R.I.P. Saul Zaentz, Oscar-winning producer of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Saul Zaentz, who parlayed a successful run in the music industry into a second career as one of the most ambitious and adventurous of independent film producers, has died. Zaentz had suffered from Alzheimer’s in recent years. He was 92.
After five years spent working as a distributor for powerful jazz impresario and producer Norman Granz, Zaentz moved to Fantasy Records in 1955. In 1967, Zaentz put together a group of investors who purchased Fantasy and—with Zaentz in the driver’s seat—expanded the commercial and creative range of the jazz-centered label by signing Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR would quickly become one of the most successful rock acts in the world, and it would spend its entire recording career with Fantasy, in the process making both the company and Zaentz hugely rich.
The only downside of that connection: a feud between Zaentz and CCR frontman John Fogerty that persisted for decades after the band broke up in 1972. Fogerty, who had signed away his distribution and publishing rights to Fantasy in order to get out of his contract, refused for years to perform any material he’d recorded with CCR, all in order to deny Zaentz further royalties. In 1985, Forgerty released his first new album in a decade, Centerfield; it contained a song about a thieving pig called “Zanz Kant Danz.”
Zaentz sued Fogerty for defamation of character and, for good measure, filed a plagiarism suit claiming that one of Fogerty’s new songs, “The Old Man Down The Road,” copied the melody of “Run Through The Jungle,” a 1970 song that Fogerty had written for CCR—and a song Zaentz therefore owned. A jury ruled in Fogerty’s favor in the plagiarism case, but following the lawsuit, Fogerty and Warner Bros. ended up changing the name of the pig song to “Vanz Kant Danz.”