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Zack Norman, who made his mark as an actor in films like \u201cRomancing the Stone\u201d and \u201cCadillac Man\u201d and with appearances on television shows like \u201cThe A-Team\u201d and \u201cThe Nanny\u201d \u2014 and who, as a producer, also became known for a star-crossed movie that became a running punchline on the show \u201cMystery Science Theater 3000\u201d \u2014 died on April 28 in Burbank, Calif. He was 83.<\/p>\n
The cause of his death, at a hospital, was bilateral pneumonia related to the coronavirus, his daughter Lori Zuker Briller said.<\/p>\n
While best known for scene-stealing appearances as a supporting player, Mr. Norman was always more than a character actor. He was also a painter, a real estate developer and an art collector who in the 1980s mingled with the likes of Andy Warhol<\/a> and Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Starting in the early 1970s, Mr. Norman tallied nearly 40 movie and television acting credits. He had a memorably menacing turn as Danny DeVito\u2019s crocodile-tending antiquities-smuggler sidekick in \u201cRomancing the Stone,\u201d Robert Zemeckis\u2019s 1984 adventure comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was abundantly familiar to fans of the indie director Henry Jaglom, appearing in many of Mr. Jaglom\u2019s films, including \u201cSitting Ducks\u201d<\/a> (1980), a comedy in which he was one of two dimwitted hoods who steal from a gambling syndicate, and \u201cHollywood Dreams\u201d<\/a> (2006), in which he played a kindly film producer who looks after a fame-obsessed starlet (Tanna Frederick).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That role was not much of a leap for Mr. Norman, who, under his real name, Howard Zuker, <\/em>produced or financed more than 40 movies. Among the films he backed was \u201cHearts and Minds,\u201d<\/a> Peter Davis\u2019s landmark exploration of the Vietnam War, which took home the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1975.<\/p>\n A far more obscure film that Mr. Norman helped produce, \u201cChief Zabu\u201d (1986), entered into pop-culture lore in an unusual way: by disappearing for three decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Howard Jerrold Zuker was born on May 27, 1940, in Boston, the elder of two children of Sydney Zuker, a lawyer, and Evelyn (Bloomberg) Zuker, and grew up in nearby Revere, Mass. Inspired by Lenny Bruce, he started doing stand-up comedy in local clubs in his late teens.<\/p>\n He took up acting while attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville. But after leaving Vanderbilt, he discovered that it was hard to pay the bills as a fledgling actor and comedian, so at 23 he went to work at a cousin\u2019s real estate development firm in Boston.<\/p>\n \u201cI became, in <\/em>a year and a half, a millionaire<\/a>,\u201d he said in an interview last year on the podcast \u201cNot Real Art.\u201d \u201cI realized that being rich was not the answer,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s how I went back to New York and started in show business again.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1965, he produced his first Off Broadway play, John Arden\u2019s \u201cLive Like Pigs.\u201d<\/a> A year later, he toured Europe as a stand-up comic. Following a set at the Playboy Club in London, Variety deemed him \u201cone of the funniest men to ever cross these shores.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the years, he continued to finance his career by developing properties in New York and Florida, as well as by unearthing bargains in the art world. In the early 1980s, he purchased several early works by Basquiat for four-figure sums, long before prices<\/a> of his work came to rival those of private Caribbean islands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cChief Zabu,\u201d<\/a> which Mr. Norman wrote, produced and directed with Neil Cohen, was another bargain, made on a shoestring budget of $200,000. Mr. Norman was also a star of the film: He played Sammy Brooks, a real estate mogul who, with his friend Ben Sydney (Allen Garfield), pursues both financial and political ambitions in a grandiose scheme to take over a fictitious Polynesian island.<\/p>\n The film fizzled in a preview<\/a> and was never released. For 30 years it was buried, but not forgotten \u2014 at least not to fans of \u201cMystery Science Theater 3000,\u201d<\/a> the Generation X staple of the 1990s that featured a weary space traveler and his robot friends poking fun at bad B-movies on a journey through the cosmos.<\/p>\n On the show, any time a character in one of those achingly bad movies cracked a newspaper, Joel Hodgson, the original host, would wearily intone, \u201cHey, Zack Norman is Sammy in \u2018Chief Zabu.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It was a knowing reference to an advertisement, featuring a stern photo of Mr. Norman, that he continued to run \u2014 stubbornly yet playfully \u2014 in Weekly Variety every Wednesday for nine years. Why? \u201cBecause it gave me great joy,\u201d he said in a 2016 interview with The Sun Sentinel of South Florida.<\/p>\n In addition to his daughter Lori, Mr. Norman is survived by his wife of 40 years, Nancy Zuker; his sister, Janie Krasker; his sons, Stephen and Michael Aron; another daughter, Tracy Aron Brittan; and 14 grandchildren. He was previously married to Norma Blumenthal Sommers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Norman\u2019s faith in \u201cChief Zabu\u201d eventually paid off. He and Mr. Cohen released a new cut of the film in 2016 and then took it on tour, presenting it at comedy clubs. Even so, it took them decades to realize that the Variety ad had become a cultural artifact.<\/p>\n In a 2020 interview with the film website Skewed & Reviewed, Mr. Cohen said that neither of them had heard of \u201cMystery Science Theater 3000\u201d<\/a> until one afternoon in the mid-2010s when they were walking down a Los Angeles street and saw a man wearing a \u201cZack Norman as Sammy in Chief Zabu\u201d T- shirt.<\/p>\n \u201cWe stopped the guy and said, \u2018Dude, what is up with that?\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd you can image his reaction when he saw he was talking to Zack Norman, whose face was on his T-shirt.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n