Larry Brezner fostered talent of various comics

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Larry Brezner, a Hollywood manager and producer who helped propel two little-known comics named Robin Williams and Billy Crystal to stardom, died Oct. 5 in Duarte, California. He was 73.

The cause was complications of leukemia, Brezner’s longtime business partner, David Steinberg, said.

Brezner, who began his professional life as a New York City public schoolteacher, managed a stable of artists that over the years also included Bette Midler, David Letterman, Robert Klein and Martin Short.

He produced more than a dozen feature films, including “Throw Momma From the Train” (1987), starring Crystal and Danny DeVito, and “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987), for which Williams earned his first Academy Award nomination. (The best actor Oscar that year went to Michael Douglas for “Wall Street.”)

At his death a principal in Brezner Steinberg Partners, based in Beverly Hills, California, Brezner was known throughout his career as an astute handicapper of comic talent.

“What I sensed about Larry right from the beginning was how much he knew what ‘funny’ was: how much he appreciated the nuance of how to tell a joke, how a joke lands,” Crystal, a client since 1973, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “And that’s very rare.”

Brezner was born in New York on Aug. 23, 1942. With his family, he often visited the Laurels Country Club in the Catskill Mountains to hear the great midcentury comics. To the end of his life, colleagues said, he could mimic them impeccably.

“He did the best old Jew I’ve ever heard,” Steinberg said Thursday. “He had a perfect Myron Cohen. He did a perfect Walter Matthau.”

The young Brezner earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and did graduate work in the field at St. John’s University in Queens. He taught elementary school in the Bronx before opening The Focus, an ill-fated coffeehouse and performance space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the 1970s.

“He wanted it to be a vegan-slash-organic-food coffeehouse,” Steinberg said. “Guess how it did? He was hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead of his time.”

After The Focus foundered, Brezner joined Rollins and Joffe, a New York talent agency whose stable included Woody Allen. There, he helped represent a fledgling improv troupe known as 3’s Company. When the group made little headway, he realized that one of its members, Crystal, might do far better on his own.

“I was sort of a closeted stand-up,” Crystal said. “He gave me confidence to go out there alone and try it.”

Brezner, who later worked out of Los Angeles, spotted a young Williams in an improv class there in the late ’70s and helped channel his perpetual motion into a routine that was cohesive and sometimes even sedately self-revealing.

“He had comedic energy that rebounded through the room,” Brezner told The New York Times in 1985. “It felt like you’d stepped into a wind tunnel.”

He added, “If he just did his thing, the effect was that people laughed a lot, but they wouldn’t know who he is.”

Brezner’s other films as a producer include “The ’Burbs” (1989), starring Tom Hanks; “Coupe de Ville” (1990), starring Patrick Dempsey; and “Angie” (1994), starring Geena Davis.

Brezner’s first marriage, to singer and songwriter Melissa Manchester, whom he met when she appeared at his coffeehouse and whom he managed for a time, ended in divorce; he was also divorced from his second wife, Bett Zimmerman.

His survivors include his third wife, Dominique Cohen-Brezner; a brother, Jeff; and two daughters from his marriage to Zimmerman, Lauren Azbill and China Brezner.

Though Brezner was by all accounts immensely funny in private, his few quasi-public stabs at comedy — performances at parties and the like — met with unqualified pans from those best equipped to judge.

“He had miserable instincts onstage,” Crystal recalled warmly Thursday. “Sometimes when he’d come offstage I’d say, ‘I have one big note for you: Don’t ever do this again.’”