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Saul Zaentz, an acclaimed independent film producer who adapted literary works for the screen and won best-picture Academy Awards for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Amadeus" and "The English Patient," died Friday at his apartment in San Francisco. He was 92.

Mr. Zaentz died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, the producer Paul Zaentz, his nephew and longtime business partner, told The Associated Press.

Mr. Zaentz (pronounced zants) was comfortably in his 50s when he began making movies and had already made a fortune in the music business from the success of the rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival and the acquisition of a formidable jazz catalog.

In a business driven by celebrity stars and box-office profits, he staked his reputation and his money on serious, intelligent films, often based on offbeat prizewinning books or plays, featuring rising stars and relatively untested directors passionate about the collaboration.

Working with Milos Forman, Anthony Minghella, Peter Weir and other directors, he made only nine films in his cinematic heyday, from 1975 to 2007, most of them without Hollywood studio backing. They included "The Mosquito Coast" (1986), "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988), "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (1991) and "Goya's Ghosts" (2007).

He produced blockbusters and bombs, made and lost millions, and, while applauded by critics, he never became a household name like Zanuck, Spielberg, Hitchcock or George Lucas. But his major hits (each a decade apart), "Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), "Amadeus" (1984) and "The English Patient" (1996), won 22 Oscars for his actors, actresses, directors and other contributors.

And on Oscar night in 1997, Mr. Zaentz won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement and his third best-picture award. It crowned a career and an evening of triumph, with nine Academy Awards conferred on "The English Patient," Mr. Minghella's mesmerizing dramatization of Michael Ondaatje's novel of love and war set in the North African desert and a bombed-out Italian villa.

Described by The New York Times in 1995 as the last of the great independent producers, Mr. Zaentz, a portly, balding man with a full white beard who read voraciously and loved baseball, financed his own pictures when possible to retain creative control, selected his own stars and directors and shot on location to capture the beauties of an African desert, a ruined Tuscan monastery or the jungles of Central America.

Colleagues said he did not interfere with his artists' work. "Saul is the producer ideal because he realized that a film has to be made by one person, the director, not by a committee," Mr. Forman, who directed "Cuckoo's Nest," "Amadeus" and "Goya's Ghosts," recalled in 1995.

Berkeley was the home of the Saul Zaentz Film Center, for years the editing and sound studio for his and other independent films, and the Bay Area was his spiritual home. There in the 1960s and 1970s he made millions in the music business: his grubstake for an autumn-of-life film career that, critics said, reflected his rebel persona and eclectic taste for fiction and drama.

Saul Zaentz was born in Passaic, N.J., on Feb. 28, 1921, one of five children of Morris and Goldie Zaentz, Jewish refugees from a shtetl in Eastern Poland. He ran away from home at 15, sold peanuts at ballgames in St. Louis, made a little money gambling and traveled around the country, hitchhiking and riding freight trains. He enlisted in the Army in World War II and served in Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

After the war he studied at Rutgers University, worked on a chicken farm and took a business course in St. Louis. He settled in San Francisco in 1950 and began working for a record distributor. In 1955 he was hired as a salesman by Fantasy Records, a label whose roster included the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, the poet Allen Ginsberg and the comedian Lenny Bruce. He also managed tours for Duke Ellington, Stan Getz and others.