Paul Jones, a Hamptonite of many pursuits, dies at 40

Paul Jones and Alexandra Saland used to work together on the east end of New York’s Long Island — he was a real estate agent and she photographed his listings. In 2016, a few years after she had left that job, she came across him on an online dating site. “Hi,” she said. He asked her out.

Within a year, they were living together in the hamlet of Water Mill in Southampton. By 2018 Jones was down on one knee, in front of family and friends, asking Saland to marry him. Soon they were having a baby and they put off the wedding. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“We didn’t want to get married on ipads or Zoom, so we postponed the wedding indefinitely,” Saland said in a phone interview.

Jones came down with the coronavirus in the fall and was hospitalized in October. But like other COVID-19 long-haulers, as they have come to be known, he never fully recovered. He ended up in an emergency room Feb. 8 with shortness of breath. Then he was transferred to Stony Brook University Hospital for a heart procedure; the virus had damaged his heart. Soon he went into cardiac arrest and was put on life support.

He died Feb. 26 at 40. Saland said the cause was a combination of COVID-19 and pneumonia.

Jones seemed to make friends with nearly everyone he met in the Hamptons, better known as the summer playground of wealthy Manhattanites, but also home to a community of local families, many of whom have lived there for generations.

“He was a magnet,” his mother, the Rev. Connie Jones, associate minister of Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton, said in an interview. “He had a glow on him, and everybody felt it.”

He was a man of multiple pursuits. In addition to selling real estate, Paul Jones tended bar and managed property. Last year, he and a friend started a remediation company franchise that cleans and disinfects properties.

He was a bouncer for a decade at the Stephen Talkhouse, a popular music spot in nearby Amagansett. And at 6 feet, 4 inches, with a bushy black beard, he looked the part.

“He was the perfect combo of teddy bear and scary bouncer when he needed to be,” musician Nancy Atlas wrote in a letter to fellow musicians, as reported in The East Hampton Star. “Lord knows he kept us covered from rogue, long-nailed, drunk harpies and wanton men.”

He also enjoyed Djing and becoming the entertainment himself.

“Sometimes he’d just grab the mic and start singing,” his mother said.

Jones loved fishing and hunting and cooking big dinners, including pig roasts. He appeared on “Real Talk in the Kitchen,” which aired on LTV, a public access channel in East Hampton, where he shared his technique for making meat rubs.

He coached football and baseball and played rugby at the Montauk Rugby Club. He built furniture. He was a welder.

“He’d pick up a lot of old pieces and say, ‘This would make a nice lamp,’” his mother said.

Paul Craig Jones III was born in Southampton on June 30, 1980. His father, Paul C. Jones II, was the town’s first African American police officer. His mother was also a nurse.

Like many in his extended family, Paulie, as he was called, went to East Hampton High School. He played football, ran track and graduated in 1998. On the recommendation of a high school teacher, he applied for and won a music scholarship to Five Towns College, in Dix Hills on Long Island, where he studied violin for a time.

One thing that brought him and Saland together was that they were both single parents. (Saland’s husband died in 2012.) Their two families blended easily: Jones with his son, Paul Jones IV, called Jonesie, who is 13, and Saland with her daughter, Tatyana, 8. Their son, Asher Alexander Jones, will be 2 in May.

He is also survived by his sister, Kim Jones, and two brothers, Paul Anthony Jones and Joseph Kennedy Smith.

Paul Jones’ many talents included jewelry design. He fashioned a pair of earrings for Saland. And he had sketched the diamond and ruby engagement ring that she now wears.

Leon Gast, a filmmaker whose 22-year quest to make “When We Were Kings,” a documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s epic 1974 boxing match, involved a Liberian shell company, the Hells Angels, a drug deal gone bad, singer Wyclef Jean and ultimately an Academy Award, died Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 84.

His wife, Geri Spolangast, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Gast was a young filmmaker who had already directed one major documentary, about New York’s Latin music scene, when he learned in 1974 of a plan by boxing promoter Don King to stage a combination music festival and boxing match in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo).

A company in London had agreed to pay for the dozens of performers at the festival, including James Brown, Miriam Makeba and B.B. King, while Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire, put up $10 million to split between the boxers in the fight’s main event, Foreman and Ali.

Gast, who had boxed in high school, lugged his projector to King’s offices in Rockefeller Center, where he lobbied for the job of making a film about the music festival, with clips of the fight interspersed. King wanted a Black director, but he liked Gast’s work, and he hired Gast after he agreed to hire Black crew members.

The fight, billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” was to take place Sept. 25, 1974, preceded by the threeday music festival. But on Sept. 17, Foreman cut his forehead while sparring; he needed 11 stitches, and the fight was pushed back six weeks.

Many of the boxing fans and reporters who had traveled to Zaire left, but Gast decided to stick around. He had a sense of the drama unfolding: Ali was 32 years old, considered over the hill for a boxer and certainly no match for Foreman, 25, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, whose 40-0 record included 37 knockouts.

“The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali,” one of his admirers, sportscaster Howard Cosell, said on television, “because very honestly I do not think he can beat George Foreman.”

But Ali was unfazed. While Foreman — who at the time was reserved to the point of surliness — refused to be interviewed, Ali opened up to Gast, who over the next several weeks recorded hours and hours of the former heavyweight champion exercising, sparring, meeting locals and indulging in his famed verbal virtuosity.

“If you thought the world was surprised when (Richard) Nixon resigned, wait until I kick Foreman’s behind,” Ali said at one point; another time, he said: “Only last week, I murdered a rock. Injured a stone. Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick!”

He even suggested when and how Gast’s crew should film him.

“One day Muhammad told us: ‘In the morning when I run, I come around that corner with the sun and the river behind me,’” Gast told The New York Times in 1997. “‘Put your camera over there. It’ll be a great shot.’ He was right. It was a great shot.”

Foreman was favored to win by 4-to-1 odds, but Gast had faith in his newfound friend. He bet writer Hunter S. Thompson $100, at 3-to-1, that Ali would prevail.

The fight finally took place Oct. 30 — at 4 a.m., to accommodate audiences watching it in theaters in the United States — under a giant poster of Sese Seko. Ali had bragged for weeks about how he was going to “dance” around the ring to avoid Foreman’s powerful fists. But instead he leaned back against the ropes, absorbing blows until Foreman wore out, after which Ali delivered a knockout punch. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy, and it stunned the estimated 1 billion people watching around the world.

Back in New York to assemble the film, Gast immediately ran into problems. Ticket sales from the music festival were supposed to have paid his production costs, but after the fight was delayed, Sese Seko had declared it free as a way to drum up attendance.

Gast couldn’t even get ahold of the 300,000 feet of footage he had shot. The London-based company that King said would bankroll the project turned out to be a cover for a shell company based in the Cayman Islands and owned by Stephen Tolbert, the Liberian minister of finance. Gast flew to Liberia to arrange for more money, but before they could make a deal, Tolbert died in a plane crash.

Gast’s lawyer, David Sonenberg, sued in a British court, and after a year Gast had his film, plus hours and hours of audio, piled up in the bedrooms and hallways of his apartment on the Upper

West Side of Manhattan.

What he did not have was money, and so he took on a series of side projects. At one point the Hells Angels hired him to make a film that would counter their reputation as violent criminals — although they undercut their own case when several of them beat up Gast (without seriously injuring him) for refusing to give them editorial control. (The film, “Hells Angels Forever,” was widely panned.)

Not all of Gast’s moneymaking efforts were filmrelated, or legal. One night in June 1979 he and at least four other men were waiting by an airport near Charleston, West Virginia, for a plane carrying some 10 tons of marijuana, which they were smuggling from Colombia. But the aircraft crashed on landing, spilling its contents down a hillside. Gast was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a $10,000 fine and five years’ probation.

In 1989, after years of struggling, Gast reconnected with Sonenberg, who had since become a successful music manager. Gast persuaded him to underwrite the rest of the production process and even to let him use a room in his Manhattan town house as a studio.

Gast was still intent on centering the film on the festival. But one day one of Sonenberg’s clients, hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, was in the studio when Gast was editing a clip of Ali. Jean was enraptured and asked to see more and more of the footage.

Sonenberg and Gast decided to re-edit the film, this time focusing on the fighters, with the music festival as the background. They brought in director Taylor Hackford, who helped edit the film and conducted interviews with Spike Lee, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer (the last two had covered the fight as reporters).

Sonenberg suggested calling the film “When We Were Kings” as a nostalgic reference to the musical and sports royalty who gathered for the event. He even got Jean and his group, the Fugees, to provide music.

In 1996, Gast and Sonenberg took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where they received a special jury citation and 17 distribution offers. Critics praised the film, which nearly swept the awards for documentary films that season — including, in early 1997, the Academy Award for best documentary feature.

At the Oscar ceremony, Ali, who by then had developed Parkinson’s disease, rose from his seat to join Gast and Sonenberg in accepting the award. Foreman, his former nemesis, came up behind him. When Ali had trouble mounting the stage, Foreman took his arm and helped him up.

Leon Jacques Gast was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on March 30, 1936. His father, Samuel Gast, worked in real estate; his mother, Madeleine (Baumann) Gast, was a homemaker.

Leon played basketball at Seton Hall University and then transferred to Columbia, where he studied film and photography but left without a degree.

He found a job at an advertising agency as a still photographer, and his work appeared in Vogue and Esquire. When his company opened a film division, he transferred to making commercials — his first was for

Preparation H.

Gast moved away from advertising in the late 1960s as he began to get work in the music industry, designing album covers and making short films. In 1972 he directed “Our Latin Thing,” a cinéma vérité profile of performers like Willie Colón, Jose Feliciano and Johnny Pacheco. Five years later he released “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert film co-directed with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.

In 1991 Gast married Geri Spolan, who survives him, along with two sons from a previous marriage, Daniel and Clifford; a stepdaughter, Sara Marricco; and six grandchildren.

After “When We Were Kings,” he made two more major documentaries: “Smash His Camera” (2010), about celebrity photographer Ron Galella, and “Manny” (2015), about boxer Manny Pacquiao, which Gast directed with Ryan Moore.

Gast and his wife moved to Woodstock in 2005 and became involved in the Woodstock Film Festival. In 2018 he presented a cut of his latest project, a film about the history of the town.

Despite his nearly 60 years in film, Gast’s career, and most likely his legacy, remains bound to the loquacious boxer he followed around Zaire in 1974 — a fact that he did not seem to regret.

“When I started on it, my kids were in grade school,” he told Newsday in 1997. “I’m a grandfather now. I’m 60, and I’ve spent more than a third of my life working on this. I can’t even remember when I wasn’t thinking about it, when I wasn’t thinking about Ali.”