Somehow I missed the fact that Dan Melnick passed last month.
Now, I can’t claim to have known him that well -- I mean, I was never invited to his poker games with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Johnny Carson. Also, having started his career in TV in the 50s (when I was literally a baby), I can hardly attest to his early work.
However, like kids growing up in the ‘60s I certainly remember some of his shows, notably “Get Smart” (sort of James Bond-meets-Inspector Clouseau), which was recently remade into a feature film. And who could forget his first movie, the extraordinarily violent 1971 “Straw Dogs,” directed by legendary Sam Peckinpah and starring the young Dustin Hoffman? Like “Rosemary’s Baby” before it and “The Shining” after, it may be more famous than seen these days, but it was a landmark.
Having made that, he started being noticed by people like me, by then a young film student in New York, when he was recruited, first, to become president of production at MGM and, then head of Columbia Pictures. Later he hit as a producer with such films as “All That Jazz” and “Footloose” (though many credit the inspiration for that film being his producing partners Craig Zadan and Neal Meron, who won an Academy Award for “Dreamgirls.”)
Despite his “old school” image -- and let’s face it, anyone who started in TV overseeing “77 Sunset Strip” was, by definition, “old school” -- it was an image he cultivated. “He was old school,” his son Peter recently said. But he was old-school in more ways than just a producer, as I can attest.
I first met Melnick after I was sent here by Newsweek in the early ‘80s.
We got to know each other after I did a story on “Footloose.” Now, you have to remember, this was the twilight era for the “old-school producer” and/or studio head like Melnick, Dick Zanuck,David Begelman, Irwin and Frank Yablans, etc. These guys, who came of age after the original moguls like Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers and Dick Zanuck’s father Darryl (who saw themselves as American royalty; at one point in the Great Depression, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid exec in the U.S,. the Bill Gates of his era), were different.
Having been born in the Great Depression, Melnick, et al., were raised as scrappers, survivors and were as far from the new, forward-thinking film-school nerds like Lucas, Speilberg, Coppola and Robert Zemekis, who followed them as the WWII generation was from Vietnam.
It was, literally, two different worlds -- unlike the film school brats, who’d grown up together in the bright, economically vibrant ‘60s and early ‘70s helping each other out, investing in (or starring in!), each other’s films, Melnick came from the generation that, as they like to say, believed in the maxim “It’s not enough that I succeed; you must fail!”
These were children of the breadline -- and if someone cut into that line ahead of them, they and their family didn’t eat that day.
