Edward Lozzi Courtesy Neal PR Edward P. Lozzi, the longtime Hollywood publicist, has died. He was 77.
After a 49-year PR career, Lozzi died April 22 after a brief illness, according to publicist and longtime friend Roger Neal. “Ed was a great publicist, we worked on projects together off and on over these past 45 years. He was my oldest friend in Hollywood,” Neal said in a statement.
Lozzi ran his own Beverly Hills boutique PR firm, Edward Lozzi & Associates, and represented notables including Jon Voight, Milton Berle, Larry Hagman, Debbie Reynolds, Lou Ferrigno, Shirley Jones, Rudy Valle, Melvin Belli and, for more than 25 years until she was murdered in 2003 by record producer Phil Spector, Lana Clarkson.
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In 2013, Lozzi stood outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to protest a screening of the HBO film Phil Spector and claimed the project implied Clarkson had committed suicide. “To see that this film was going to be made was a slap in the face,” Lozzi told THR at the time. “We were so happy Phil Spector was in prison.”
Lozzi was also a political consultant and worked in media advance during the Bush 41 presidency out of Los Angeles.
He was born in Hawthorne, New Jersey, to big band musician Virgil Lozzi and Elizabeth Ann Rhodes, daughter of the New Jersey newspaper owner Raymond Lincoln Rhodes.
Lozzi attended the Delbarton School for Boys and DePaul High School before being recruited to the University of Tennessee’s football team. After majoring in business administration, he joined the USAF Reserve Officer Training Flight School at the Knoxville school in 1967 and was selected for Special Ops. training program during the Vietnam War.
In 1972, Lozzi began work as an underwriter at the Hartford Insurance Co. in New York and a year later joined the family-owned Rhodes Agency insurance brokers in New Jersey. He left the insurance business in his native Hawthorne in 1981 to launch Edward Lozzi & Associates in Los Angeles after an internship at Rogers & Cowan.
His corporate clients included attorney Belli, for whom he handled communications for landmark legal rulings in the early Big Tobacco litigations, DuPont silicone breast implant cases and Norplant Birth control class action suits, among others.
In 1995, during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles, Lozzi was retained by Al Cowlings, the driver of the infamous white Ford Bronco slow police chase seen live on worldwide TV, and arranged a highly viewed news conference by Simpson’s longtime friend.
In 2011, Lozzi and his boutique PR firm received a certificate of commendation from the City of Los Angeles at an event where Fifth District City Council-member Paul Koretz saluted him for his “outstanding contributions to society and accomplishments in the entertainment industry … through your steadfast ways and caring deeds, you have helped to further the common goal of making our city a better place in which to live.”
Survivors include his brother, Marco, sisters Rae Ann and Robyn; son Brandon; and his 100-year-old mother. Memorial plans have not been announced.
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