News

Frank Price, the writer-producer who emerged from the world of TV Westerns to preside over the television and movie divisions at Universal and serve two terms as the head of Columbia Pictures, died Monday. He was 95.

Price died in his sleep of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son Roy Price, the former president of Amazon Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter.

As a movie boss, Frank Price had a hand in such critical successes as the Oscar best picture winners Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Gandhi (1982) and Out of Africa (1985) and huge money-makers including Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Boyz n the Hood (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992).

Earlier, Price had spent nearly two decades as a writer, producer and then head of Universal Television. His idea put The Virginian — one of TV’s longest-running Westerns — in motion, and he executive produced Ironside and It Takes a Thief.

Jonathan Haze, who originated the Seymour role in cult classic 1960 horror comedy The Little Shop of Horrors during a long collaboration with its director Roger Corman, has died. He was 95.

His daughter, Rebecca Haze, told Deadline that he died peacefully of natural causes on November 2 at his home in Los Angeles but did not provide a cause.

Jonathan Haze and Dorothy Malone in ‘Five Guns West,’ 1955

Born in Pittsburgh on April 1, 1929, Haze was discovered working in a gas station by Wyott Ordung, who gave him a role in Monster from the Ocean Floor, which Corman produced. That same year, he cast Haze in The Fast and the Furious and then as Billy Candy in the 1955 western Five Guns West, starring John Lund and Dorothy Malone.

They were the first of nearly 20 movies they made together, including 1955’s Apache Woman and Day the World Ended; 1956’s Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman, It...