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Hollywood calls on Rabbi David Wolpe

[additional-authors]
October 28, 2014

Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple was pleasantly surprised when the call came that Warner Bros., along with Gulfstream Pictures, was optioning his new book “David:  The Divided Heart (Yale University Press) to be developed into a screenplay not long ago. 

Wolpe, who was once named by Newsweek as the most influential rabbi in America, is the author of seven previous books, including “Why Faith Matters” and “Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times.”  But “David” is the first of his tomes to ever be picked up by Hollywood.

“I never expected it,” Wolpe said in a recent telephone interview.  “It’s a kick.  It’s just so much fun that it would even be possible.”

The option is part of a Hollywood trend in which studios are churning out biblical epics via tentpole films:  Think Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” of earlier this year and Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Exodus:  Gods and Kings,” starring Christian Bale as Moses and slated to hit theaters on Dec. 12.  There’s even another King David project in the works, this one also in Scott’s hands, at 20th Century Fox.

“The Bible’s heroes are not perfect heroes,” Wolpe said of one reason such films are on the rise.  “And David is pre-eminent among them.  He’s the most flawed hero, and in the modern age we’re much more accepting of the idea that heroes can have serious flaws than 30 or 50 years ago.”

And King David’s story is inherently cinematic:  “In addition to the many battle scenes, there’s plenty of sex, fraught relationships with people who are close to him, and plenty of family drama,” Wolpe said.  “There are set pieces that people are very familiar with, like David and Goliath, as well as the Shakespearean dimension of this being the life of a king….David lived on a large canvas so I can imagine that if the film were done well it would be a remarkable story.”

Wolpe has been intrigued by his biblical namesake since his father wrote an inscription in his high school yearbook mentioning the ancient king.  “Principally what he had written was how beloved David was,” Wolpe recalled.  “But the more I read about David, the more I realized he’s a very problematic character.”

One the one hand, King David was pious, a poet, a musician and a king who united his nation.  On the other, Wolpe said, “He’s an adulterer, a murderer and a warrior in the most savage way.  And when you combine all of this you wonder what is it about this man that would lead him to become not just a hero but in some ways the hero.  He is the precursor of the Messiah, the one who is going to bring redemption, but he hardly seems a redemptive figure when you read the text itself.”

Fast forward to a couple of years ago, when an editor at Yale University Press asked Wolpe if he could write a book for its “Jewish Lives” series.  “He told me Moses was already taken, but I said, ‘That’s fine, because I actually want to do David,’” Wolpe recalled.

The rabbi took a three-month sabbatical from Sinai Temple to write the book, which he described as a kind of “collage” that presents “roughly a chronological account of David, divided up [into segments] describing his role as father, warrior, lover and husband – all the different roles that he played in the course of a long and almost astonishingly eventful life.”

As its title implies, “The Divided Heart” focuses in large part on David’s psychology, spotlighting, for example, the complex relationships he forged with women — notably Michal, Abigail and of course Batsheva, the married woman with whom he committed adultery and conceived a child before arranging the murder of her husband.

“David’s contradictions are not only that he is both at times extremely pious and at other times extremely wicked, but that the listens to women and allows their counsel to change his life, which is very rare in the biblical canon,” Wolpe said.

The idea for the film began with producer Mike Karz, 47, of Gulfstream Pictures, a longtime member of Sinai Temple who has known Wolpe since the then-rabbinical student was his ninth grade confirmation teacher.  Wolpe also presided over the brises of all three of Karz’s sons, as well as his oldest son’s bar mitzvah last year, Karz said.

The producer is known primarily for his family films and comedies – including Adam Sandler’s 2014 romantic comedy “Blended” — but he had hoped to make a biblical epic since visiting Israel four-and-a-half years ago.  “I noticed that the visitors were not just Jews, but people from all over the world and all walks of life,” Karz said.  “That made me realize that we in Hollywood should be doing more movies about characters from the Bible who are so meaningful to so many people from different cultures.”

Karz promptly spoke to an executive at Warner Brothers, where Gulfstream has an overall production deal, and when the executive liked his idea about making Bible-themed films, Karz began researching the subject in earnest.

But he didn’t settle on a topic until a few years later, when he chanced to sit next to Wolpe at a Purim event at Sinai Temple.  “I was listening to the megillah being read, and I leaned over and said to Rabbi Wolpe, ‘This story would make a great animated movie,’”  Karz recalled.  “And he [replied] ‘What do you think about King David?’  I said, ‘That’s a great story, too.’  And he said “Good, because I just signed a deal to write a book for Yale University Press about King David.’”

Eventually Warner brothers signed on to the project, and screenwriter Nick Schoenfeld was hired to adapt Wolpe’s “David” into a screenplay.  Since then, the rabbi has been working closely with Schoenfeld as a consultant to the film.

It’s important to us that [the rabbi] stay as involved as possible,” Karz said of developing the script.  “We’re relying very heavily upon what he has written in his book to create [the film].”

Wolpe, for his part, said, “I see my role as helping to keep the film as defensible as possible.  My preference would be that the movie is a faithful interpretation of the biblical text that can add to what the text tells us — but as much as possible doesn’t violate the integrity of the story.”

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