May 15, 2012 | 8:11 pm

New world view

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Follow me on or

George Clooney and Fred Kramer are arrested for civil disobedience at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., in March. Photo by Sasha Lezhnev/Enough Projects

Two years ago, Fred Kramer took a big, luxurious break from work to travel the world and find himself.

In March, as the newly minted executive director of Jewish World Watch, he found himself locked in a jail cell with George Clooney.

“It was quite a day,” Kramer said of the civil disobedience he stirred alongside the world’s most famous movie star, outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.

It began with a protest walk from the Religious Action Center, just down the street from the embassy, but instantly morphed into a paparazzi party, as hordes of reporters desperately cleaved to Clooney. “People were literally tripping over themselves,” Kramer recalled. Kramer got his one-on-one from a Clooney-side seat in the cop car.

“I rode in the wagon with him; we got booked together at the police station; then we were in a cell together for two or three hours before everything got resolved and they let us out,” Kramer said nonchalantly.

Just a short time ago it would have been almost impossible to imagine that he’d be touting his celebrity run-ins to draw attention to his work, but Kramer’s unexpected turn from business developer to nonprofit overseer has demanded it.

“Our culture is clearly somewhat infatuated with celebrities,” he said.

A mellow, free-spirited type with a penchant for white linen, Kramer once fancied the artist’s life.

An early foray into filmmaking that produced two smallish independent films — “Wednesday’s Child” (1999) and “Amy’s Orgasm” (2001) — quickly proved to him that “my movies were not going to end up getting made.” So he quit producing and went to work developing the technology company WithoutABox, an online international film-festival application program that, after just eight years, he and his partners sold to the Web giant Internet Movie Database. At 37, Kramer had a bundle of cash and a ballooning wanderlust, which he parlayed into a 34-foot Catalina sailboat and a one-year sabbatical.

When he wasn’t wandering Peru, India or one of six countries in Africa, he was likely to be found chattering in the back at IKAR, the synagogue where he served as board chair. But if the social justice seed was nurtured within the walls of the Westside JCC, it flourished while traveling through the African wilderness, where his wanderings brought him into contact with the consequences of modern genocide.

He returned to Los Angeles inspired to act but unsure what to do. A friend told him Jewish World Watch was looking for an executive director. “My initial reaction was, ‘This is not what I do,’ ” Kramer said. “I had considered myself a businessman, and had assumed when I began looking for new work that it would be finding a new business and making money. I had never really considered the option of running a non-profit.”

He said his involvement with IKAR “had a tremendous effect on my willingness to try something like this, both [in terms] of my Jewish identity and my obligation toward the world.” From living in the lap of luxury to visiting the depths of deprivation, Kramer found himself compelled to support “people having a more difficult time than I am.”

Los Angeles, land of plenty, was the perfect place from which to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. “I can tell you that the level of attention we’re able to draw to our issues when a public figure is advocating for them alongside us is completely different than what we are able to attract when they are not,” Kramer said. The glitter of fame has two sides. “Clearly it’s effective.”

Which is why one of Kramer’s early priorities in his new position is to use L.A.’s backyard celebrity candy store to bring attention to his organization’s cause. On May 20, the Jewish World Watch annual 5K “Walk to End Genocide”  will take place at Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles, and for the first time some notable Hollywood names will join: Josh Radnor (star of CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother”), Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda,” “Ocean’s Eleven”) and TV’s Lisa Edelstein (“House”).

For some of those connections, Kramer owes a debt to his fiancée, actress Michaela Watkins, who represents another sea change in his life inspired by his travels. “It was really an opening on a number of fronts,” he said, “and that element of the journey started when I met the woman of my dreams.”

Kramer’s dreams for Jewish World Watch include more interfaith work, expanding programming around the country and creating an office for the organization in Washington, D.C. And just maybe, a little help from Clooney.

“One of the things I asked of him,” — in jail — “was, I said, ‘You know, we have the world’s largest solar cooker project,’ ” which provides women and girls with a cooking alternative that eliminates the dangers of collecting firewood. “And in a movie he did, ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats,’ he actually kicks a solar cooker and talks about what a piece of s—- it is.

“So I told him about the cooker project and reminded him of that scene, and he chuckled, and I asked him if he would help me rectify that image and maybe produce a spot where he explains that there’s some real good that comes out of solar cooking.”

Clooney said yes.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

Share this post: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Google Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati YahooMyWeb

May 15, 2012 | 10:55 am

Here’s lookin at you, kid

Posted by Danielle Berrin

My souvenir for conducting the closing night Q-and-A for the movie "Dorfman" at the 2012 Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival. L-R: writer and radiologist Iddo Netanyahu, filmmaker Andrew Wainrib, L.A. Jewish Film Festival director Hilary Helstein, Elliott Gould and me

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 14, 2012 | 7:01 pm

The journey of a tiny Torah scroll from a concentration camp to outer space

Posted by Danielle Berrin

A secret bar mitzvah at Bergen-Belsen. Israel’s first astronaut, Ilon Ramon. The fate of the Columbia Space Shuttle.

“I thought I was making a documentary about the Holocaust,” director Dan Cohen tells the camera in a meta-movie about his movie, “An Article of Hope.”

But the story he had planned took a remarkable turn when he made a startling discovery about a miniature Torah scroll, no larger than the palm of your hand.

First smuggled into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944 by the chief rabbi of Holland, Simon Dasberg, the tiny scroll was used in a clandestine Bar Mitzvah ceremony for the young Joachim Joseph, who promised his rabbi he’d safeguard it. The rabbi perished in the camp, but Joseph survived; and with the scrap of the scroll that enjoined him as an adult to his people, he emigrated to Israel and became a successful scientist. Many decades later, when Israel’s first astronaut Ilan Ramon was conscripted to travel on the Space Shuttle Columbia, Ramon asked Joseph if he could bring the scroll with him into space “as a symbol”.

“He thought he would show it to the world how a person can go from the depths of hell to the heights of space,” Joseph recalls in the documentary.

And indeed, Ramon did just that. Before the mission’s fateful end on February 1, 2003, images from the spacecraft show him holding up the delicate scroll, like a kitten in his hand, for the world to see. The little scroll had survived the Holocaust, but it would not survive the Columbia’s re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, when the spaceship and all seven passengers disintegrated into thin air over Texas.

“An Article of Hope,” which traces the journey of the tiny Torah “from a Nazi concentration camp to the heights of space” has screened at film festivals and even at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. But it may not be seen by a wider audience unless it can raise almost $14,000 by May 26.

Cohen has secured interest in the documentary at PBS, but the non-profit TV station requires additional underwriting before the doc can air. Cohen has subsequently launched a $50,000 fundraising campaign on kickstarter.com, a Website that aims to help build communities of support for creative projects. Cohen wrote on his project’s Website that the additional funds are needed to help the filmmakers “conform the documentary to PBS technical requirements, [help subsidize] broadcast rights and fees, [for] promotion, [and] web site.”

So far, Cohen has raised $36,843 from 172 supporters—but there’s a kick: He must secure the additional funding before his deadline or he won’t get a cent. According to Kickstarter.com, “If the project succeeds in reaching its funding goal, all backers’ credit cards are charged when time expires. If the project falls short, no one is charged.”

Cohen has 11 days to realize his passion project of seven years. Will the sky be the limit for this story?

It is, after all, a quite literal tale of the magnificent scope of history, from the grounds of a death camp to the known heights of the universe.

As Israeli president Shimon Peres put it during in an interview in the movie, “There are two dimensions: there is a sky and there is a heaven.” Then, in his trademark deep, gravelly voice added, “The sky is a matter of height; heaven is a matter of depth.”

1 Comments — Leave your comment

May 10, 2012 | 5:03 pm

Iced Tea with Iddo Netanyahu and a lesson in loss

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Today I had the pleasure and privilege of spending some time with Iddo Netanyahu, a radiologist and writer, and the younger brother of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. I interviewed him for an upcoming story I’m writing on the documentary “Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story” about his older brother Yoni, an Israeli war hero and soi desant poet, who died during the 1976 raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda, while rescuing Jewish hostages from their terrorist captors.

Without Iddo, I’m not sure the film would have been made. For it was he and his mother, Zila, who decided to publish Yoni’s prolific letter-writing in what became the book, “Yoni’s Last Battle,” which Iddo co-wrote.

I’ve always thought one great gift of being a writer, or an artist of any kind really, is the possibility for making loss matter. The idea that pain can be made meaningful through response is also a central teaching of the Jewish tradition. As Benjamin Franklin said, “The things which hurt, instruct.” We learn from our losses; from pain there is growth.

I asked Iddo if the process of writing the book and publishing Yoni’s letters was therapeutic. He paused, looking at me slightly perplexed.

“There is no therapy,” he said. “That loss doesn’t heal.”

The sadness in his face made my question naive. Because when you truly love someone and lose them too soon, there is no getting over it. Instead you learn to live with the loss, the emptiness, the leftover wound that does not heal. Time doesn’t change this, it simply marches forward against your desires, in defiance of your beliefs and even your will.

In the book, “Playing for the Ashes” Elizabeth George writes, “A new relationship can develop. But the cicatrix of the old one remains. And nothing grows on a cicatrix. Nothing grows through it.”

Wounds stay, and the scars they leave behind mark their importance. This happened. This was once real.

When the wound is the only thing left of love, you cherish it.

1 Comments — Leave your comment

May 9, 2012 | 11:28 am

‘Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish’: A love-hate relationship

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Mendy Zafir in a scene from “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish.” Photo courtesy of Vilna City Films

Eve Annenberg’s “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is a film full of tricky contradictions.

As its title suggests, it is a celebratory showcase of Yiddish language, with about half its dialogue spoken in Yiddish, with English subtitles. A fact that also happens to fuel Anneberg’s big marketing ploy: “I’m coming to L.A. a week early to literally go around to Jewish senior centers and talk them into getting their people to the theater,” she said during a phone interview the week before the film’s Los Angeles premiere on May 11.

Who says pride is a sin?

“Other Yiddish films will come down the pike,” added Annenberg, who attended Julliard and Columbia University’s film school, “but I think people might say ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was the first to use this much colloquial Yiddish in modern narrative in more than 50 years.”

Efforts to revive the Yiddish language and culture have been on the increase in recent years, but usually not at the expense of other aspects of Jewish culture. “Romeo and Juliet” may be Annenberg’s “love song to Jewish culture,” but it is also a kind of angry lament at Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community.

“For the longest time, I was a little bit anti-Orthodox. Sexist, racist, anti-Zionist; I was just like ‘they [stink]’,” Annenberg told Heeb magazine in January 2011. Her feelings are undisguised in her film. “Fraud,” one subtitle declares, is a “Hassidic family business.”

In one scene, a payot-sporting, black-hat wearing Yeshiva bocher fakes being crippled to beg for money. Later, he removes his fake peyot and is shown smoking a joint as a naked African American girl crawls out of his bed. 

The celebration of one culture; the denigration of another.

The film’s milieu, which divides the reputed shadiness of the religious community from “normal Brooklyn,” where people do things like read Shakespeare, is bound to offend. But its edginess is all the more provocative, since much of it is based on truth.

Several years ago, Annenberg was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York one night and found herself bewitched by the sound of music emanating from the Millinery Synagogue on 6th Avenue and 39th Street. She was invited upstairs to a mysterious party called Chulent, organized by Yitzchak Schonfeld and designed to accommodate the “narrow margins where secular and [Ch]aredi, atheist and Chasidic, deepest depths and most foolish foolery, overlap,” according to the Web site neohasid.org. In simpler terms, the late-night party “basically is a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world.”

For Annenberg, it was the only social activity in New York that ran late enough to allow her to first put her dying mother to bed. “That’s how I met them,” she said of the young, former Orthodox men and women who conversed mostly in Yiddish — though they also spoke Hebrew, Aramaic and English (“in that order”), which they had learned in their yeshiva studies. For various reasons, they had all broken away from the Orthodox community to try to make their way in the secular world; but for some, it was easier dreamed than done. With virtually no secular-world skills, many resorted to petty scams as the easiest way to make a living.

Then they met Annenberg.

The 40-something filmmaker was so taken with the young Yids, she hatched the idea to make a movie in Yiddish. “I’m a shallow girl,” she said. “I would look at these guys dressed in their Orthodox gear and think, ‘Ohmigod, look how beautiful they are.’ ” The most famous love story in Western culture seemed a natural fit, not to mention the uncanny cultural parallels — naive youth, rigid families, communal feuds and arranged marriages.

Annenberg recruited a small group to help her translate “Romeo and Juliet” into Yiddish (she deemed a translation from the 1930s too outdated). Then she hired them as actors. Their absolute inexperience with Shakespeare so fascinated her, she taped the translation sessions and made them a subplot in the film. “It was like something out of a Jewish version of ‘Hair,’ ” she said.

But when she posted the excerpts from the sessions on Vimeo, a local Orthodox blogger was so aggressively outraged, one of her actors dumped the tapes out of shame. 

“They were so fascinating,” Annenberg said of the Shakespeare sessions. “Their excitement over the material and the fun of it. But in the ultra-Orthodox world, men and women don’t socialize the way we were socializing; we’d sit and talk and study together, and I think that was discomfiting.”

The actors who play Romeo and Juliet in the film even had a real-life romance — their first. The entire film was shot in 30 days for $175,000, and it won an audience award when it premiered at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival last year. Now, several of the formerly floundering ex-Orthodox are pursuing film careers.

But the journey wasn’t entirely blessed. In the middle of the shoot, Annenberg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, had a double mastectomy on a Wednesday and returned to the editing suite the following Monday.

“I was really, really lucky,” she said.

Perhaps God liked her movie, I suggested.

“Or not,” she joked. “I can’t tell you how many Orthodox Jews told me, ‘If only you had kept the Sabbath’ ... if only you hadn’t played ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ during the love scene!’”

“Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” opens May 11 in Los Angeles.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 7, 2012 | 3:01 pm

Enraptured by Torah

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Last week the British-born, Scottish-raised, Israeli-based biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg visited Los Angeles. She lectured twice, first at Sinai Temple in Westwood and then at UCLA Hillel. Both nights I weeped through her words.

I’m not going to attempt to encapsulate what she taught, because that would be like trying to unzip fog, but I wanted to say something about the sheer seductive power of her Torah. Because it is a Torah the world needs; a Torah of poetry and art, love and sexuality, psychology and fantasy. I’ll save some of the beautiful things I learned for another post.

There are two basic reasons why I find Zornberg’s biblical scholarship astounding. The first is that she draws upon an extraordinary amount of the most erudite secular literature. It is indicative of her approach, for example, that two of her books, while concerned with biblical subjects, make reference in their titles to the poetry of Wallace Stevens—“The Beginnings of Desire” and “The Particulars of Rapture.” Marrying sacred and secular literature is a foundational element of Zornberg’s style; it is how she writes, teaches and thinks. And it is a testament to her background in both religious and literary worlds, as she is a descendant of a long line of Eastern European rabbis and earned her PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. These discrete but complimentary sensibilities infuse her style, and speak to the bible’s vitality as a living document. Last week, Freud, Lacan, Kafka, Henry James, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and even the Hollywood movie “Letter from an Unknown Woman” found expressions and reverberations in various Exodus stories. 

Zornberg revels in paradoxes and contradictions. At the same time she celebrates the rabbinic tradition of adding to the original text (the Talmud after all are the words of rabbis interpreting the words of God), she also subverts the tradition by exposing its inadequacies, or what she calls, “gaps”.

In “The Particulars of Rapture,” she writes: “In my approach, the biblical text is not allowed to stand alone, but has its boundaries blurred by later commentaries and by a persistent intertextuality that makes it impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text,” adding, “it continues, in a sense, the rabbinic mode of reading, where ‘the rabbis imagined themselves as part of the whole, participating in Torah rather than operating on it at an analytic distance…”

The difference is that for Zornberg, revelation does not stop with the rabbis. The written biblical text is not a totality unto itself but a kind of core architecture that could be decorated different ways, by different designers. Additional modes of interpretation articulate gaps in the story which she considers “repressed”, which brings me to the second reason I adore her work.

Zornberg reads the Torah from a woman’s point of view (I dare say she wouldn’t call this “feminist” since she made a sort of haughty comment about feminist readings of the bible at UCLA). But it could be said that what defines Zornberg’s Torah is its attempt to unearth the “unconscious layers” of female experience in the bible. Acknowledging that women are mostly “absent” from the Exodus story, but with few transient exceptions, after which “women essentially disappear,” Zornberg turns to Midrash—and Rashi, in particular, whose commentary she refers to as biblical “second nature”—to retrieve or reconstruct what is hidden. “Women have a separate, hidden history, which is not conveyed on the surface of the text,” she writes in “Rapture”. And it is this “hidden sphere,” a phrase she borrows from Vaclav Havel, that most preoccupies her.

And it is her distinctly feminine reading of the bible that I find most enrapturing. Because it is investigating through these eyes that Zornberg illuminates desire, sensuality and love in the bible. And yet, those elements figure in only when there is a relationship in which to contextualize them. They symbolize being drawn, lured, attracted, compelled. For central to Zornberg’s teaching is discovery of the self, which is premised upon the engagement in relationships. Zornberg teaches that every human journey is defined by how the individual responds to the challenges of being in relationship—with oneself, with others and with God.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 3, 2012 | 4:04 pm

One hour with Elliott Gould

Posted by Danielle Berrin

I heard that the day you read for the part of “Dorfman,” screenwriter Wendy Kout had a rather animated freak-out over meeting you. Are you used to that by now?
Oy vesmir. Wendy is very enthusiastic.

I was also told that when recent USC graduate Brad Leong, the director of the film, asked you about what working processes have suited you in the past, you answered by discussing your experiences working with Ingmar Bergman, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh. That must have been pretty intimidating to a 24-year-old first time director.
I completely believe in modesty and humility and being forthcoming and honest.

At 73, your film resume is extensive. Do you have any idea how many films you’ve actually appeared in?
I’m not in denial about it. When I accepted a presentation at the 25th Annual Haifa International Film Festival I said, ‘I’ve been in a great many films; some are better.’ The audience laughed and that made me feel good. I’ve lived through all of this and I’m still working.

You seem to have a very “Zen” attitude about life.
We are at war with ignorance, desperation and fear. I couldn’t have imagined nor believed that one like me, born Elliott Goldstein, 6801 Bay Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, PS 247, Seth Low Jr. High and the Professional Childrens’ School could get to the front and I’m there. I used to think it was about being talented and now I know that it’s more about character. And I want to invest this character wherever it could do some good.

You sound like a very spiritual person. What are the sources of your life philosophy? Therapy? Judaism?
This family is so deep, it’s deeper than can be measured. I don’t nor can I deny my roots. I know what I am and I know about our culture. Although I’m not as observant as some of us would have me be.

In “Dorfman” you play an overtly Jewish character.
I don’t see that so much. I didn’t think that was as fleshed out as it might have been.

In the film, a central relationship is the one between your character, Burt Dorfman, and his daughter, Deb. What have you learned from your own relationship with your daughter that you could draw upon for the role?
It’s never too late to change. It’s never too late to see our individual patterns and how we close ourselves off, how we protect ourselves, how we continue to perpetuate certain thoughts, even certain routines in life—and then to have an opportunity or to realize that it’s essential for us to evolve, that we don’t lose anything but we can gain something.

In the film, father is extremely dependent upon his daughter. Could you relate?
My daughter, Molly, I learn everything from her. She’s everything to me. She’s my daughter; she’s my mother; she’s life.

You wouldn’t say that about your sons?
The male is different. No one can be smarter than our daughters.

That’s nice to hear.
The mother comes from the daughter. And I believe that western culture is predicated on the child and his mother. I was not a very good parent to begin with; anyone can be a parent, that’s nature in life. [Parenting] is not just a matter of being responsible for another but to be able to take responsibility for yourself. And that has been a lifelong process and journey for me since I was so frightened. So frightened.

The character Burt Dorfman is suffering deep grief from the loss of his wife. After having been married several times, could you understand the loss of such an ultimate relationship?
He’s holding on. He’s crippled. He’s not functional. He’s not the way his late wife would want him to be, but he knew no other way. So we play roles.

Do you believe that at this point in your life you’ve figured out relationships?
I’m an idealist and I can be incredibly confused by people who would practice religion on all levels and not live it. Some of us are even atheists which really blows my mind. For me the concept of Gd is the ultimate ideal and I accept. It opens everything up. I don’t have an argument with anyone; it’s so beautiful to be alive.

You sound pretty accepting, but I read a comment you made about your former wife, Barbra Streisand, during an interview with AISH.com in which you talked about her becoming an icon and you said, “I had no understanding of why anybody would want to make themselves into something that isn’t real. Why would anybody want an identity that makes itself an illusion bigger than life? Nothing is bigger in life other than God. And none of us is God.” I found that edgy.
It is edgy! It’s all somewhat edgy! We’re conscious! I don’t lie. I don’t have to be so serious any longer; I know I’m honest. I don’t want politics to come into this. I need to calm myself down because it is essential for me to stay calm.

As a Jewish person, does playing a Jewish character feel any different than playing any other character?
Being that we have nearly 6,000 years of written history, it’s very deep and therefore there’s something more perhaps, to call on. Some people resent me and certain aspects of how I reflect and project. I was in a picture called American History X and I played a Jewish teacher in an environment of great anti-Semitism and the JDL [Jewish Defense League] attacked me for it, attacked me for changing my name from Goldstein to Gould.

In a 2007 profile of you in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman counted you as part of “Hollywood’s Jew Wave” and said you popularized the “leading man as schlemiel.” What did you make of that?
I thought that was cruel of him. He probably thought of himself as a schlemiel.

You’re about to turn 74. What has it been like to age in an industry that overly prizes youth?
It’s such a privilege. It’s part of evolving and I wouldn’t change anything. My spirit is.. oh the spirit is so breathtaking… ohmigod. How does it feel? It’s such a privilege to know, to know, you know? Just to know. It’s all so moving to me. At one point I let a great part of my career go. I had to give it back because I knew it wasn’t about being somebody. And I didn’t want to be beholden to this great success. And I didn’t want to have to be fearful that I would lose it. Because [life] is about seeing, it’s about being, it’s about living, it’s about sharing, it’s about not being afraid but accepting whatever reality is. So if that’s what it means to be a Jew, that makes it all the better.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 2, 2012 | 1:56 pm

L.A. story: ‘Dorfman’ screenwriter pens a love letter to her city

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Sara Rue and Haaz Sleiman in a scene in downtown Los Angeles from “Dorfman.”

“I would like to share the story of how ‘Dorfman’ came to be, in the very location where our mini-miracle occurred,” screenwriter Wendy Kout e-mailed last week. She insisted on meeting at the tiny block on Industrial Street, a revitalized strip in the Los Angeles Downtown Arts District that inspired her to write a movie.

Just a few blocks east of the Midnight Mission, where hundreds of homeless camp on the sidewalks, is a gentrified stretch that seems like another world. Between Mateo and Mill streets, where twisting train tracks serve as a kind of neighborhood border, lies a quiet, medium-scale block spotted with art galleries, chic restaurants and fashion boutiques, a little urban oasis in an otherwise industrial landscape.

“You know the old adage, ‘Let’s put on a play, my dad has a barn’?” Kout asked as she opened the door to a high-ceilinged, two-story condo owned by the film’s producer, Leonard Hill. “In my case, it’s, ‘Let’s make a movie, my friend has a loft.’ ”

Almost every scene of “Dorfman,” a romantic comedy starring Sara Rue and Elliott Gould, who plays Rue’s father, was shot in Hill’s Toy Factory loft, named for its history as a manufacturing site. Hill and his real-estate partners purchased the building in 2002, as part of a preservation project, and converted the space into live/work lofts. Kout was so taken by the building and its role in downtown L.A.’s urban renewal that she wrote the movie around the setting. For a self-described “Valley girl,” it was L.A.’s promised land: Soho meets SoCal, bohemia meets Hollywood.

Indeed, one star of the movie is downtown L.A. itself. When the film’s protagonist, a nebbishy Jewish girl named Deb, gets an opportunity to spend a week at her unrequited love’s downtown loft (she plans to woo him by cat sitting), her ensuing saturation in the new culture becomes a catalyst for her self-realization. In this L.A., people do astonishingly urban things. They walk! They take the Metro! They dine on rooftops! Not a chain store in sight, they buy everyday items at specialty, artisan shops. A trip to the Los Angeles Flower Market, where luscious orchids sell for $10 a pop, bursts on screen in bright, beautiful colors, giving away one of L.A.’s best-kept secrets. Deb’s transformation from an aimless single gal into the self-assured, made-over Deborah, mirrors the transformation of a newly revitalized city, from something known, mundane and expected into a place that is alluring, exciting and new.

Truly being seen, whether it’s cityscapes, other people or even for oneself, is a leitmotif in the film, but it’s also the central challenge for a little independent film like this one (Hill wouldn’t say what the budget was): Will anybody actually get to see it? It screens here on May 10, the closing night of The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, co-presented by The Jewish Journal, but beyond the festival circuit, where it has been doing the rounds for several months now and has even won several awards, the film does not yet have a distributor.

“Look at this; is this crazy?” Kout said from the Toy Factory’s rooftop pool, admiring its panoramic view of the downtown skyline. I recognize the spot from a scene in the film. “Basically, I tried to use every square inch of this building,” she added. “I knew the locations before I wrote the script — it’s the repurposed, revitalized city.”

Kout had just about given up screenwriting when she ran into Hill, a veteran television producer, across the street from the building, at the restaurant Church & State. They had worked together decades earlier on one of Kout’s pilots that was never picked up, but had since lost touch. “I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Well, I kind of own the block.’ ” Next, Hill invited her for lunch and a tour. “He was all excited and twinkly, showing me his world,” she recalled of that propitious meeting. Then she got twinkly, too, seeing a side of Los Angeles she had never known existed.

“I grew up in the Valley — I would come downtown to go to the Mark Taper Forum. For me, downtown was never a place to live.”

But something about the resurgent city sparked her enough to return to screenwriting — albeit on new terms. “I had given up on all that, because I was chasing the studio model,” she said. Over the years, Kout had delivered countless scripts to some pretty big names, including Barbra Streisand, “Spider-Man” producer Laura Ziskin and screenwriter John Hughes, who penned cult hits “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles.” But none of her screenplays was produced. “Even if I had gotten a movie made in the studio paradigm, I probably would have been fired after the first draft,” she said. So when Hill told her, “You write it, I’ll produce it,” it was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Circling back across the roof, Kout looked out toward the Los Angeles Times building, a looming presence in the distance. “Where else do you see this much sky and this much city?” she asked. Hill is on the roof, too, watering the plants on his deck. 

“Have you ever seen a Jew do this?” Kout asked wryly.

“And I have power tools!” Hill quipped. As if power tools have any place in the tranquil, almost other-worldly surroundings of this setting, framed by hills and sky on every side.

“Wendy was absolutely Dorothy who suddenly saw Oz in Technicolor — she wasn’t in Kansas anymore,” Hill recalled of the first time he brought her to the loft.

“You mean, I wasn’t in the Valley,” Kout said.

Still, they might still have been in the desert if not for an 11th-hour save by Gould, who agreed to play the part of Burt Dorfman, Deb’s cantankerous widowed father, after a deal with another actor fell through. Hill knew Gould through Hollywood guild politics, and called the actor one night out of desperation, dropping the script on his doorstep hours later and warning that if he didn’t get an answer by morning, the film would be scrapped. As the movie’s sole investor, Hill had decided that if the deal didn’t close within a certain time frame, a cost-efficient production would not be possible. Fortunately, Gould liked the script and asked to meet with the creative team — Kout, Hill and the film’s then-24-year-old director, a graduate of USC film school, Brad Leong. 

Kout remembers being unabashedly star-struck. “As a Jewish woman, I have been in love with Elliott Gould since the first time I saw him on the screen,” she said. She’s not kidding: When Gould arrived that day, Kout nearly ran him over. “I turned into a gushing 15-year-old girl,” she said. She and Hill re-enact the scene when Gould walked in, “kinda shlumpy,” as Hill described it, and Kout ran up to him screaming, “Ohmigod, ohmigod, omigod, I’m so excited, I’m so excited.”

“I could not stop jumping,” she recalled with only mild embarrassment. “I was holding his hand, and I wouldn’t let go! But, let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of Jewish men on the screen [when I was growing up]. There was Paul Newman, who was too old; there was Woody Allen, who I didn’t really have an attraction to other than his incredible brain — and then there was Elliott Gould.”

Gould was gracious about the fandom. “Oy vay iz mir,” he said, remembering the moment during a phone interview from his West L.A. home last week. “Wendy is very enthusiastic,” he said, ever so delicately (he tends to sound like a spiritualist when he speaks), “and I believe that enthusiasm is a gift.”

At that initial meeting, Gould tried to get a feel for the young, first-time director by asking him about his “process.” But as “Dorfman” was to be Leong’s first feature, he flipped the question back to Gould: “Tell me what has worked for you,” Hill recalled Leong saying. With complete sincerity, Gould rattled off a list of likes and dislikes based on his past experiences with other directors — who happened to be the likes of Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman and Paul Mazursky.

There was a time when Gould seemed to embody Hollywood stardom. After roles in Altman’s 1970 Korean war satire, “M*A*S*H,” and an Oscar-nominated performance in Mazursky’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” he became a kind of American countercultural icon. It was also during this period that he married Barbra Streisand, his first wife and with whom he has a son. But big-time fame wasn’t his thing.

“At one point, I let a great part of my career go,” he said, a stream-of-consciousness, seemingly random thought that came up just after he had been talking about his parents. He choked up: “Now you can tell I’m being moved,” he said, fighting tears. “I had to give [my career] back, because I knew it wasn’t about being somebody, and I didn’t want to lie, and I didn’t want to be beholden to this great success and have to be fearful that I would lose it.”

Gould’s attitude helps explain why a man who has done it all would take a chance on a little movie like “Dorfman.”

“You always want to work with people who want to work with you,” he said. “I find that ego and vanity is toxic, and I’m exceedingly sensitive to it. And also, even though sometimes it is rampant in this industry, there’s really no room for it.”

Which may be why the role of Burt Dorfman seems so right for Gould, whom The New York Times once praised for his “touching transparency.” Although appropriately cantankerous for an aging widowed Jewish man, Gould plays the role with unselfconscious vulnerability. In 2007, he was described by the Village Voice as helping to popularize the notion of “leading man as schlemiel,” and though he finds that characterization offensive, he said that playing Jewish characters comes naturally to him.

Screenwriter Wendy Kout and actor Elliott Gould

“It is somewhat cultural,” he said. “But being that we have nearly 6,000 years of written history, it’s very deep, and therefore, there’s something more, perhaps, to call on.”

In “Dorfman,” this meant he gets many of the film’s best lines, most of which are Yiddishisms. “This is a farkakteh staircase!” he shouts during his first visit to the loft, which is a little too chic for his taste.

For Kout, the Jewishness was her bottom line. “You know,” she said, “If I had walked in [to a] studio [with] this movie, the first thing that would change is the characters would not be Jewish.” Because “Dorfman” is really her own story, a way of reclaiming her screenwriting voice, authenticity was important to her. Everything from the locations to the actors to the music (10 of its 14 songs are by L.A. indie bands) had to be as authentic as possible. “We read everybody,” she said about the casting process, “but we were looking for Jews.”

At one point, director Leong, who is Asian-American, asked, “What is a flagella?” The script, in fact, read “fagela,” and after a good laugh, Kout remembers thinking, “It’ll be fine. We’ll get him a Yiddish dictionary.”

As the producer writing the checks, Hill was a little more tense about the whole Jewish thing. “Is it any more Jewish than ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ was Greek?”

For Hill, a son of German immigrants who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, the film’s Jewish sensibility comes from “embracing uncertainty.” As the film vies for theatrical release, that’s something he’ll have to do as well.

“Well, we were told our movie would get commercial distribution if we had Katherine Heigl in the lead, but with Katherine Heigl in the lead, it’s not ‘Dorfman’!” Hill said.

After making some 60-odd TV movies, Hill is a big believer in the “engineering of storytelling,” meaning that if you structure a story a certain way, and aim it at the right audience, “There is a way to industrialize the manufacture of mainstream commercial movies done at low-budget levels.

“If we could do it,” he added. “I could really get back to the hobby I most enjoy — making movies.”

For Kout, making this film was enough. She had come to writing late in life and spent most of her childhood wondering, “Where are my stories? Where are my characters?”

“I was very much like Deb,” she said, “living in a world where I was not being reflected anywhere. And then she goes downtown, where differences are appreciated.”

For Kout, the most romantic thing about this romantic comedy is that both its characters and the city they live in have the capacity to change. It’s the central message of the Jewish tradition, I offered. She smiles.

“People think when you say romantic comedy, it’s girl-boy, but this movie is about her journey,” Kout said with such conviction it was hard to tell if she was talking about the character or talking about herself. 

“What’s romantic to me is she learns how to love herself. And because she begins to love herself, she can love another.”

“Dorfman” screens on May 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Laemmle Town Center in Encino. To purchase tickets, go to lajfilmfest.org or call (800) 838-3006.

0 Comments — Leave your comment