Gary Smith, an Emmy Award-winning television producer who specialized in creating sophisticated programming for stars like Barbra Streisand, Elvis Presley and Mikhail Baryshnikov, died on July 18 in Los Angeles. He was 90.
The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a family spokesman.
Mr. Smith’s partner for nearly 40 years in the production of TV specials, awards shows and extravaganzas was Dwight Hemion. Their many collaborations, which began in the 1960s, earned them numerous Primetime Emmy Awards. Mr. Smith also won several more on his own.
“They helped define the best of American variety television entertainment, from intimate musical specials to celebrations of history like ‘Liberty Weekend’” (commemorating the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in 1986), said Ron Simon, the head curator of the Paley Center for Media.
Mr. Smith said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2001 that conversations with stars were critical to determining the theme of a special. He recalled that Mr. Baryshnikov told him that “A Chorus Line,” which he saw sometime after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1974, “really knocked me out.”
That was the hook that Mr. Smith said he needed to develop the 1980 special “Baryshnikov on Broadway.” In that show, Liza Minnelli guides Mr. Baryshnikov on a dreamlike tour of Broadway musicals, and he leaps assuredly into each one, dancing in one familiar production number after another from “Oklahoma!,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “A Chorus Line” and other musicals.
“This glorious show transcends theater or dance,” the Newsday critic Marvin Kitman wrote, calling it “the best of the great Smith-Hemion musical pieces.”
The show won four Emmys, including one for outstanding variety or music program that Mr. Smith shared with Mr. Hemion, Mr. Baryshnikov and Herman Krawitz, the executive producer.
Two years earlier, Ben Vereen, the singer, dancer and actor who had reached a huge audience as Chicken George in the blockbuster mini-series “Roots” (1977), told Mr. Smith and Mr. Hemion that he and his friends had entertained one another when they were young by using a large tree stump outside a candy store as a stage on which to sing and dance.
“That became the home base, the glue, for the Ben Vereen special” — called “The Sentry College Presents Ben Vereen … His Roots” — Mr. Smith said in the Television Academy interview. “We built a set outside a stoop.”
In his review in The Baltimore Sun, Bill Carter wrote, “That the special is uncompromising quality television is logical, not only because the star is so talented but also because it is the work of the best TV variety production team in the business — Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion.”
Gary Stephen Smith was born on Jan. 7, 1935, in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. His father, Joseph, was a dress manufacturer; his mother, Estelle (Abrams) Smith, worked in a department store.
Gary showed artistic talent at a young age. While in high school, he painted sets in a scenic design shop for Broadway musicals like “Top Banana” and “Guys and Dolls.” Later, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, he majored in scenic design. But he left without graduating in 1956, because, he said, he chose to focus on writing his thesis, which caused him to miss enough scenic design classes that his teacher failed him. (Forty-six years later, in 2002, he received the school’s Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award.)
In New York City, he took the United Scenic Artists union’s weeklong scenic design exam. After passing, he got a job that involved designing sets for live commercials for sponsors like Geritol and Bulova.
In 1959, he was hired as an art director for a summer replacement series starring the singer Andy Williams. He went on to work on a Judy Garland special and “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall,” for which he won his first Emmy Award, in 1962. The next year, he began working as an art director on “The Judy Garland Show.” He made a quick and unusual leap to producer after only a few weeks.
In 1965, Mr. Smith became the producer of “Hullabaloo,” one of two popular network variety shows (the other was “Shindig!”) that featured rock music and were aimed at young viewers. But young people weren’t its only audience.
Mr. Smith said that he saw people over 25 at discos doing the Freddie, a wacky dance created by the British rock group Freddie and the Dreamers. “And you know where the Freddie got started? On ‘Hullabaloo,’” he told The Sacramento Union in 1965.
Mr. Smith had met Mr. Hemion while working on “Kraft Music Hall,” where Mr. Hemion was a director, and in 1967 they teamed up to produce a special starring Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
For more than three decades, the two collaborated on television specials, working with stars like Neil Diamond, Ann-Margret, Bing Crosby, Burt Bacharach, Bette Midler and Glen Campbell. They also worked together on “Elvis in Concert,” built around Elvis Presley’s last tour before his death in August 1977, and three specials starring Ms. Streisand. Without Mr. Hemion, Mr. Smith produced and directed “Streisand: Live in Concert,” taken from a performance on her 2006 tour.
“All of Barbra’s TV work demands long and arduous hours,” Mr. Smith said in a 2003 interview posted on the Barbra Streisand Archives website. “There are no shortcuts or one-take items. The hours are long, because she gets so totally involved in making each take better.”
In a statement, Ms. Streisand recalled working with Mr. Smith, first as a producer when she sang with Ms. Garland on “The Judy Garland Show” in 1963 and then on a Burt Bacharach special in 1971. “Gary happened to be there when I met Burt on a tennis court, so Gary got us together and we sang the song ‘Close to You,’” she said, adding that Mr. Smith had “wonderful taste” and “always brought an infectious spirit to his work and made the long hours fun.”
Mr. Smith and Mr. Hemion worked on other kinds of program as well, including the inaugural galas in 1985 for President Ronald Reagan and in 1993 for President Bill Clinton; “Romeo and Juliet on Ice” (1983), featuring the gold medal-winning Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill; “Happy Birthday, Bugs! 50 Looney Years” (1990) — which celebrated the rascally cartoon rabbit Bugs Bunny; and “Kennedy Center’s 25th Anniversary” (1996).
After Mr. Hemion retired, around 2001, Mr. Smith worked with other collaborators. He was the executive producer of a series of American Film Institute specials; a tribute to “I Love Lucy” on its 50th anniversary in 2001; and the Tony Awards telecasts in 2002 and 2003. Mr. Hemion died in 2008.
Mr. Smith also produced the network prime-time television broadcasts of the 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2000 Democratic National Conventions.
“Everybody complains about the fact that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party package their conventions,” he told The Washington Post in 1996. “I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that. Why is it negative to think about something being packaged, as long as it’s still truthful?”
Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Maxine (Lengel) Smith, with whom he worked on “Hullabaloo” and whom he married in 1971; their twin sons, Jake and Zack; a daughter, Daisy Smith, and two sons, Doug and Sam, from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren.
In early November 1963, Mr. Smith recalled in the Television Academy interview, he was sitting in Ms. Garland’s dressing room at CBS when she picked up the telephone and told the operator, “Get me the White House. It’s Judy Garland.”
He thought she was showing off, but it turned out that she knew President John F. Kennedy — she had visited him in the White House in 1962 — and eventually he came on the line.
“He must have said to her, obviously, ‘Sing,’ and she said, ‘I can’t sing on the telephone,’” Mr. Smith remembered. But after some cajoling, he said, “She starts to sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on the phone, in hair curlers, to President Kennedy.”
Mr. Smith added: “I will never forget this as long as I live. And two weeks later, he was assassinated.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Gary Smith, Master Producer of TV Entertainment, Dies at 90 appeared first on New York Times.
