fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

February 19, 2009

Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers

Tommywood, Uncategorized /
"The Reader"

“The Reader”

Are Holocaust movies good for the Jews? Or even, for that matter, for society at large?

This year’s offerings include “Defiance,” a story of a group of Jews who were heroic resistance fighters; “The Reader,” a story of post-war revelation about a Nazi woman who beds down with a German boy; “Good,” about the moral compromises of a German university professor in the Nazi era; “Adam Resurrected,” based on Yoram Kaniuk’s novel about a demented Holocaust survivor living in Israel; “Valkyrie,” about the Nazi plot to murder Hitler; and “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” about the friendship between a German officer’s son and a Jewish child in a concentration camp. The lineup even includes a horror movie, “The Unborn,” which features a Mengele-Auschwitz plot point. And then there’s Roberta Grossman’s documentary, “Blessed Is the Match,” about Hannah Senesh, which was on the early lists as an Oscar contender.

These Holocaust-related movies so crowded the end-of-year releases that at one point it seemed that on any given weekend you had to choose which Holocaust movie to see. However, come award season, with the exception of “The Reader” most of them have faded – not only commercially, but also in terms of critical accolades and award nominations.

Why? Theories abound.

One issue is the quality of the films: For any movie to garner Oscar acclaim, it needs to transcend its subject matter by virtue of the pedigree of the filmmakers involved, as well as the acting, and it must feel triumphant; it needs to become a “must-see movie,” as did “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist.” Among this year’s Holocaust-related offerings, only “The Reader” seems to have risen to both those challenges.

But right now, there’s also the anxiety of the economy, and audiences today are eager for stories of hope – whether in the candidates we elect for public office, the heroism of a pilot safely landing a plane in the Hudson River, a movie about a mall cop saving the day or, as concerns this year’s Oscars, a movie about an 18-year-old boy from the slums of Mumbai whose quest to be reunited with the girl he loves involves becoming a quiz show millionaire.

So, more Holocaust movies but fewer awards. So, will this year’s bountiful crop mean fewer Holocaust movies in the future? And if so, is that a bad thing?

In my travels in Hollywood, I have always heard how hard it is to make a film about the Holocaust. Some of the arguments have to do with cost – period movies are expensive – and there’s the matter of accents and foreign languages, not a big favorite among American audiences. Also, it is fair to ask: Who is the audience? Are Holocaust films going to attract teenagers (the largest segment of the viewing population)? Do they contain too much violence for women? Is the subject too sentimental or emotional for men? Will the films only appeal to Jewish audiences? Many Holocaust movies, made even after a great struggle, have not fared well at the box office. One very successful producer who made a Holocaust drama that failed vowed to me, “Never Again!” It was just too much work for so little return, he said. He decided to concentrate on more commercial fare.

Yet despite all this, many movies about the Holocaust era continue to be made, for myriad reasons, but most often because someone – an actor, a director, a financier – is passionate about a story, or because the story has the potential to become an “important” film (and is most often based on a best-selling and/or award-winning, attention-getting book).

I grew up one generation removed from the Holocaust, among survivors, and as a creative person, former movie development executive and still-aspiring film producer, I understand the irresistible pull of the most powerful story of our era. The pull of wanting to tell it, of feeling that there are important stories not yet told or fully understood, that there are still important truths that need to be stated. Everyone who has ever heard a Holocaust survivor speak knows that each story of murder or survival contains more nuance than any film will ever be able to do justice to – and yet each story clamors to be told to the widest audience possible.

My father, Bruce Teicholz, was, in fact, portrayed by name by the actor Ralph Arliss in the 1985 NBC miniseries, “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” which starred Richard Chamberlain, and I confess that I rather enjoyed seeing him portrayed this way, as did my father, with whom I watched the show. My father enjoyed the attention, as well as the attention given to Wallenberg.

But herein lies the conflict: Films tell stories, and they can move and educate people and sometimes even change them. But the Holocaust is a reality and not a teaching story or an action adventure. The reasons a film does or does not work and the reasons we find it a credible rendering of some aspect of the Holocaust exist on separate tracks that of necessity must overlap to make a successful film.

And there’s the rub. Because good filmmaking is not about historical accuracy; it depends upon fakery and invention.

A movie, even a documentary, generally conforms to what audiences have come to know. A film has a certain length and a certain narrative structure. There are heroes and villains, often played by movie stars. There is conflict; there is drama; there are love stories; and there is often a point to be made. A work that “breaks the rules” still does so in the context of a set of expectations – and that format doesn’t by its nature fit the facts of the Holocaust.

For example, “Defiance” is about the Bielski Otriad, Jewish partisans who survived in the Byelorussian forest. It is a story that Edward Zwick, who wrote, directed and produced the film, and whose important historical work includes “Glory” has wanted to tell for a long time. Clayton Frohman wrote the original script, based on the book by Nehema Tec, more than a decade ago.

Indeed, the story that Jews fought back, that Jews rescued Jews, that Jews served with the Red Army in fighting the Nazis deserves to be known; it demands to be part of our collective knowledge of the Holocaust, and it is all the more remarkable because of how the Bielskis created a society of their own in the forests of Byelorussia and were responsible for rescuing some 1,200 Jewish men, women and children.

The movie conveys these important facts, but it also casts the plot in terms of a conflict between the two older Bielski brothers, Zus and Tuviah, who differed philosophically on whether to fight and kill for revenge, or to resist and behave ethically. The film also tells the story in terms of sibling rivalry, ego and faith, through the brothers’ romances and their human weaknesses.

As a result, “Defiance” had moments when I became choked up by the heroic nature of what the partisans faced, but also many more moments when I was too conscious of the movie-making, such as in a “Godfather”-esque sequence that intercut between a Jewish wedding and a murderous attack on a Nazi stronghold. In the end, I felt I was watching a story and not immersing myself in history, and the personal dramas meant to engage me didn’t transcend the moviemaking. In the end, the movie is smaller, less important and less interesting than the story it attempts to tell.

“The Reader” presents a different dilemma. Its story takes place after the Holocaust, and the film uses Holocaust events to pose questions about guilt and shame, and how that damage, too, is part of the Holocaust story. Based on a novel by Bernhard Schlink, the film sets out to create a hall of mirrors in which secrets carry consequences and assumptions are constantly upended. In many ways, we are made to feel that the Holocaust-era events – as terrible as they were – are just one of many insolvable mysteries of human behavior. “The Reader” feels important and provocative in ways that have garnered award attention – but it is only tangentially a Holocaust drama.

One of these movies, therefore, is about an important chapter of the Holocaust, but does not succeed; the other one succeeds, but is not really about the Holocaust – it only uses the Holocaust as a dialectical tool. Each disappoints in its own way.

Because the generation of Holocaust survivors will soon be gone, there is an urgency to tell these stories, particularly the innumerable personal tales that haven’t yet been told. At the same time, perhaps because the distance of time has diminished the number of actual witnesses among us, storytellers in all genres are now feeling more free to use the Holocaust as dramatic material in ways that have as much (if not more) to do with storytelling than accuracy. Moreover, the more we acknowledge that the totality of the Holocaust escapes interpretation, the more irresistible it becomes to explore the questions it poses as compelling drama.

Holocaust movies will always be hard to make, but no doubt there will always be creative artists with a passion to tell the stories that took place during the Holocaust.

Yet movies also get made because a financier, a star, a director, a successful writer (or any combination of those) is convinced that they can make at least some money doing so. And it is a reality that they become successes more often than not, not because a story is of historical impact, but because leads are attractive, or perhaps because the characters they play are flawed or heroic.

There always will be winners and losers among Holocaust films. Some may be memorable and may indeed have a large impact on how history is perceived. Nevertheless, we must also acknowledge that these films, by their very nature, are – like the shadows in Plato’s cave – mere projections, personalized recantations or reinventions of an epic series of events.

So, there cannot be a “good” Holocaust film, only a good film about Holocaust-related events.

Still, despite all this, should we be any less proud if one of these films wins an Oscar?

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week

Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers Read More »

‘Bridas Touch’ — Some Don’t Feel the Magic

Leave a Comment / Culture, Weddings /

Weddings are magic. The details have come together according to plan. Two people have found each other and decided to spend their lives together, no matter what fate brings them. The bride looks like a queen; plus, she has special powers.

On her wedding day, the Jewish bride has the “Bridas Touch” — a temporary condition in which, particularly under the wedding canopy, her marital fortune is contagious. While she’s under the canopy accepting a ring from her betrothed, she gives single women her regular jewelry to wear for added luck. The remainder of wine from her glass is also imbued with special powers and distributed to single wedding guests; this segulah wine is a Red Bull energy drink for the uncoupled, increasing the inherent beshertiness of the imbiber.

The bridal wizardry begins even before the ceremony. When the mothers of the bride and groom break a plate before the ceremony, signifying that a kinyan, or transaction, has taken place, the shards are given to single women for good luck.

At my brother’s wedding, I reached into my purse during the reception and promptly sliced my finger open on such a lucky shard. Luckily, a handsome doctor with a great sense of humor came to my rescue, cleaning the wound with vanilla vodka and suturing it using frayed napkin strands. After cocktails and dancing, we hid from the crowd under the Viennese Table and he told me he loved me — that table of delicious pastries serving as chuppah to our love. (Or if you prefer the truth to literary license: The finger-slicing was followed by a Band-Aid and a hora, during which some other dancer impaled her four-inch heel in the center of my big toe.)

Whether bridal luck exists or is just an old bride’s tale, weddings themselves are as much a display to the community as they are a celebration of couplehood. Weddings are supposed to motivate the rest of us to achieve similar stability. We are meant to take our places, two by two, in the parade of matches, happily marching toward the goal of founding a bayit ne’eman b’Yisrael, a faithfully Jewish home for your newly expanded family.

But it’s not that easy. In celebrating love, weddings also shine an unwanted spotlight on the absence thereof. Sometimes, when weddings fail to inspire, singles begin to sense that we have failed the community and ourselves and perhaps the incredible shrinking Jewish people.

When we sit as wedding spectators, we are, of course, happy for the happy couple. But those of us who are selfish enough to also want that spiritual and emotional connection for ourselves — magical incantations be damned — sit there, hands folded in our laps, legs crossed demurely, holding magic jewelry and shards that, like life, may cut or cure us.

Well-intentioned seating plans and awkward introductions to the only other single person at the wedding, in hopes that sparks will fly, make us embittered, angry and sarcastic, as the futility is reinforced. We wait for the ceremony to be over so that the thinking can end and the drinking can begin. Maybe if we dance fast enough to this generic set of songs, adrenalin will reign, reinforce our external displays of celebration and prevent the tears from coming. In these moments, we’d give anything to believe in a little magic.

When I dance in honor of my friends, it’s not the rhythm that eludes me, it’s the fervor. And what impedes the enthusiasm is the fear that, for whatever reason, I’ll never get there myself. I can’t imagine myself there in “the dress.”

Tendrils and ringlets seem unnatural and unattainable on so many levels; a white dress so impractical for a klutz like me. There seems to be an interchangeability here that erases individuality — the bride loses herself and becomes a construct, an object, a vision in white, taking her place in the structure of the wedding and community as society has deemed she should.

Even trying positive visualization, imagining myself there so I can someday get there in three dimensions, I don’t know where I stand — I’m a romantic who believes it’s possible; a cynic who doubts the potential. I try to imagine myself enjoying the certainty and confidence of true companionship, when clichéd melodies will seem bereft of the lyrical platitudes that my ears discern today, because the crowds will clamor in support of a love elusive and long-awaited and a day that contains equal parts miracle and magic.

This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week.

‘Bridas Touch’ — Some Don’t Feel the Magic Read More »

The first Madoff settlements come in

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

I guess litigation was going to be more expensive for Banco Santander than settling with 70 percent of it’s clients:

“About 70 percent have already executed exchange agreements,” a lawyer, Sam Danon, told Judge Paul Huck of Federal District Court. “I believe somewhere in the area of 7 or 9 percent have rejected it. There’s a percentage that are still considering the agreement.”

The two sides in the Miami lawsuit also told the court that they had agreed to send a notice to Santander clients that outlines details of the pending Miami class action.

The final version of the notice, which explains that the lawsuit demands clients be made whole for their losses and that the compensation agreement releases all parties from further liability, should be ready in a week, lawyers said.

The notice will go to the about 30 percent of clients who have not yet settled, the lawyers said.

Santander offered to compensate all individual clients through the issuance of 1.38 billion euros ($1.75 billion) in preferential shares with an annual coupon of 2 percent.

The offer would cost Santander, the euro zone’s biggest bank, less than the 2.33 billion euros ($2.96 billion) it has acknowledged its clients may have lost to Mr. Madoff, lawyers for the plaintiffs have argued.

The lawsuit asked the court to halt the compensation plan, saying the settlement was “coercive” and fell far short of the compensation sought by the class-action suit.

The first Madoff settlements come in Read More »

The end of the Jewcy people?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Thankfully, Jewcy is not going the way of the buffalo. But it’s staff is now going to have to offer it’s services free of charge. The Fundermentalist reports:

According to a senior staff member of the magazine, its primary funder, theater mogul Jon Steingart, and its president, Tahl Raz, informed the staff on Friday, Feb. 13, that Steingart and its other major backers, Michael Weiner and Michael Steinhardt, were pulling their money from the magazine because they did not see it as a profitable model in a sour economy.

Steingart and Raz told the staff that they would have until the following Friday to vacate the magazine’s offices in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Steingart started Jewcy as a Jewish themed party night at his Ars Nova theater space in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. That eventually spawned a clothing brand that sported off-beat Jewish products, such as women’s underwear and t-shirts bearing such slogans as “Shalom Motherf—er.”

Raz, then a Senior Editor at Fortune Small Business approached Steingart about spinning the Jewcy brand into an online magazine.

The webzine was launched in November 2006 as a for-profit product that featured cultural essays and Jewish content not found in the mainstream Jewish press, including a heavy reliance on blogging.

Steingart, Raz and Steinhardt, however, deemed that the model was no longer sustainable, according to Jewcy’s editor, Lilit Marcus.

I consider this truly sad news. I have long enjoyed and still believe in the Jewcy model, which I liken to Slate for Jews. Sure, it hasn’t been the same since Daniel Koffler left for Oxford last summer. But for two years they have published interesting articles about politics, culture, religion, academia, even food, and they’ve got one of the best names in Jewish journalism.

My amazement at the news was muted, though, by this statement attributed to Marcus: “The site’s traffic has seen a tremendous surge during the past several months and is now at 160,000 visits per month, an all time high.”

Wow. No wonder the machers thought Jewcy was no longer sustainable. That’s only about double the traffic The God Blog received in January. And I’d consider this a modest blog.

Marcus told The Fundermentalist that they’ll keep on truckin’. And I hope they do. They’ve definitely got a good brand. Just a matter of figuring out a way to make it economical. I hear that’s a problem for a range of media outlets these days.

The end of the Jewcy people? Read More »

Josh Brolin Mines Emotional Depths

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Oscars /

It’s pouring rain outside, and the three sharp raps on my front door announce that Academy Award nominee Josh Brolin has arrived for an interview, his hands hunched deep in his pockets and his hood pulled up over his baseball cap on a chilly Thursday afternoon.

Brolin — as everyone knows by now — is up for best supporting actor for his nuanced performance in “Milk,” Gus Van Sant’s biopic about slain gay activist and San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk. Brolin is surprisingly sympathetic as Dan White, the troubled political misfit from a white, Catholic district who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone on Nov. 27, 1978.

Milk himself was known to have carried a sign during rallies proclaiming, “I’m from Woodmere. I’m Jewish. I’m gay.” Brolin isn’t Jewish (OK, so he’s the stepson of Barbra Streisand), but at 41, he is widely considered to be one of the best American actors of his generation, and the chance to interview him for this newspaper was at hand.

I’d seen Brolin in person around my neighborhood, where he’s just the guy in the baseball cap who takes the time to wave or say “Hi,” before jumping into his black Dodge 4×4 pickup truck, sometimes smoking a Winston, sometimes with one of his two dogs in tow. That’s Brolin-the-neighbor.

As an actor, however, his range goes far beyond any Americana cliché. He stands out for his uncanny ability to mine unexpected emotional depths in characters who might appear uncomplicated in less-capable hands.

In the past two years alone, he earned rave reviews as a brutish, corrupt cop in “American Gangster,” a Vietnam veteran on the run with stolen drug money in the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men,” President George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s controversial “W,” out on DVD this month, and now White in “Milk.”

We met up at my house because it was convenient for us both, an unusual and generous gesture for an actor in the midst of awards season — but again, that’s Brolin.

“The reason I am an actor is because I’m fascinated by people and why they do what they do,” he said, settling into a chair in the living room. “Whether it’s George Bush or Dan White or the guy in the moon. And the thing about my profession is, you can go anywhere and do anything, and it pertains.

“You can go to the grocery store or on vacation, and it pertains. I can be around nobody, and it pertains, because then I’m suddenly challenged with my own aloneness, and I can use that later. So it’s constant, and it’s interesting, and it’s like photography. You cannot master it; it’s constantly changing; its possibilities are limitless.”

Brolin entered therapy of his own accord at 13, because he wanted to explore how he ticked and how others tick. “I’d heard people talk about psychoanalysis, and I wondered, ‘What is that, and what does that mean, and what do the people do?’ And so I got some cheap analyst that I found out of the Yellow Pages,” he said, with a laugh. “And I went for a couple of months. I didn’t really have anything to talk about, but I was fascinated by it, like with everything else.”

In those days, Brolin didn’t aspire to become an actor. As a child, he had considered the field to be “an anathema,” because he had watched his father, the actor James Brolin (“Marcus Welby, M.D.”) struggle with the ups and downs of show business.

Josh Brolin grew up on a 230-acre ranch in Paso Robles, Calif., where his mother, Jane Agee, a wildlife activist, ran a way station. From the age of 6, he helped to care for a menagerie that included “wolves, coyotes, lions, one bear, a lot of mountain lions, a real lion.” He sometimes flew with his father in a little Cessna into the Mohave wilderness to release animals into the wild.

Working so closely with animals wasn’t entirely without risk: One of the wolves bit his younger brother, Jess, on the leg, requiring 60 stitches to sew up the wound; the actor still has a couple of scars on his back from minor encounters with a wolf. “But it was a great upbringing,” he said. “It wasn’t until later that we realized what an anomaly it was.”

The young Brolin surfed competitively, played in a punk rock band and aimed to practice law before becoming hooked on acting during an 11th-grade theater-improvisation class. Thereafter, he went out on auditions with what he described as “a totally made-up resumé.” His first feature film, “The Goonies,” produced by Steven Spielberg, made him a teen heartthrob, but Brolin truly blossomed as an actor after founding a theater company in New York with Anthony Zerbe.

He took a class with Stella Adler, read and wrote poetry and took on a variety of roles in theater, film and television, playing Wild Bill Hickock in ABC’s “The Young Riders” and a bisexual Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent with an armpit fetish in 1996’s “Flirting With Disaster,” among other endeavors.

On Brolin’s 27th birthday, his mother, who at the time was divorced from his father and in remission from cancer, crashed her car into a tree not far from the family ranch. “They kept her alive until 1 a.m. the next morning, until I said to ‘pull the plug,’” he said, quietly.

“You go through many different emotions,” he said of the aftermath. “Sadness, anger, resentment that she’s not around, then you romanticize at a certain point: ‘My mom was the greatest mom on earth,’ when really she was a nut-ball,” he said with great affection.

“My mother was an extreme character, a lot of fun, a personality renowned in this town and many other towns,” he continued. “My mother was talked about constantly. She was talked about on TV, written about in books; she was a major, hilarious, 5-foot-2, 110-pound, Texas-born force and a ball, and we miss her terribly.”

In 1998, James Brolin married Streisand at her Malibu estate in a ceremony officiated by Rabbi Leonard Beerman. Josh attended with his son, Trevor, now 20, and his daughter, Eden, 15, from his first marriage to actress Alice Adair.

Because Streisand is such an iconic Jewish artist, I had to ask Brolin at least a few questions about her, starting with an Internet item I had read claiming that the liberal Streisand had chastised Brolin for taking on the role of Geoge W. Bush.

“That’s total bull and completely fabricated,” he replied, wearily.

It’s no secret that Brolin has had some bad experiences with reporters. “I read the majority of what is written about me and go, ‘That’s not really what happened,’” he said.

Perhaps to protect Streisand’s privacy, he speaks of her with affection but does not elaborate much: “She has been incredibly sweet and kind to me and my family,” he said.

When he is up at the beach, he sometimes drops by to see her and his father. He said the extended family has celebrated the winter holidays at her home, save for one recent occasion, when they gathered at a restaurant.

“But in general, we don’t get to see them a lot, just because she’s working, and I’m working,” he added, “and when I’m home, I tend to spend time with my kids.”

When Josh Brolin married actress Diane Lane in 2004, it was Lane who suggested that the couple incorporate the Jewish tradition of breaking a glass into the ceremony, and Brolin was game — after all, he had also hired a mohel to circumcise his son years earlier. He said he welcomes learning about different religions and traditions, because that helps to inform his work as an actor.

Much has been written about Brolin’s emergence as a leading man and movie star over the last two years, though he doesn’t see it as so abrupt. He pointed out that he has regularly worked as an actor over the past decade, including a turn in Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda,” although he supported himself throughout mostly by day-trading stocks, which turns out to be another one of his eclectic interests.

“I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done,” he insisted of his acting career. “The only difference is that I’ve been working with great filmmakers.”

Joel and Ethan Coen proved tough customers, however, when Brolin first expressed interest in “No Country for Old Men.” “They’d seen my audition video, and they’d said ‘no,’” the actor recalls.

But his agent, Michael Cooper, obtained one of the brothers’ cellphone number and asked them to just meet with the actor (in Coensian fashion, they called Cooper “the gnat” because he always seemed to be buzzing in their ear), and the actor landed the role of Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss on the last day of auditions. Then, just before rehearsals began, he crashed his motorcycle into a car and snapped his collarbone. (His last thought before hitting the ground: “Man, I really wanted to work with the Coens.”)

How did he keep the role?

“I lied,” he quipped when he appeared on “Inside the Actors Studio.” “The only reason I was really honestly able to do the part is because Ethan said, ‘Wait a second, Llewelyn gets shot in the right shoulder on Page 17; we’re going to be fine.’ So that’s just something that’s fate.”

Brolin said he was initially reluctant to take on the part of Bush when Stone approached him some time ago. In fact, he turned Stone down twice.

“Politics never matter to me when choosing a role,” he said. But the prospect of playing Bush from age 21 to 58 seemed “overwhelming.”

To prepare, Brolin read 18 books on the former president. “I didn’t watch the news; I didn’t read the paper; I just didn’t want any outside information,” he recalled. “It was almost like going into a blackout for five months, of suspending all judgment, of saying, ‘How can I play this guy in the most well-rounded way possible?’”

One breakthrough occurred when Brolin envisioned Bush’s story as a modern variation on Shakespeare’s “Henry” plays. “In ‘Henry IV, Part I,’ the character is young, flailing, partying, having the best time; then that’s not working so much for him anymore, and he realizes he must take responsibility — as in ‘Henry IV, Part II.’ And then ‘Henry V’ is Bush basically becoming king — president of the United States — and having such unbelievable and total conviction that he refuses to re-access or waiver in any way.”

Brolin’s process for tackling a character always involves voluminous research. In the case of “Milk,” he said, “I was flailing, reading a lot, looking for some kind of a hook and not finding one.”

He recalled that when he first met one of the late supervisor’s colleagues (Cleve Jones, played by Emile Hirsch in the film), “I could see in his eyes, ‘This is the wrong guy.’” Brolin was eventually allowed to listen to the confession White recorded with police 90 minutes after fatally shooting Milk and Moscone.

“I heard this duality going on,” the actor said. “I saw this man who perceived himself as a victim, and who thought, ‘Poor me,’ and also the good guy who had gone off the rails, who realized the horror of what he had done.”

Brolin had his “hook,” his way into the character.

Even as he’s preparing to star in an as-yet untitled Woody Allen film with Anthony Hopkins this summer — Allen is “so unassuming, without ego, and we’ve been talking to each other often,” Brolin said — he has received a New York Critics Circle Award and a National Board of Review Award for “Milk.”

And as he is gearing up for the Oscars ceremony on Feb. 22, he said, the nonstop interviews and appearances have become somewhat draining. On the day of our meeting, he drove his truck out to Point Dume in Malibu to surf.

“It was raining, and I ended up walking probably a mile and a half along the beach,” he said. “When I got back to my truck, I was completely soaked, but it was the most beautiful, serene, incredible morning.”

“I’m finding it’s essential for me to take the time out to ground myself, because it can get really crazy,” he said of Oscar season. “I understand that it is perceived as a race, but it’s not a race. I think we’re all very happy to get nominated and proud of it, but now it’s starting to wear on me a little bit. Not that I don’t feel very, very lucky. But I do miss the creative part of the work.”

The Academy Awards will air on Feb. 22 on ABC.

Josh Brolin Mines Emotional Depths Read More »

‘I Understood Her as a Woman’

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Oscars /

At the comparatively young age of 33, Kate Winslet has a filmography of which actors twice her age might be proud. At the same time, she’s carved a unique niche for herself separate from almost every other actress her age, which guarantees her a continuing stream of first-class work.

Today she is a front-runner for the Best Actress Oscar for “The Reader,” which is her sixth nomination. In the film, based on novel set in post-World War II Germany, she plays an illiterate tram ticket-taker who begins a secret affair with a teenage boy. For her, the real attraction is that after torrid sex (and there is a great deal of male and female nudity in the film), he reads to her.

Ten years later, the young man (first played by David Kross and then Ralph Fiennes) shows up in a public courtroom with his law class to observe the trial of women concentration camp guards. To his horror, he discovers that one of the women on trial is his former lover, the woman who introduced him to love and sex and with whom he has been obsessed ever since. She is the centerpiece of this major war crimes trial.

Winslet’s performance is remarkable for its self-effacement. While in the early part of the film she shows the kind of emotion-free ruthlessness that makes her subsequent career credible, she also makes us believe that this is a woman who has no idea of the depths to which she has sunk and no real comprehension of the hideousness of the work to which she was ultimately driven by the fact that she was illiterate and could qualify for little else.

The problem here is that because Winslet is such a gifted actress, audiences will find it hard not to feel some sympathy for this woman who presumably had so little human feeling for the Jewish inmates under her control in the camp.

For her role in the gloomy but superbly acted “Revolutionary Road,” directed by her husband Sam Mendes, she re-teams with her “Titanic” co-star Leonardo Di Caprio. Her performance in this largely overlooked gem is even more nuanced and finely wrought than her work in “The Reader.” She is equally unsympathetic and her performance is entirely without sentimentality. But while the quixotic Hollywood Foreign Press awarded her a Golden Globe Best Actress award for “Revolutionary Road” and a Best Supporting for “The Reader,” Academy voters went only for “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry. 

However the Oscars turn out — and she has some pretty stiff competition — one thing is certain: Any actress who can go from the uber-sensitive romantic Marianne Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility” to a war criminal deserves the Meryl Streep award for versatility, at the very least.

Her fragile, English side adds a kind of incandescent serenity to films from Jane Austen to her Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, the mother of the children who inspired Peter Pan in “Neverland,” to her Ophelia in “Hamlet.” Her quirky “out there” intelligence can go from the whacky, spaced-out Clementine in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to the young genius Iris Murdoch in “Iris” to the Marquis de Sade’s laundry maid in “Quills” to her 2006 role of the mother trapped in suburbia in “Little Children.”

Her career arc, too, has range, mixing monster commercial successes like “Titanic,” the most successful movie of all time, which took in over $1 billion worldwide — she smilingly calls it, “a small film I did about a boat” — with on-the-edge, indie pictures like “The Reader,” geared to small niche audiences.

After “Titanic,” she turned down “Shakespeare in Love,” which won an Oscar for Gwyneth Paltrow, and “Anna and the King,” which didn’t do much for Jodie Foster. Instead she went off to Morocco to play a ’60s-era hippie mother of two kids in the praised but barely seen 1998 film “Hideous Kinky.”

Child of show-business parents, she’s managed her career deliberately but somehow without giving the impression of either driving ambition or calculation and always with a humility that seems unforced.

Married to the English, Jewish director Mendes, (his mother, Valerie, is a children’s book author) she has a son, Joe, with the director, a daughter from a previous marriage and makes her home in England.

We caught up with the effervescent actress one recent weekend when she came to Los Angeles to talk about “The Reader.”

Jewish Journal: How did the part in “The Reader” come to you?
Kate Winslet: I had read the book seven years ago when I was pregnant with my son, Joe. I read it in a day, which is remarkable that I even found time to read something from cover to cover in a day. I’m not a particularly fast reader. So I knew that this was pretty compelling material to have held my attention in literally one sitting. I absolutely loved it of course, was devastated and tremendously moved by the story.

JJ: So what took you so long to make the picture?
KW: At that point I was 27, and I never saw myself as Hanna Schmitz. I’m now 33, but 27 and 32 seemed like a big age difference to me. Not for a second did I think, “God, wouldn’t that be incredible to play Hanna Schmitz one day?” I thought to myself, “Wow, what an amazing role. I wonder who could play that part?” I had a list of a few people in my brain.

JJ: Who?
KW: I’m not telling [laughs]. But it was lovely to kind of ruminate on the possibility that Hanna Schmitz may come to life one day, but I really didn’t put myself in that role. So when [director] Stephen Daldry came to me in April 2007, when we were in rehearsal for “Revolutionary Road,” and asked me to play this part, I had to really kind of go, “Hang on a second. Did I just hear you correctly” — because I’d read this book and I didn’t think that I was right for this role.

JJ: What changed your mind?
KW: I read it again and said, “Hang on, she’s my age. I’m this age now, and I could do this. Could I do this? Yes, I think that I could.” But then we were shooting “Revolutionary Road” and the role went away. Then it became Nicole’s [Kidman] part. I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s great.” I’d be first in line to see that movie. And then she became pregnant and the role then opened up again for me, and we were able to make it work. I was just so grateful that I had yet another extraordinary opportunity to play two great roles in the space of less than a year.

JJ: Did a story about a woman having sex with a 15-year-old bother you, because some might call their affair statutory rape?
KW: This is not a story about a woman having sex with a 15-year-old. That boy knows exactly what he’s doing, and, for a start, Hanna Schmitz thinks he’s 17. She’s not doing anything wrong. They enter that relationship on absolutely equal footing. Statutory rape? Please don’t use that phrase. I do genuinely find it offensive.

JJ: So how would you describe it?
KW: This is a beautiful and very genuine love story, and that’s how I always saw it. I was very moved by how these two people met. This is his first experience of intimacy in that way and love in that way and understanding of what love is and can mean and how deeply it affects the rest of his life. He loved that woman. She wasn’t cruel to him. She didn’t force him into anything.  There’s nothing that I believe to be remotely inappropriate or salacious about that relationship. Yes, she’s 33. He’s 15. As I say, she thinks he’s 17. But Hanna hasn’t experienced these emotions ever in her life. That’s why the relationship becomes so dear to her and why she longs for it and yearns for it so many years later. She just wants to see his face again. She needs that communication. It’s the thing that feeds her. It’s the thing that keeps her alive for the 18 years that she spends in prison up to the point of her death. “The Reader” is about a young man’s experience of falling in love with somebody who turns out to have made some choices that were unavoidable in her life that resulted in horrific crimes against humanity. He in some way had to deal with the fact that he had loved her, and she had loved him. I’m going to stop there.

JJ: Won’t some be disturbed by their age difference?
KW: Yes, some will have issues with that. There were 19 years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years, from the age of 15 to 20, with a man who was 13 years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life. He passed away when I was 20. So I think that we really are coming at this from a different angle. To me, both of these films are love stories essentially — very, very different love stories.

JJ: “Revolutionary Road” is also so tragic, but in a different way.
KW: It’s a fascinating study of the human condition, of a fragmenting marriage and the torment that these two people put themselves through in their efforts to try and find happiness and try and stay together, actually.

JJ: Some have criticized “The Reader” as being one of a number of recent films that have managed to summon some sympathy for a Nazi.
KW: The actor’s job is to understand a character that they’re playing and to ultimately love them in order to be able to accept who they are for all their marks and scars and all their crimes even, which is certainly the case here, with Hanna. I did understand her, yes, absolutely. I knew that it wasn’t my responsibility to make an audience sympathize with her and that was not part of this process for me.

JJ: So how did you get into her skin?
KW: I could hope audiences might understand her, and I could also hope that if they did find themselves feeling any empathy toward this woman at all that would morally make the audience say, “I forgive you.” No one wants to say, “Oh, I understand.” Of course not, and I’m certainly not saying those things either, because you can’t generalize this. But I understood her as a woman. I knew that it would be wrong to humanize her and wrong to give her a very, very warm center. But I did have to make her a real person. The truth is that the Holocaust was started by real people, husbands and uncles and brothers — real people, normal people like us. That was very important to me, to capture the oddness of that, given the backdrop and given her illiteracy, and how disconnected she is from society because of her illiteracy, and how ashamed she is about it and how lonely she is, too.

JJ: Was this the hardest role of your career?
KW: Unbelievably so. It’s only recently, in talking about the film, that I’m actually able to sort of deal with it a bit, because we only wrapped last July. It took me a heck of a long time to come out the other side of playing that character. In the case of “Revolutionary Road” as well, but with Hanna I’ve had to really kind of figure out who the heck I am again because I walked away from that like someone who had walked out of a car crash and somehow survived it.

JJ: How else were you affected by that role?
KW: I went home and lost weight, which was just weird. I was just shattered and felt very sort of angsty and sad. So it’s really interesting now for me to talk about it and gain a little bit of perspective actually on what I went through and what we all went through in making this film. It was an incredible experience. Every day was an absolute joy, but it was also extremely demanding.

JJ: Why are you attracted to such downbeat movies?
KW: That’s why I’m here. Yes, I am, very much so, and I don’t even know why sometimes. I suppose that it’s because I like surprising myself most importantly and challenging myself as a person and as an actress. I like doing things that are completely unpredictable. I like the idea of not shocking people but just throwing people off, doing something that makes people go, “What? Whoa, she did that? Wow. I didn’t think she would do something like that.”

JJ: Can you identify in any way with Hanna — and the way we judge her?
KW: We live in a very judgmental world, and it makes me really sad. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just simply do what we wanted to do, be ourselves, wear what we wanted to wear and not worry about the exterior and the trappings of life and could literally go and be free. I feel like it’s harder and harder to do that. I think that’s a lot to do with the media’s obsession with celebrity, what they’re wearing, what they did yesterday, what they’re doing tomorrow, etc. It’s almost gotten to a point now where the public, I think on some level, feels like they have a right to know what’s the next installment. I mean, I think about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who I don’t know at all, but I think about them and it’s like they’re sort of a walking soap opera, and the public wants to know what’s going to happen next. “Coming soon….”  I think for them it must be so hard to hang on to any mystery as actors. I’m going wildly off the tack, aren’t I, but do I feel judged? Yeah, absolutely. The trick is to try and find a way of just ignoring it and not letting the judgment affect one’s sense of self and one’s choices and one’s priorities in life. Luckily enough, I am a strong enough character to be able to hang on to that.

JJ: Does your husband get jealous when he sees you working with some of hottest talents in the business?
KW: Of course not. I’m not a porn star. I’m not actually walking out there and having sex with other people for my job. It’s part of my job. He doesn’t get jealous in the slightest. It’s really not a big deal. It’s something that, believe me, he’s used to and it really just isn’t [an issue]. He’s always more concerned to make sure that I feel comfortable, whether I feel that being a part of any love scene is absolutely justified and relevant to the story. I’ve always felt, because I have done a lot of nudity, very fortunate to have really and truly believed in those relationships and those very intimate moments, and in every single case I feel that any level of nudity in the films that I’ve been a part of has been absolutely relevant and has actually really enhanced the story. Sam [Mendes] has supported me in all of that and has felt the same way. He encouraged me to take the role.

Ivor Davis writes a column for the New York Times Syndicate and is a former West Coast correspondent for the Times of London.

‘I Understood Her as a Woman’ Read More »

‘Waltz With Bashir’ Fills In Gaps in Director’s Memories

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Oscars /

Israeli director Ari Folman has two sides. There’s the calm, diplomatic one he presented in an interview with Deborah Solomon in The New York Times, when she suggested that the recent Gaza war lends added relevance to his war film, “Waltz With Bashir,” which has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Folman’s response: “It will always be up to date because something will always happen again.”

“You mean the prospect for peace seems so remote? That’s sad,” Solomon countered.

“But it’s true,” Folman said.

Still, after eight years spent digging around in his own war demons to make the film, the former combat soldier said he believes diplomacy is preferable to violence. “Talk, don’t shoot,” he told Solomon. And so, she branded him “The Peacemaker,” placing a title of responsibility upon the artist. The burden of being held to account for Israel’s military actions in Gaza is following him through the heat of this year’s awards season.

In a conversation just a month later, Folman revealed a more volatile side. The call went through at nearly 11 p.m. Israel time, and remarking that he still had three more interviews to do that night, he answered the phone on the verge of a tirade.

When asked if attitudes toward the war in Gaza permeate discourse about his film, and, in particular, if he has encountered any hostility from audiences during the Q&A sessions that follow his screenings, Folman was dismissive.

“Hostile? Why?” he answered. “I don’t recall a military operation that was more supported than this one in Gaza.”

But, surely he had noticed a difference in audience responses to the film either during or after the invasion?

“There’s maybe 20 minutes for this interview, and you’re going to waste 16 minutes talking about Gaza,” he snapped. “I don’t want to talk about Gaza and politics. I have enough of that.”

Considering the barrage of criticism lodged internationally at Israel for its recent military action in Gaza and that Folman’s documentary is a penetrating account of war, it’s no wonder he’s on the defensive: He is being asked as much about current events, or perhaps even more so, than about the making of his film. His impatience may stem, too, from the fact that the movie he calls his “anti-war liberation” played in theaters during an Israeli military campaign lauded in Israel and by the U.S. government but challenged everywhere else. Given, too, that the circumstances of timing have helped make a name for this filmmaker, who previously was unknown outside of Israel, the Oscar nomination has attracted even more attention. All of this has forced Folman again and again to publicly confront the traumatic memories this film was supposed to help him reconcile.

Folman had served in Israel’s army and reserve for 22 years when he finally decided he wanted out. In 2003, just after turning 40, he asked his military superiors to be released from Israel’s reserves. (Every citizen is required to serve one month annually in the reserves until age 50.) He got permission — on the condition that he see the army therapist and talk about his experiences.

At the time, he had become an accomplished screenwriter and filmmaker in Israel, who for his reserve duty made instructional army films like “How to Defend Yourself From an Iranian Nuclear Attack in 60 Seconds.” But it took a series of 20 two-hour therapy sessions for him to begin to talk about the most significant event in his military career, what was also one of the most polarizing chapters in Israeli history: the 1982 Lebanon War.

There were gaps in Folman’s memory, a kind of self-inflicted amnesia. “I realized I had suppressed things, deep down. There were black holes in my memory,” he told an audience gathered at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood last January. When he served in Lebanon, Folman was 19. By age 22, Folman had put his war stories to rest. He deliberately disconnected himself from fellow conscripts and decided to forget what had happened. “I did succeed, but things can get out; then you have to deal with it.”

His first trigger in the film (as it was in life) comes in a phone call from his friend, Boaz. The two meet in a bar, the rain is pelting down outside as Boaz recounts a recurring nightmare: A pack of 26 savage, slavering dogs terrorize the streets of Tel Aviv, then gather, ravenous and barking, at the base of a building where Boaz is hiding. The dream, he says, is connected to Lebanon, where barking dogs often alerted the enemy of approaching soldiers. In Lebanon, Boaz was ordered to kill them. Folman listens attentively to his friend’s story, but when probed about his own tortured past, he comes up blank.

“Waltz With Bashir” is Folman’s effort to fill in the gaps in his memory. It is a documentary, but it is also animated. It consists of nine firsthand testimonials — seven of which are narrated by the veterans who lived them — threaded together by Folman’s personal narrative. It is based on true stories depicted in a surreal phantasmagoria of images. Folman says the only way to make this film was through animation, where there is little distinction between dreams and hallucinations, nightmares and combat. This is Folman’s view of war — absent the glory of victory or brotherhood. It is full of trauma, repressed memories, dreams and lost youth.

“Waltz With Bashir” presents an unrelenting depiction of wartime brutality — innocents die, soldiers fire indiscriminately and the trauma does not end when the combat does. Folman shows the war’s real victims to be the Lebanese and the Palestinian civilians, though they are visible only in the background. The focus on the IDF soldiers does not spare Israelis the conflicted moral questioning that accompanies violent conflict.

There is a popular genre in Israeli folklore called “shoot and cry,” in which soldiers are portrayed as reluctant to kill and maintain their humanity by atoning afterward. Folman insists his film goes deeper than that. He has little regard for American war films in which bravery and friendship are glorified amid terrible carnage. “Waltz With Bashir” has none of that. It tells of fragile soldiers who regress into terrified boys.

“I expected critics to dismiss it as a leftist, anti-Zionist film, but that didn’t happen,” he said at the screening. Instead, Israeli consulates around the world have invited Folman to screen the film. “It’s kinda weird, if you consider how the IDF is portrayed.”

On the other hand, he said, promoting the film is advantageous to Israel, because it gives the impression that the country can tolerate criticism. “This is propaganda for the government,” Folman explained. “They couldn’t buy this for money — so they keep sending it.”

Folman’s own reaction to the film is more complex. He calls it an “antiwar film” — a kind of artistic protest — yet the hint at any tension between his ambitions as a filmmaker and his patriotism was vehemently denied.

“Is there any contradiction?” he said disdainfully. “Let me tell you something. Sometimes you just don’t understand. [This film] isn’t just representing Israel. You sit here, and you ask me if I’m torn apart between ideas I put into my film and being Israeli — I mean, it’s Israel, and it’s much more tolerant than you might think.”

There are still, however, sensitive parallels in the film. The Holocaust is mentioned twice in a story that depicts the brutality of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which the IDF stood by in 1982 as Lebanese Christian Phalangists entered the two Palestinian refugee camps on a civilian killing spree.

Folman himself comes from a “really extreme, hardcore Holocaust survivor family”; both his parents are survivors. “The Holocaust is deep in the DNA of the people,” he said of Israelis. But, unsurprisingly, Israeli audiences didn’t want to discuss it. Elsewhere — in the U.S., France, even a few Arab countries — the subject of culpability is raised: How could a country of Holocaust survivors stand idly by during a massacre?

Folman reminds that Israelis are not of just one mind: “There were never such demonstrations in Israel as when right after people realized something really went wrong there — the Christian Phalangists were our allies,” Folman said of the group that killed massive numbers of Palestinians during the war. A record 400,000 Israelis took to the streets in protest after the Kahan Commission determined Israel bore indirect responsibility for the mass murder.

And Folman pays homage to the slaughtered: Using the film’s only bit of real-life news footage, haunting images of lifeless Palestinians linger on screen. Where the war is animated, documentary footage shows the dead Palestinians. By highlighting their humanity, the film reinforces the inhumanity of the crime against them.

In the late-night conversation, Folman acknowledged parallels between the film and recent events but said he believes his message shouldn’t be reduced to commentary: “The film has a political statement. It’s no big deal; it’s nothing new, and it doesn’t change because of Gaza. Nothing changed during the Gaza event. The antiwar statement will stay there forever. Nothing will change.”

His work, he believes, remains in the realm of art — interpretation, even therapy — but not a political event in and of itself.

“I just don’t believe that films can change the world,” he has said repeatedly.

“They can build small bridges between people, but they can’t really change public opinion.”

‘Waltz With Bashir’ Fills In Gaps in Director’s Memories Read More »

LIVE VIDEO – Survival of a Jewish Nonprofit

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

On Thursday morning, Feb. 19, JewishJournal.com will broadcast LIVE from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Tune in at 8:30 a.m. to watch “The Lean Years: Strategies for Survival,” a conference dedicated to creating a greater conversation about surviving the economic crisis as a Jewish nonprofit. 

Exclusive to JewishJournal.com, watch and listen to a briefing and discussion of the findings of the 2008 Survey of Jewish Organizations (conducted by Jumpstart, Natan and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation in December 2008).  This first-ever survey will offer critical data for understanding the world of Jewish nonprofits in the midst of an economic crisis that has rippled through the Jewish philanthropic and nonprofit landscape. 

UPDATE: THIS A RECORDING OF AN INITIAL BROADCAST WHICH AIRED LIVE ON THIS PAGE EARLIER TODAY.

If you are unable to view the player, try refreshing the page.

After the conference, JewishJournal.com will replay the recording throughout the day on our site. 

For more information, visit LIVE VIDEO – Survival of a Jewish Nonprofit Read More »

The Comic Chameleon

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Hollywood Jew, Oscars /

Bruce Vilanch is not going to ruin this year’s Oscar surprise, even though he could. The ceremony is two weeks away, hoopla is swirling, and Vilanch, who writes for the show, seems relatively unfazed. His grilled cheese is way more interesting than those appalling rumors that — oh my! — certain movie stars may not walk the red carpet. Knee-deep in writing his 20th Oscar script, Vilanch remembers how it felt the first time: It was two decades ago, they still didn’t pay well, but the honor of getting the job meant to him that he had really made it in Hollywood. At the very least, working on the telecast on Oscar night was a significant improvement upon the Oscars of his youth. Back then he’d celebrate in Paterson, N. J., in a bathrobe, eating Chinese food.

“Twenty years ago, Allan Carr called me and said, ‘Do you want to come and write it?’” Vilanch, 61, recalled. “That year was known forever as ‘The Snow White Year,’ because they had Rob Lowe dancing with Snow White in the opening number, and Disney sued.”

Things today are quite different; Disney now owns the ABC network that will broadcast the 81st annual Academy Awards on Feb. 22, and even though the company’s foreign rights department is still quietly conflicted over renewing its contract, Vilanch said they’ll do it. Sure, ratings have dropped — last year’s broadcast holds an all-time low record of 33 million viewers, down from 40 million in 2007 — but things aren’t that bad. “It’s the greatest show on earth, seen by millions of people,” Vilanch said with a child’s enthusiasm. Even though they did away with those decadent gift bags (“Thanks to George Clooney, who sold his on eBay for charity”) he’s still the fan he was as a kid.

Only now Vilanch is a primary creative force responsible for the show’s success. His name is as commonly associated with the Oscars as it is with “gay,” “Jewish” and “funny” — all of which describe the whole of Vilanch’s career; his humor is both derived from and engineered to reflect those sensibilities. Vilanch is a comic chameleon who, for more than 33 years, has written material for many of the greatest luminaries in show business — Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, Shirley MacLaine, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg — and that’s just a few of them. Each time, his work so expertly fits an entertainer’s style that you’d hardly believe it was Vilanch’s genius playing out undetected. Yet, whether he’s a ventriloquist or a collaborator, he remains, for the most part, behind the scenes. And so you wonder if the little boy who once dreamed of becoming Zero Mostel is content staying out of the spotlight. 

When he enters a room, you can’t miss him: his wild, blondish locks, signature campy T-shirts and his bold frame take up more than their share of airspace. He’s vaguely recognizable, though it’s hard to know where from. For one thing, he has shrunk considerably over the past two months, since undergoing a procedure that reduced his appetite. Now 75 pounds lighter, his black slacks are baggy, and he seems more at ease moving around. Before, he said, “I took two steps and couldn’t breathe — I had reached critical mass.” There are some unpleasant side effects to his new state, however — he had only eaten half his sandwich when he became visibly uncomfortable. 

Growing up gay, Jewish and adopted in New Jersey prepared Vilanch for trials with discomfort. “I had a grounding in guilt rich with lore,” he said sardonically. He discovered his sexuality at a very young age and quickly realized that a sense of humor could deflect insults and physical abuse. His theatricality is no doubt connected to his mother, whom he describes as a “would-be showgirl,” though she never managed to eke out a career. Instead, she met his father, an introverted optometrist, and they married young. They raised Vilanch in a Conservative Jewish community where “the temple was kosher, but we weren’t” and they identified as “Jews who wanted to assimilate, but didn’t want to disappear,” he explained.

“It was considered that the Reform Jews wanted to give away too much, and the Orthodox were the people who couldn’t live in the real world.” By a fluke, Vilanch became a bar mitzvah twice. (“There was an unprecedented hole in the schedule, and they invited me back to do an encore presentation of my haftarah; it was Ovadia, the minorest of the minor prophets,” he recalled.)

Vilanch came out during a transitional moment in the homosexual community — a “pre-gay” period, as he put it, before the Stonewall riots galvanized political activism. Though he would later become something of a gay icon, he suffered as a young man.

“If you were black, you couldn’t hide, but if you were Jewish or gay, you had the choice to lead an authentic or inauthentic existence. If you chose an authentic one, you were asking for trouble. It was much easier if you didn’t have to tell anybody anything.”

In college at Ohio State University, Vilanch decided he didn’t care anymore. He read an essay by historian Merle Miller, who wrote, “a faggot is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” which reminded Vilanch of a similar slur about Jews. That was the end of his hiding.

He double-majored in theater and journalism at a time when the campus was a hotbed of 1960s countercultural revolution. He and many of his classmates were in school mainly to avoid getting drafted for Vietnam, and the campus was rife with student protest. Vilanch worked as a reporter for the school newspaper covering anti-war protests, which were so intense that the National Guard was called in with tear gas to suppress them. “One of the reasons why people rarely talk about what they did is because everybody avoided going to Vietnam — George Bush, Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle — nobody went,” Vilanch said. “The revolution was on; the war was on; we were all chemically altered.”

Vilanch pursued journalism and figured that eventually he’d find his way back to the stage. He landed at The Miami Herald, where he helped launch Tropic Magazine by writing celebrity profiles. (His colleague, Larry King, wrote a column there that he likens to Page Six of the New York Post.) But it was a profile of Bette Midler he wrote while working at the Chicago Tribune that was the catalyst for his writing career in Hollywood. Midler was so impressed by what he wrote, she hired him. Just recently, he created material for her live show, “The Showgirl Must Go On,” playing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

“I just called her to tell her she was on TMZ last night, but I didn’t tell her because she looked awful,” he said with genuine concern and maybe a slight chuckle.

By now, Vilanch has worked with enough celebrities that he’s learned how to handle them. And he has his own thoughts about the underbelly of fame: “What you discover is that the biggest stars in the world are type-A personalities; it’s the same drive that gets people to be president of the U.S. or head of Microsoft. You can never forget that they are priority number one, and you have to stay out of their way — or you’ll get run over.” He once asked Frank Sinatra how he should behave around him, and Sinatra replied, “Don’t pet the panther.” That became Vilanch’s motto when working with movie stars — he admires them, he enjoys them, but he keeps his distance. Sometimes, the intensity weighs on him.

Vilanch became a recognizable figure himself when he appeared on “Hollywood Squares,” the TV comedy game show. But he said he’s never had ambitions for bonafide fame; he lacks the drive to be center stage, the implacable ego. Perhaps that makes it easier to work for famous people who get most of the credit for his work. “I never consciously felt jealous, but I suppose you don’t get to 350 pounds by not having some kind of emotional reaction,” he said. His humor, he adds, is about “finding the absurdity in being a big Hollywood personality,” something that might be harder to do if he were one himself.

His success in Hollywood, however, is substantial enough to make creating a private life difficult. Vilanch wanted to have children years ago, but said it would have been too difficult to introduce them into the life he was leading. Even though he is as much defined by his gayness as by his writing, he has not been in a significant relationship for 28 years, and didn’t want to parent as a single father. There were women friends who might have parented children with him, but every time he came close, “they met some guy.”

The pain, he said, fits the lesson that Hollywood offers over and over: “How to accept an endless series of rejections, no matter how big you get.”

It certainly doesn’t get bigger than Oscar night, where Vilanch will be backstage crushing on his friend — the evening’s host, Hugh Jackman. “I’ll be helping him change outfits,” he quips. The two have worked together before, during three Tony Award broadcasts, though they met while rehearsing different shows on Broadway. Vilanch views Jackman as “wonderful and uncomplicated” — a song-and-dance man who will bring style and showmanship to an event Vilanch considers one of the few common national experiences left.

“It’s about the movies, which is everybody’s fantasy life,” he said. And there’s no doubt Vilanch believes that.

The Comic Chameleon Read More »