortilla Soup,” starring Hector Elizondo and Raquel Welch.

Mr. Goldwyn, growing up amid Hollywood royalty, attending your first Oscar ceremony in the mid-1930s, and working in editing rooms during your summer holidays, do you remember when your passion for movies really began?

I always loved the movies. I think the first movie I saw as a kid was “Skippy” [1931] with Jackie Cooper. Movies were always magical to me and they were all we ever talked about at home. My father had a tremendous love for movies. There’s a joke about him that says, ‘This is a movie I want to do, and I don’t care what people think, as long as everybody goes to see it’ [laughs]. I grew up with his enthusiasm, watching his enthusiasm, and his belief in this enthusiasm. I always enjoyed going to the movies; when I had a free day or on a Saturday afternoon, I would go out and see one of them. I thought for a while I would become a journalist; I was very taken with making documentaries which I did at one point, but there is no better way to tell a story than making a movie. It’s a wonderful medium, and its power gets greater and greater because there are more ways you can tell a story today than you could years ago.

What kind of a filmmaker was your father?

My father made the films he wanted to make. He never turned people loose by saying, ‘Go make a movie.’ He didn’t work that way. He was enormously involved in every single aspect of the movies. His feeling about movies was you are telling a story, and once you went in with a story, you’d better come out with a story. He was a very tough guy to work for, very demanding, and he had great respect for talent, but he was difficult for people, even if they were very talented. He had the longest-running producer-director relationship with Billy Wilder; sometimes they fought like cats and dogs, always about how to make a picture better.” [Wilder once reportedly said, ‘Just because Sam Goldwyn is a shit, doesn’t mean that being a shit makes you Sam Goldwyn.’] The screen now has become much more sophisticated than it was, but what we miss today are the stars. They had great stars back then. Despite all its problems, the star system was wonderful, it worked. You went to see movies to see the stars. They invested in creating stars, and they created a generation of stars who have lived for so long. Joan Crawford is still Joan Crawford, Davis is still Davis. The system was focused on delivering star pictures, and they were made with those people in mind. That very same system was able to exist and survive for so long because the studios owned theaters; people went to the movies, and as each studio made fifty or sixty pictures a year, they had to cast their stars to please the audience.

Just like your father discovered young, talented actors, so did you. You discovered an unknown Julia Roberts and cast her at age twenty in “Mystic Pizza” [1988].

She is a star in the true meaning of the word. It is a funny thing what happened with her back then when we made “Mystic Pizza.” We wanted to make a movie about working-class girls. A few years before, I saw “Diner” [1982], a brilliant film made by Barry Levinson, about young men and their expectations of life. I wanted to do the same thing about girls. So I started looking for a story, and I found a script on which a lot of rewriting was done. Basically, it was about three girls whose prospects in life were limited by their background. It was a small movie, and there was an actress we wanted to get, but she couldn’t decide whether the part was right and big enough for her. So one day, the director, Donald Petrie, said to me, ‘I think I saw a girl for that part,’ and he shot a little video on her. Unfortunately, when I saw it, she was awful. He said, ‘Sam, she’s going to be good.’ I said, ‘Well, this is wrong, that is wrong, that has to be changed, etc.’ A little while later, he came back with another video of her. I said, ‘Is this the same girl?’ All the habits she got, like biting on her lip and all that, it was all there. And, most importantly, there was a kind of a fire and a lost quality at the same time, which people love, it was all there. After two days of rushes, it was very clear, she would become a star. And she is, she’s a wonderful actress.

“Mystic Pizza” (1988, trailer)

She had ‘star quality’ right from the beginning?

Absolutely. You know, [director] Michael Curtiz had a phrase about acting schools. He used to say, ‘In acting schools, they can teach you how to act, but only God can make a star!’ [Laughs.] A friend of mine, Tom Ewell, once did a movie with Marilyn Monroe called “The Seven Year Itch” [1955]. When I asked him, ‘What’s it like to work with her,’ he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it’s like to work with her: she’s always late, she doesn’t know her lines, she’s got the wrong costume on, her hair is still a mess, she stumbles around, she can’t hit the marks, but then there’s that moment when that little red light goes on…! Now I understand why it took me forty plays to get to Hollywood!’ [Laughs.] That’s a star! I watched Billy Wilder when he was shooting “Some Like It Hot” [1959]. He was going nuts; he was complaining, screaming, yelling, it was awful. He never knew when she was going to show up, and she always had all these people around her and all that. But then again, whatever she brought to that picture, was more than what was on the paper. That’s the extra thing you get from a star. It is still something people want. One of the things about the old system was that it nurtured them over a period. Of the hundreds of people who got contracts, it often didn’t amount to anything, but each year, there was somebody going up the ladder. Now we do very little to develop people—we develop stories, we develop directors, but very little to develop personalities. Only television does something about it, but the movies don’t do anything about it anymore. I think that’s a shame. Today when you start working on a movie, you got X in mind; when you find out you don’t get X, you start to change until you can work with Y or Z. When you think of the number of stars they had then, compared to the number of stars the system produces today and also look at the shorter lives that they’re having now… back then they all had twenty-five-year careers whereas today you see them coming and going so fast.

How do you cast your movies?

Whenever I make a film, I start with names in the back of my mind. Let me give you an example, one of the films I distributed and am very proud of is “The Madness of King George” [1994]. I went to the theater, saw that play, and told author Alan Bennett that I wanted to do the film with Nigel Hawthrone, the guy who was playing it. I was determined that the writer, the star, and also the director of the play, Nicholas Hytner, would do the film. So you always start out to do a movie with so-and-so. Ultimately, “The Madness of King George” proved to be a hugely successful film, winning an Academy Award for John Fenner [for Best Art Direction] and a nomination for a first-rate Nigel Hawthorne in the leading role of George III in the Best Actor category. I was very lucky to have a father who said, ‘You’re only as good as what you do.’ He believed that it’s not what you did yesterday, but what you’re going to do tomorrow that is important. That’s a very interesting philosophy, so I thought about that when I was growing up. Also, today a star is only as good as his last picture, and you deal with different subject matters you couldn’t deal with back then. Married people slept in separate beds, there was no divorce, you never got away with a murder, etc. The morality of the world has changed a great deal. We’ve headed to a very bad time in American pictures because I think too few pictures are working. This megabuck movies era, when everything just seems a big action picture, I don’t know if that’s going to last. They try to reach audiences worldwide, but only thirty-five percent of the income of movies comes from the United States, so they have got to work all over the world, and their common language now is action. But despite that, there are still a lot of good movies that come out of here.

So you’re still optimistic?

Yes, but what I am more depressed about is the tendency of European pictures to copy American pictures, and that’s a big mistake. One of our sources is European pictures. European filmmakers have a different point of view on life, so when they start making American type of pictures, I don’t think that is going to work. Also, their films often don’t work in their own countries, and if that happens, usually they don’t work abroad. They tend to lose their individuality. In the United States, the movie industry has become a part of a vast communications company, while it used to stand on its own. If you look at the pictures these old guys made, every movie had to stand on its own feet. Take my father’s pictures, he borrowed money from the bank, and if the picture didn’t pay the bank back, he was in trouble. That’s how he worked his whole life. People often ask me what it was like to be brought up in Hollywood, and I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, you know, the movie stars and everything!’ And then I would say, ‘You really want to know what I remember being brought up? That is the day my father was able to pay back the cost of a movie, that was a celebration in our family. At least, then he didn’t owe the bank any money.’ This was combined with the personality of a man who was a compulsive gambler. He had to do it: when he was making a movie, he was throwing the dice. The more I study his fascinating life, the more I realize that.

How do you really remember him?

After his death in 1974, I reflected on the death of a parent, and sometimes your perception of a parent changes. I was involved for some time with A. Scott Berg, a man who did a wonderful biography of him [called ‘Goldwyn’, first published in 1989] and who spent eight years on that book. What I learned from his research was pretty consistent with the man I knew. I remember so many times when my father would see a movie, which was not his movie, and he’d turn to me and say, ‘You see what you can do, you see what you can do with this! You see how wonderful it is! God, I wish I could have made it!’ He took great pleasure in somebody else’s movies. He never felt threatened by other people’s success. His attitude towards films had a wonderful quality, and he also made mistakes that way. But it made him less afraid to make any mistakes, and that is very important because you shouldn’t be making pictures if you’re afraid to make any mistakes.

How would you compare your father with David O. Selznick, who was another awesome independent producer at that time?

David O. Selznick was more complex than my father. I knew him very well, I adored him, but he had this enormous success when he was in his thirties with “Gone With the Wind.” We once talked about death, and he said to me, ‘You know what’s so terrible? I know what the headline of my obituary will be. ‘David O. Selznick, producer of “Gone With the Wind,” dies.’’ And that film was made such a long time ago, that’s a frightening thing. My father adored him, he respected him too, and he tried to get him to work at one point, but David had a self-destructive mechanism. My father, on the other hand, was a survivor; that was one of his qualities. This is a business for survivors. It isn’t one hit, two failures, one hit. You have to survive all the time and stay in the game. My father was bought out of the company which later on became Paramount [1916], he was thrown out of the company which would become MGM [1922], but he survived them all. That I think is about character and personality; that’s more than just picture-making. That’s what I learned from him and it made me a rich man, you know. I was able to get it sitting at the table, and that was very valuable. Fortunately, it was there when I needed it often. He was a difficult guy, terrible rages of temper which he couldn’t control, but he was a very, very interesting man. He didn’t speak English very well, but he was always trying to say something meaningful. He taught me a lot more than just about movies. After all, he was a man who walked across Poland at age thirteen, he got beaten so many times in the game and he always said, ‘They’re not going to kill me, I will come right back.’ That’s what happens so much in this business. You see people with great talent, great flair, great success, and then they’re gone.

It’s very interesting to see that not only your father, but also many of the other film pioneers all came from Central Europe, and one way or the other wound up in the same brand new film business, at the same time and the same place, here in Los Angeles.

Well, there was really no place for them to go to in Europe. They weren’t wanted there. Most of them were poor Jews. There was little employment for them, they weren’t educated, they could never become lawyers, bankers or doctors. They could never move to that side of society. So they came to America, and the best most of them could do, was work in the rag trade, like my father, who was a glove cutter. And then something happened. Even though most of them hardly spoke any English and came from the lower class of their own society, they were all smart enough to see and take a look at the future—they were guys like educated versions of what Bill Gates is now. They all saw this new idea, and they took their chance. They brought their culture with them; some of the morality of their movies is probably very much affected by this. Also, it was important that they integrated into the society, that they could become part of it and be accepted by it. I knew a few of them, I didn’t know Mayer, but I knew his daughter Irene Mayer Selznick very well; she was married to David. She was the Godmother of one of my children and always was a very dear friend. My father didn’t like Mayer; they always disliked each other. I also knew Harry Cohn, Jack L. Warner, all of those people. The same thing also is true for the talented people who came over here in the 1930s, like Michael Curtiz, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder. They were all the same, except that they were educated; they knew they had to make it in this culture because they also knew there was no way to go back.

Do you think it was more difficult in those early days to make films as an independent producer, or is it much tougher nowadays?

I often used to say to my father, ‘Well, it was easy in your time. There was no television, so people had nothing to do but go to the theater.’ And then he would say, ‘Well, have you ever thought what it was like when they didn’t want to go to the theater!’ [Laughs.] We’re becoming a lot like Broadway—everything has got to be a hit, that makes it very difficult. After I got back from the military, I worked for CBS, but I was not happy with corporations and with their regimes. I probably missed something, maybe I was spoiled. If I were more disciplined, I would better be able to deal with that. But I was never good at dealing with politics, and these politics of survival are very difficult at studios, although as a producer I have also done pictures at studios. In those days, Darryl F. Zanuck would wake up in the morning, read the newspaper and say, ‘I see a story here about a chain gang. We’re going to make a chain gang movie!’ So he came in the office, threw the newspaper on the table, a bunch of people looked at it, and they said, ‘Great idea, Darryl!’ He was going to do it anyway, whether they liked it or not. Then he’d say, ‘Any ideas for a title?’ ‘I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang!’ They’d announce they would make it, they had directors, writers, and directors under contract. ‘We’ll put that aggressive fellow in it, what about Paul Muni, maybe that would be good too!’ And the next thing… they had a movie! You can’t do that today, there’s too much at stake with every movie, everybody involved with it has reason to be ‘frightened.’ When they make a film for, let’s say, sixty or seventy million dollars, they spend thirty-five to forty million marketing; most of that is spent within about four weeks. That’s a lot of money. As an independent producer, it is very difficult to compete with that. I have to come up with pictures that, in some form, are completely unique. That’s very enjoyable, but also very difficult. You have to look for something that is fresh, something that is different. A picture like “The Full Monty” [1997] has that quality, and every year, you see a couple of pictures like that. But you’re fishing for needles in a haystack, really, and the guys who make those hundred million dollar films, say those are hard to find too. Basically, we’re all gambling, but that’s the fun of it—you take that away, and what have you got left? I couldn’t imagine not waking up at three o’clock in the morning and not worry about something [laughs]. My father told me once, ‘The night you will not solve the problem, write it down, and you’ll deal with it tomorrow because it will not be as bad as it seems,’ and I still work with that all the time. Am I going to finish this movie on time, I got to do retakes, and when am I going to get all the people to do it because some actors will be doing other things, etc., things like that.

“The Full Monty” (1997, trailer)

What about the impact of television and the internet?

I am not sure that those old boys would have survived because they did not see television coming. That was a big, big mistake. And at this moment, nobody really knows what the impact of the internet will be. This internet business is really big. Just think about this—and I don’t know the answer—just as you can download music, you can download movies. I can download a movie and pass it on to you. Technically, it is possible. Just think about the implications, what it is going to do, how it is going to change the business. The movie business didn’t see television coming, they didn’t see video coming, neither of which they own—while they could have owned television and video. Each time one of these changes takes place, it takes you further and further from what those guys were about. My father used to talk about television, he didn’t like it—it wasn’t movies! But he also saw the implications of it. Also, the whole method by which we project movies is changing. It is all becoming digitally now. If anyone builds a movie theater today without digital capability, that would be a huge mistake. All these things affect how you make movies, how you go about doing it all—it’s all part of the same package, you know, it’s a revolving thing. So history is repeating itself. Sound changed the business; it took the industry nearly a year and a half to adapt to sound. When Al Jolson sang in “The Jazz Singer” [1927], those companies were loaded with two years of product they first had to get rid of. So they had to stick sound and music on it one way or the other so that they could advertise with sound. It killed a whole generation of actors—one of the stars my father had at that time was Vilma Banky. She was a star, had appeared in “The Son of the Sheik” [1926] with Rudolph Valentino in his final film, but she was Hungarian, and she couldn’t speak two words of English. After sound came, she simply retired from acting.

Has it been difficult for you to carry the family name?

No, not really: I always had a good life, went to a good school, didn’t always take advantage of every opportunity that I was offered, but I learned. I grew up with the Chaplin boys, Charles and Sidney. I went to school with them, but theirs is a whole different story. They had a pretty rough childhood because their parents didn’t get along; they barely took time. Actually Charles was very talented and Sidney had a pretty good career in the theater, he was in ‘Funny Girl’ with Barbra Streisand and all that.

Some of them, including Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. and Charles Chaplin, Jr., wrote autobiographies, as did screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg, the son of B.P. Schulberg.

Yes, but Budd’s story is sadder than mine. His father was the head of Paramount and every year he got presents from Clara Bow and from all the directors and the writers. Then, one day, his father was fired from Paramount just before Christmas, and there were no presents. So his mother and father went out, bought them themselves and wrote the names of the people on them. He wrote a short story about this, ‘The Christmas Presents.’ It had a very profound impact on Budd and his brother. The marriage of their parents broke up, his mother became a very successful agent, but it was the end of his father. Again, that’s where my father was so unique. Whenever they thought he was defeated, he always kept coming back. He was quite a character. I remember when I was a child, we went up to Lake Tahoe on a fishing trip. When we arrived there, we checked in the hotel, and he told his name. So this guy said, ‘Oh, Goldwyn, like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer?’ ‘No,’ my father said, ‘like the Metro-Goldwyn Company.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you straighten it out with Mayer?’ He said, ‘Would that get us a better room?’ [Laughs.] Sometimes he’d laugh about such things, and sometimes he could get all worked up over something. If I brought a bad report card home from school, he’d say, ‘I got to have a talk with you.’ I knew then what was coming. I knew exactly the dialogue that was coming, ‘As I look at you, I look at somebody facing two forks on the road: one, a chance to be a great man, the other is prison.’ [Laughs.] I’d say, ‘Is there any chance in the middle?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s no way no look at it!’ [Laughs.] Then there’d be a long lecture about the opportunity that I had and that he hadn’t had, and then he’d say, ‘Now, I know which direction you’re going to take, and we’re not even going to think about the other.’ So at least I knew I wouldn’t be going to prison [laughs]. That was the kind of personality he was—larger than life!

Los Angeles, California
August 14, 2000

“Tortilla Soup” (2011, trailer)

FILMS

GOOD TIME GIRL (1950) DIR David MacDonald PROD Sydney Box ASST PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Muriel Box, Sydney Box, Ted Willis CAM Stephen Dade ED Vladimir Sadovsky MUS Lambert Williamson CAST Jean Kent (Gwen Rawlings), Dennis Price (Red Farrell), Griffith Jones (Danny Mortin), Flora Robson (Court Chairman), Herbert Lom (Max), Bonar Colleano (1st Deserter)

MAN WITHOUT A GUN (1955) DIR Richard Wilson PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Richard Wilson, N. B. Stone, Jr. CAM Lee Garmes ED Gene Milford MUS Alex North CAST Robert Mitchum (Clint Tollinger), Jan Sterling (Nelly Bain), Karen Sharpe (Stella Atkins), Henry Hull (Marshal Sims), Emile Meyer (Saul Atkins), John Lupton (Jeff Castle)

THE SHARKFIGHTERS (1956) DIR Jerry Hopper PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Lawrence Roman, John Robinson (story by Jo Napoleon, Art Napoleon) CAM Lee Garmes ED Daniel Mandell MUS Jerome Moross CAST Victor Mature (Ben Staves), Karen Steele (Martha Staves), James Olson (Harold Duncan), Philip Coolidge (Leonard Evans), Claude Akins (‘Gordy’ Gordon), Rafael Campos (Carlos)

THE PROUD REBEL (1958) DIR Michael Curtiz PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Joe Petracca, Lillie Hayward (story by James Edward Grant) CAM Ted McCord ED Aaron Stell MUS Jerome Moross CAST Alan Ladd (John Chandler), Olivia de Havilland (Linnett Moore), Dean Jagger (Harry Burleigh), David Ladd (David Chandler), Cecil Kellaway (Dr Enos Davis), Dean Stanton (Jeb Burleigh)

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1960) DIR Michael Curtiz PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR James Lee (novel ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ [1884] by Mark Twain) CAM Ted McCord ED Frederic Steinkamp MUS Jerome Moross CAST Tony Randall (The King), Eddie Hodges (Huckleberry Finn), Archie Moore (Jim), Patty McCormack (Joanna), Neville Brand (Pap), Mickey Shaughnessy (The Duke)

THE YOUNG LOVERS (1964) DIR – PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR George Garrett (novel ‘The Young Lovers’ [1955] by Julian Halevy) CAM Joe Biroc ED William A. Lyon MUS Sol Kaplan CAST Henry Fonda (Eddie Slocum), Sharon Hugueny (Pam Burns), Nick Adams (Tarragoo), Deborah Walley (Debbie), Beatrice Straight (Mrs Burns), Malachi Throne (Prof Schwartz)

COTTON COMES TO HARLEM (1970) DIR Ossie Davis PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Arnold Perl, Ossie Davis (novel ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem’ [1965] by Chester Himes) CAM Gerald Hirschfeld ED Robert Q. Lovett, John Carter MUS Galt McDermot CAST Godfrey Cambridge (Grave Digger Jones), Raymond St. Jacques (Coffin Ed Johnson), Calvin Lockhart (Rev. Deke O’Malley), Judy Pace (Iris), Redd Foxx (Uncle Budd), John Anderson (Bryce)

COME BACK, CHARLESTON BLUE (1972) DIR Mark Warren PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Bontche Schweig, Peggy Elliott (novel ‘The Heat’s On’ [1966] by Chester Himes) CAM Dick Kratina ED Gerald Greenberg, George Bowers MUS Quincy Jones, Donny Hathaway CAST Godfrey Cambridge (Grave Digger Jones), Raymond St. Jacques (Coffin ED Johnson), Peter DeAnda (Joe), Percy Rodriguez (Capt Bryce), Jonelle Allen (Carol), Maxwell Glanville (Uncle Caspar)

THE GOLDEN SEAL (1983) DIR Frank Zugina PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR John Groves (novel ‘A Rover Ran Out of Eden’ by James Vance Marshall [Donald G. Payne]) CAM Eric Saarinen ED Robert Q. Lovett MUS John Barry CAST Steve Railsback (Jim Lee), Penelope Milford (Tania Lee), Michael Beck (Crawford), Torquil Campbell (Eric), Sandra Seacat (Gladys), Seth Sakai (Semeyon)

ONCE BITTEN (1985) DIR Howard Storm PROD Dimitri Villard, Robby Wald EXEC PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR David Hines, Jeffrey Hause, Jonathan Roberts (story by Dimitri Villard) CAM Adam Greenberg ED Marc Grossman MUS John Du Prez CAST Lauren Hutton (Countess), Jim Carrey (Mark Kendall), Karen Kopins (Robin Pierce), Cleavon Little (Sebastian), Thomas Ballatore (Jamie), Skip Lacey (Russ)

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING (1987) DIR Mike Hodges PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Peter Snell SCR Martin Lynch, Edmund Ward (novel ‘A Prayer for the Dying’ [1987] by Jack Higgins [Harry Patterson]) CAM Mike Garfath ED Peter Boyle MUS Bill Conti CAST Mickey Rourke (Martin Fallon), Bob Hoskins (Father Michael Da Costa), Alan Bates (Jack Meehan), Sammi Davis, Liam Neeson (Liam Docherty)

MYSTIC PIZZA (1988) DIR Donald Petrie PROD Mark Levinson, Scott Rosenfelt EXEC PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Amy Jones, Perry Howze, Randy Howze, Alfred Uhry (story by Amy Jones) CAM Tim Suhrstedt ED Marion Rothman, Don Brochu MUS David McHugh CAST Julia Roberts (Daisy Araujo), Annabeth Gish (Kat Araujo), Lili Taylor (Jojo Barboza), Vincent Phillip D’Onofrio (Bill Montijo), William R Moses (Tim Travers), Adam Storke (Charles G Winsor)

MINNAMURRA (1989) DIR Ian Barry PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., John Sexton, Kent C. Lovell, Antony I. Ginnane SCR John Sexton CAM Ross Berryman ED Henry Dangar MUS Mario Millo CAST Jeff Fahey (Ben Creed), Tushka Bergen (Alice May Richards), Steven Vidler (Jack Donaghue), Shane Briant (Allenby)

STELLA (1990) DIR John Erman PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Robert Getchell (novel ‘Stella Dallas’ [1923] by Olive Higgins Prouty) CAM Billy Williams ED Jerrold L Ludwig MUS John Morris CAST Bette Midler (Stella Claire), John Goodman (ED Munn), Trini Alvarado (Jenny Claire), Stephen Collins (Stephen Dallas), Marsha Mason (Janice Morrison), Eileen Brennan (Mrs Wilkerson)

ROCK-A-DOODLE (1991, animation) DIR Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, Dan Kuenster PROD Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy EXEC PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., John Quested, Morris F. Sullivan SCR David N. Weiss (story by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, David N. Weiss, T.J. Kuenster, John Pomeroy, David Steinberg) CAM Robert Paynter ED Joe Gall, Lisa Dorney, Fiona Trayler MUS Robert Folk CAST (voices only) Phil Harris (Narrator / Patou), Glen Campbell (Chanticleer / The King), Christopher Plummer (Grand Duke), Sandy Duncan (Peepers), Dee Wallace (Dory)

THE PROGRAM (1993) DIR David S. Ward PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR David S. Ward, Aaron Latham CAM Victor Hammer ED Paul Seydor, Kimberly Ray MUS Michel Colombier CAST James Caan (Coach Sam Winters), Halle Berry (Autumn Haley), Omar Epps (Darnell Jefferson), Craig Sheffer (Joe Kane), Kristy Swanson (Camille Schaeffer), Abraham Benrubi (Bud-Lite Kamanski)

THE PREACHER’S WIFE (1996) DIR Penny Marshall PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Nat Mauldin, Allan Scott (screenplay of THE BISHOP’S WIFE [1947] by Robert E Sherwood and Leonardo Bercovici; novel ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ [1928] by Robert Nathan) CAM Miroslav Ondricek ED Stephen A. Rotter, George Bowers MUS Hans Zimmer CAST Denzel Washington (Dudley), Whitney Houston (Julia Biggs), Courtney B. Vance (Rev Biggs), Gregory Hines (Joe Hamilton), Jennifer Lewis (Marguerite Coleman), Loretta Devine (Beverly)

TORTILLA SOUP (2001) DIR María Ripoll PROD John Bard Manulis, Lulu Zezza EXEC PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. SCR Ramón Menéndez, Tom Musca, Vera Blasi (screenplay of YIN SHI NAN NU, a.k.a EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN [1994] by Ang Lee, Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus) CAM Xavier Perez Grobet ED Andy Blumenthal MUS Bill Conti CAST Hector Elizondo (Martin), Jacqueline Obradors (Carmen), Tamaro Mello (Maribel), Elizabeth Peña (Leticia), Constance Marie (Yolanda), Raquel Welch (Hortensia)

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003) DIR Peter Weir PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Peter Weir, Duncan Henderson SCR Peter Weir, John Collee (novel ‘Master and Commander’ [1970] by Patrick O’Brien) CAM Russell Boyd ED Lee Smith MUS Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon, Richard Tognetti CAST Russell Crowe (Captain Jack Aubrey), Paul Bettany (Doctor Stephen Maturin), Billy Boyd (Barrett Bonden), James D’Arcy (First Lieutenant Tom Pullings), Lee Igleby (Hollom)

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (2013) DIR Ben Stiller PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., John Goldwyn, Ben Stiller, Stuart Cornfeld SCR Steve Conrad (also screen story; short story by James Thurber) CAM Stuart Dryburgh ED Greg Hayden MUS Theodore Shapiro CAST Ben Stiller (Walter Mitty), Kristen Wiig (Cheryl Melhoff), Shirley MacLaine (Edna Mitty), Adam Scott (Ted Hendrickx), Kathryn Hahn (Odessa Mitty), Sean Penn (Sean O’Connell)

TV MOVIE

APRIL MORNING (1988) DIR – PROD Delbert Mann EXEC PROD Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Robert Halmi TELEPLAY James Lee Barrett (novel ‘April Morning’ [1961] by Howard Fast) CAM Frank Tidy ED Eric Albertson, Sean Albertson, David Finamore MUS Allyn Ferguson CAST Tommy Lee Jones (Moses Cooper), Robert Urich (Joseph Simmons), Chad Lowe (Adam Cooper), Susan Blakely (Sarah Cooper), Meredith Salenger (Ruth Simmons), Rip Torn (Solomon Chandler)