Carl Samrock, the veteran Hollywood publicist who over the course of a 50-year career worked for Warner Bros. and headed his own firm, has died. He was 81.
Samrock died Saturday night of pancreatic cancer at his home in Encino, his wife of 44 years, Carol Andelman Samrock, announced.
Samrock was vice president of national publicity at Warner Bros. Pictures in Burbank under co-chairmen Bob Daly and Terry Semel. He joined the company in 1982 as West Coast publicity director and built and managed a 16-member staff responsible for publicity duties on some 30 films in production or release annually.
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Samrock moved to Warner Home Video in 1997 as a consultant to help then-president Warren Lieberfarb introduce the new format.
A year later, he launched Carl Samrock Public Relations, a boutique firm that focused on publicity and promotion campaigns for DVD and Blu-ray releases. For the next nearly two decades, the company handled such tentpole titles as The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca and Gone With the Wind for Warner, Seinfeld: The Complete Series for Sony and many Disney and DreamWorks Animation classics.
In 2017, his firm was acquired by its strategic partner Click Communications.
Samrock was born on June 1, 1941, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father, Victor Samrock, was a Broadway producer and manager, and his mother, Hyla, once was a member of the Doris Humphreys modern dance troupe.
Samrock attended the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan and the Horace Mann School in the Bronx before graduating from Tufts University in 1965.
Soon after college, Samrock worked as a theatrical press agent on stage shows including the 1967 off-Broadway hit You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; The Subject Was Roses; In Praise of Love, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Harris; Private Lives, starring Maggie Smith; A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, starring Albert Finney; and I Have a Dream, starring Billy Dee Williams as Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1977, Samrock was appointed vice president in the New York office of ICPR Public Relations, a corporate and entertainment PR that worked with major movie studios and independent film producers, actors and filmmakers.
From the late ’60s through the mid-’70s, Samrock was a freelance photographer, specializing in entertainment and editorial work, in particular for The New York Times‘ Arts and Leisure section. His personality portraits for the paper included Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Jessica Tandy, Randy Newman, Joan Baez, Robert Altman, Anne Baxter and Christopher Walken.
In 1972, his photo coverage of Bella Abzug’s run for Congress accompanied a New York Times Magazine feature on the campaign.
In addition to Broadway and off-Broadway shows, he provided publicity photos for WNET/13 (the Great Performance series, The Adams Chronicles, Theatre in America and Monty Python’s 1972 trip to New York) and Warner Bros. Records (Joe Cocker, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Seger).
Samrock lectured regularly on publicity at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA, serving as a faculty member in Westwood for brief time. He also was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and on the board of directors of the American Society of Magazine Photographers.
And he was president of the Encino Little League for the 1995-96 season.
In addition to his wife, survivors include his sons Gabriel (and his wife, Faye) and Steven (Katsue), sister Ellen and granddaughter Daisy.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
