David Horowitz, a pioneering Hollywood PR pro in the Oscar realm who played a key role in booking Bill Clinton's iconic appearance playing the saxophone on late-night TV, died July 17 in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Horowitz' PR credits include Oscar Best Picture-winners like "Dances with Wolves," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." He is also credited with arranging then-candidate Bill Clinton's appearance on "The Arsenio Hall Show" during the 1992 campaign, resulting in the iconic image of the future president playing the saxophone in wayfarer sunglasses.
The Los Angeles Times, which called him one of the Hollywood PR sector's top veterans, said Horowitz excelled at "low-key, naturalistic campaigns" to promote films. Deadline said he was "one of the first and most important practitioners of a job that hasnow become widespread in the industry" -- Oscar film publicist.
Horowitz' fried and colleague Carl Samrock told the Times he often spread interest in films through chatter and word-of-mouth, "as simple as 'I've seen this movie. It's great.'"
His career started out on the ad side with the Goodman Organization and moved to the PR side under director Robert Aldrich in the early 1960s with "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" He was a president for Rogers & Cowan, VP at Kirk Douglas' Bryna Productions, VP at TriStar, and publicity chief at Warner Bros.
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