RIP Paul Maslansky

 

Paul Maslansky, ‘Police Academy’ and ‘Return to Oz’ Producer, Dies at 91

The trumpet player from New York also shepherded ‘The Castle of the Living Dead,’ George Cukor’s ‘The Blue Bird,’ ‘The Russia House’ and ‘Love Child.’

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

December 6, 2024

 

Producer Paul Maslansky, who came up with the premise for the first Police Academy movie and got help from three world-class directors to push the troubled cult classic Return to Oz past the finish line, has died. He was 91.

Maslansky died Monday of natural causes at a hospital in Los Robles, California, his partner of 16 years, Sally Emr, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The New Yorker made his producing debut in Italy on The Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, and he filmed George Cukor’s penultimate feature, the Elizabeth Taylor-starring The Blue Bird (1976), and Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House (1990), starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, in the Soviet Union.

Maslansky, who collaborated often with Oscar winner Alan Ladd Jr., also produced Larry Peerce’s Love Child (1982), starring Amy Madigan in the true story of a woman who is impregnated by a guard in prison and has to fight to keep her baby; the slapstick comedy Scavenger Hunt (1979), directed by Michael Schultz; and Fluke (1995), about a selfish businessman (Matthew Modine) reincarnated as a dog.

After finishing up on Love Child in Florida, Maslansky was asked by Ladd to go to San Francisco to check in on The Right Stuff, the astronaut movie that The Ladd Co. was producing. On hand for the John Glenn ticker-tape parade scene, he saw a group of SFPD officers arrive that “looked funny.”

As he recalled in a 2014 interview, Maslansky learned that they weren’t really cops, they were police academy cadets, hired because of the city’s fair employment hiring policy. “We have to take them in,” he was told, “but we can flunk them out after three weeks.”

That night, Maslansky wrote a two-page story “about a group of [prospective officers] who don’t want to get thrown out, they want to become real cops and win the day.”

Ladd told him he could make the movie for about $4.5 million. After Neal Israel and Pat Proft took about six weeks to write a first draft, WKRP in Cincinnati creator Hugh Wilson did a rewrite over a weekend. “We shot that script, he transformed it,” Maslansky said. (Wilson also directed.)

Filmed in Toronto, Warner Bros.’ Police Academy (1984) opened with a robust $8.6 million ($32 million today) and went on to rake in $82 million ($249 million today) while spawning six sequels, an animated series, a live-action series and more.

Police Academy had not yet reached theaters when Disney sent Maslansky to London to replace producer Gary Kurtz on the effects-heavy Return to Oz (1985), which had fallen behind schedule under the direction of first-time helmer Walter Murch.

Maslansky faced a crisis five weeks into filming when Murch, who was making the jump after years as a lauded film and sound editor, appeared unable to continue on Oz, appearing “obviously confused,” he said in 2010.

With Maslansky and Disney executive Richard Berger making a list of possible directors to take over for Murch, the producer remarkably received calls from George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, who said they were rushing to London to help.

Lucas took over for about a week, Spielberg stayed for a couple of days and Coppola “gave Walter his attaboys,” Maslansky said.

Murch was able to complete the dark Wizard of Oz sequel, but it grossed just $11.1 million in the U.S. on what the producer said was a budget of about $20 million.

One of three sons, Paul Marc Maslansky was born in Harlem on Nov. 23, 1933, and raised in Queens. His father, Manuel, was a dentist who spent six years in World War II, and his mother, Beatrice, was a homemaker.

After Forest Hills High School, he followed his older brother, Robert, to Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and he played jazz trumpet in a band called the Southern Collegians before graduating in 1954.

Maslansky spent two years in the U.S. Army, attended NYU Law School for a year and worked as a musician before moving to Paris. He cobbled together $1,500 and hired Melvin Van Peebles to write a documentary about Fullbright scholars that screened in 1960 in Cannes and was bought by Screen Gems.

Hired as producer Charles H. Schneer’s assistant in London, Maslansky moved up the ladder on such films as Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Carol Reed’s The Running Man (1963) and Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships (1964).

He made his producing debut on The Castle of the Living Dead and gave Donald Sutherland his first credited movie role (he actually played three characters). Maslansky said he made the horror film for $120,000 and sold it to Sam Z. Arkoff at American International Pictures.

He then worked for a couple years at United Artists before joining his high school buddy Ike Pappas, by then a CBS reporter, in covering the Six-Day War in Israel in 1967.

n addition to The Blue Bird, the first two Police Academy films, Love Child and The Russia House, Maslansky worked with the respected Ladd on Death Line (1972), Race With the Devil (1975) and Damnation Alley (1977).

His other producing/exec producing credits included Hot Stuff (1979), The Villain (1979) and Cop & 1/2 (1993)

Maslansky directed one feature, the cult blaxploitation favorite Sugar Hill (1974), starring Marki Bey, and earned an Emmy nomination for producing a 1978 NBC miniseries about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that starred Paul Winfield.

In addition to Sally — she and Maslansky made things official with a marriage ceremony officiated by a rabbi in the ICU at the hospital just before he died, she said — survivors include his children, Sacha, Sabina and Samuel, and grandchildren Gigi and Ashton.

His late younger brother, Michael, was a Hollywood publicist whose clients included Katharine Hepburn, Jessica Lange, Peter Finch, Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Sylvester Stallone and Marty Feldman.

Maslansky, who made cameo appearances in the Police Academy movies, said the first film’s gag that had George Gaynes’ Commandant Lassard receiving oral sex while at a podium “built my house in the Malibu Colony.”

“Police Academy changed my life, in terms of material things,” he said in a 2021 interview. “I always knew that I was decent at my job, but I never had a hit in the movie business. I had turned 50 and had made 25, 30 pictures … but I hadn’t had a breakout hit. That was the one.”

MASLANSKY, Paul (Paul Marc Maslansky)

Born: 11/23/1933, Rego Park, New York, U.S.A.

Died: 12/2/2024, Los Robles, California, U.S.A.

 

Paul Maslansky’s westerns – producer:

The Gun and the Pulpit – 1974 [producer]

The Villain – 1979 [executive producer]