Fred Weintraub

Hollywood producer introduced Bruce Lee craze to the US

Fredweintraub,who left home, family and a baby-carriage business to become New York City’s Greenwich Village impresario who advanced the careers of dozens of fledgling singers and comedians at his Bitter End coffeehouse, died Sunday in Pacific Palisades, California. He was 88.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jackie.

After showcasing a panoply of virtually unknown performers in the 1960s — including Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Randy Newman, Nina Simone and Peter, Paul and Mary — Weintraub became a Hollywood producer.

He introduced Bruce Lee and the martial arts craze to U.S. movie audiences and persuaded Warner Bros. to subsidise the last-minute cost of a threeday rock festival near Bethel, New York, in 1969. The investment resulted in the studio’s Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock.

Fred Robert Weintraub was born on 27 April, 1928, in the Bronx, New York, to Meier Weintraub, who owned a toy and baby-carriage business, and Anna Bogatz.

In addition to his fourth wife, the former Jackie Dubey, a film producer, he is survived by four children from his earlier marriages, Sandra, Barbara, Max and Zachary Weintraub, and four grandchildren.

Weintraub said he had expanded his father’s business, Darling Furniture and Toys, to dozens of stores and was living with his wife and daughters in Westchester County, New York, when, at 26, he was struck by the Fellini film La Strada.

He immediately identified with the film’s itinerant strong man, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn, whom he recalled “clawing at the sand in despair.”

He soon left his wife and daughters (this was the second time he left home; he had also run away at 12) for a freewheeling life, playing the piano in a bordello, operating a fishing boat in Cuba and roaming Europe before deciding that the Greenwich Village music scene was where he belonged. ©New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service