Zack Norman, who made his mark as an actor in movies like “Romancing the Stone” and “Cadillac Man” and with appearances on tv exhibits like “The A-Staff” and “The Nanny” — and who, as a producer, additionally grew to become recognized for a star-crossed film that grew to become a operating punchline on the present “Thriller Science Theater 3000” — died on April 28 in Burbank, Calif. He was 83.
The reason for his dying, at a hospital, was bilateral pneumonia associated to the coronavirus, his daughter Lori Zuker Briller stated.
Whereas finest recognized for scene-stealing appearances as a supporting participant, Mr. Norman was at all times greater than a personality actor. He was additionally a painter, an actual property developer and an artwork collector who within the Eighties mingled with the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Beginning within the early Seventies, Mr. Norman tallied practically 40 film and tv performing credit. He had a memorably menacing flip as Danny DeVito’s crocodile-tending antiquities-smuggler sidekick in “Romancing the Stone,” Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 journey comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.
He was abundantly acquainted to followers of the indie director Henry Jaglom, showing in a lot of Mr. Jaglom’s movies, together with “Sitting Geese” (1980), a comedy by which he was one in every of two dimwitted hoods who steal from a playing syndicate, and “Hollywood Goals” (2006), by which he performed a kindly movie producer who takes care of a fame-obsessed starlet (Tanna Frederick).
That function was not a lot of a leap for Mr. Norman, who, underneath his actual title, Howard Zuker, produced or financed greater than 40 motion pictures. Among the many movies he backed was “Hearts and Minds,” Peter Davis’s landmark exploration of the Vietnam Conflict, which took residence the Academy Award for finest documentary characteristic in 1975.
A much more obscure movie that Mr. Norman helped produce, “Chief Zabu” (1986), entered into pop-culture lore in an uncommon manner: by disappearing for 3 many years.
Howard Jerrold Zuker was born on Might 27, 1940, in Boston, the elder of two kids of Sydney Zuker, a lawyer, and Evelyn (Bloomberg) Zuker, and grew up in close by Revere, Mass. Impressed by Lenny Bruce, he began doing stand-up comedy in native golf equipment in his late teenagers.
He took up performing whereas attending Vanderbilt College in Nashville. However after leaving Vanderbilt, he found that it was laborious to pay the payments as a fledgling actor and comic, so at 23 he went to work at a cousin’s actual property growth agency in Boston.
“I grew to become, in a 12 months and a half, a millionaire,” he stated in an interview final 12 months on the podcast “Not Actual Artwork.” “I spotted that being wealthy was not the reply,” he stated. “That’s how I went again to New York and began in present enterprise once more.”
In 1965, he produced his first Off Broadway play, John Arden’s “Stay Like Pigs.” A 12 months later, he toured Europe as a stand-up comedian. Following a set on the Playboy Membership in London, Selection deemed him “one of many funniest males to ever cross these shores.”
Over time, he continued to finance his profession by growing properties in New York and Florida, in addition to by unearthing bargains within the artwork world. Within the early Eighties, he bought a number of early works by Basquiat for four-figure sums, lengthy earlier than costs of his work got here to rival these of personal Caribbean islands.
“Chief Zabu,” which Mr. Norman wrote, produced and directed with Neil Cohen, was one other discount, made on a shoestring funds of $200,000. Mr. Norman was additionally a star of the movie: He performed Sammy Brooks, an actual property mogul who, together with his pal Ben Sydney (Allen Garfield), pursues each monetary and political ambitions in a grandiose scheme to take over a fictitious Polynesian island.
The movie fizzled in a preview and was by no means launched. For 30 years it was buried, however not forgotten — a minimum of to not followers of “Thriller Science Theater 3000,” the Era X staple of the Nineties that featured a weary house traveler and his robotic associates poking enjoyable at dangerous B-movies on a journey by way of the cosmos.
On the present, any time a personality in a type of achingly dangerous motion pictures cracked a newspaper, Joel Hodgson, the unique host, would wearily intone, “Hey, Zack Norman is Sammy in ‘Chief Zabu.’”
It was a understanding reference to an commercial, that includes a stern picture of Mr. Norman, that he continued to run — stubbornly but playfully — in Weekly Selection each Wednesday for 9 years. Why? “As a result of it gave me nice pleasure,” he stated in a 2016 interview with The Solar Sentinel of South Florida.
Along with his daughter Lori, Mr. Norman is survived by his spouse of 40 years, Nancy Zuker; his sister, Janie Krasker; his sons, Stephen and Michael Aron; one other daughter, Tracy Aron Brittan; and 14 grandchildren. He was beforehand married to Norma Blumenthal Sommers.
Mr. Norman’s religion in “Chief Zabu” finally paid off. He and Mr. Cohen launched a brand new lower of the movie in 2016 after which took it on tour, presenting it at comedy golf equipment. Even so, it took them many years to appreciate that the Selection advert had grow to be a cultural artifact.
In a 2020 interview with the movie web site Skewed & Reviewed, Mr. Cohen stated that neither of them had heard of “Thriller Science Theater 3000” till one afternoon within the mid-2010s once they have been strolling down a Los Angeles avenue and noticed a person carrying a “Zack Norman as Sammy in Chief Zabu” T- shirt.
“We stopped the man and stated, ‘Dude, what’s up with that?’” he recalled. “And you may picture his response when he noticed he was speaking to Zack Norman, whose face was on his T-shirt.”
