August 18, 2009

Producer Lawrence Bender is sitting poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel, celebrating an unrivaled triumph: he’s just helped Quentin Tarantino kill Adolf Hitler.

This is the outcome of their new film together, “Inglourious Basterds,” which rewrites history so that it’s the Nazis who burn and the Jews who orchestrate their incineration. Perhaps only Tarantino, the not-at-all Jewish auteur director with a penchant for violence and an obsessive worship of B-movie genre films, could deliver such deliciously uncomplicated revenge. As his producer would attest, Tarantino is one of the few in Hollywood who has both the imagination to avenge the Holocaust through fiction and the gall to edit history without concern for any deeper meaning.

Not so for Bender.

As Tarantino’s longtime producer — the pair go all the way back to 1992’s groundbreaking “Reservoir Dogs” — Bender was the first Jew to read Tarantino’s “Basterds”  script. When he finished, he said, he told the director, “As a fan, I thank you; as your producer, I thank you; as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you.”

Surprised, Tarantino asked, “Really?” To which Bender replied, “Are you kidding me? This is a Jewish wet dream!”

That’s because — for what may be the first time — “Inglourious Basterds” puts vengeful Jews in control as they turn the horrors of Holocaust brutality onto its perpetrators.

Bender’s pride in Tarantino’s reversal of power may stem, in part, from his own experiences of anti-Semitism as a child. “It wasn’t like my life was threatened, but I got pushed around for being Jewish. People would call me ‘Bender kike’ and throw me up against the lockers.” In the same way the film inverts revenge, Bender unleashed his anger in high school, beating up on other Jewish kids. “I hate that I did that,” he said quietly. “But it’s just the truth. Sometimes Jews can be the worst anti-Semites.”

If for Tarantino the film is an experiment in genre, for Bender, a prominent Hollywood liberal and pro-Israel activist, “Inglourious Basterds” brings together his greatest passions: movies, politics and a cherished Jewish identity. In his professional, political and private lives, Bender has often sought involvement in things that matter, whether writing about fuel efficiency for the Huffington Post or traveling to Israel to meet with heads of state. And while he has worked on his share of glitzy Hollywood films — “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” for example — he has also produced films with social impact, such as the Oscar-winning Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the Oscar-winning “Good Will Hunting,” about a math genius with a social conscience.

“When we do movies, we can make a difference in the way you think or feel,” Bender said of the influence of Hollywood. But it is only through activism, he believes, that one can make a difference in the way people live.

Bender, 51, was born in the Bronx, the eldest of four children. He spent most of his childhood in South Jersey, where his mother was a kindergarten teacher and his father a philosophy professor at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). Bender said it was his parents who planted the seeds of his own political activism when they brought him to Washington in the 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam.

In college, Bender was something of a floater. Although he studied civil engineering, he considered an array of careers — chef, potter, karate instructor — none of which he found particularly inspiring. In an unlikely twist, he wound up studying African dance and was later recruited for a professional dance company, but was forced to give it up when he suffered a back injury. For a time he lived in New York and tried his hand at acting — studying with some notables, including Sondra Seacat, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler — but eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at the American Film Institute.

In Hollywood, Bender discovered he could merge his artistic inclinations with his practical skills. After landing his first on-set job, he quickly worked his way up from dolly grip to producer. He raised $100,000 “by hook or crook” to produce his first film, a horror flick called “The Intruder,” and it was the director of that film who introduced him to an emerging young artist named Quentin Tarantino.

The two have made eight films together, including Tarantino’s breakout hits “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” as well as “Kill Bill” 1 and 2, though they’ve also shared a few bombs (anyone see “Four Rooms”?). Over the years, as Tarantino’s status has surged, Bender has stayed quietly behind the scenes, leading some to suggest that Bender got a lucky break.

“You always have people who either look up to you or are jealous or think you’re just lucky. That doesn’t mean anything to me,” Bender said, unfazed. “I can’t say I’m equal to Quentin — he’s a big star; he’s an auteur. I would even say he’s my boss. But when we’re making a movie, we’re partners. And what’s great about Quentin is that he brings out the best in everybody. I’ve never worked harder for anybody than when I work with Quentin.”

But where Tarantino is a showman, Bender seems understated and soft-spoken. At 51, he carries the sharpness of youth with chiseled features and a dimpled smile. He proudly displays a photo of his 3-year-old son, Misha, who clearly takes after his father. Bender has never married, and asked about family, it becomes clear that not having one is one of his regrets. “I don’t think it’s the business. It’s just me,” he said. “I want to have a family; I definitely want more kids. But when you get to be 50 and have 50 years of experience, it becomes harder to match up; it’s one thing to fall in love with someone, it’s another thing to have compatibility in interests and in the way you live.”

As one of Hollywood’s leading Democratic fundraisers and activists, Bender maintains a high profile. He has hosted many of Washington’s elite in his Holmby Hills backyard. He likes to boast of being an early supporter of Barack Obama, since he pledged his support when Hillary appeared to have the edge. Bender has leveraged his political clout to support causes he cares about. A devoted environmentalist, he developed a series of TV spots with William Morris Endeavor chief Ari Emanuel on behalf of The Detroit Project, a grass-roots campaign to support fuel-efficient cars led by Arianna Huffington. And it was Bender who, after hearing Gore speak about climate change, persuaded the former vice president to put it on film.

Bender likes to tell the story about the moment he decided to get involved. It was 1998, and he had been invited to Camp David by then-President Bill Clinton to screen the film “Good Will Hunting” along with its stars, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Robin Williams, and Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. There, surrounded by the president, the first lady and the secretary of state, Bender realized, “That’s what’s missing in my life.” He explained, “I felt like making movies wasn’t everything for me, because I was sitting with all these people that were 100 percent dedicated to trying to make a difference in the world.

“I think politics is really important to our lives. At its best and highest form, it can make the biggest difference in the world and at its worst, it is the worst skullduggery on planet Earth.”

Since then, Bender has become involved with both AIPAC and the more left-leaning Israel Policy Forum. He describes his politics as left-of-center, though to suggest that it is policy that draws him to the Jewish state belies his real passion. Bender lights up when he talks about Tel Aviv’s beaches and clubs, Israeli women, the marvels of the high-tech industry and the Israeli way of life.

“What’s amazing is you meet anybody there — you meet a gardener — and they know more about the history than a professor here in the United States.”

And for him, “Inglourious Basterds” offers one more benefit.

“I have to tell you how excited I am to take this movie to Israel,” he said. “I feel it’s like a little pin in the hay, like, ‘Hey guys, go to Israel.’ I think it’s such a great place, and Hollywood does need to focus on it more.”

When the extreme horror auteur Eli Roth visited Germany to promote his 2005 hit, “Hostel,” journalists asked how he dared make such a sexually sadistic movie. Roth, now a still-boyish 37-year-old, had already cemented his reputation as one of the most successful directors to push the so-called “torture porn” genre to grisly new heights; “Hostel” pushed it even further with its tale of smug American college students who become the playthings of wealthy sadists abroad. The filmmaker was used to criticism for his over-the-top depictions of impalings, decapitations and blow-torching, but Roth — who has numerous relatives who died in the Holocaust — became enraged when German journalists asked him to justify those grisly scenes. “I said, ‘This movie is nothing but [cinematic] magic tricks, but your grandparents turned my ancestors into furniture. Into lamp shades.’ I went on and on; I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t believe they took that kind of self-righteous position.”

Roth’s same righteous fury appears in his portrayal of Sgt. Donny Donowitz, aka The Bear Jew, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” in which he is perhaps the craziest basterd in a squad of vengeful American Jewish Nazi slayers.

“Donny is a Jewish guy from South Boston who is fighting on behalf of Jews who can’t,” said Roth, who still displays much of the 40 pounds of extra muscle he put on for the role. “He uses his baseball bat to pummel Nazis, so he can physically feel that sensation of cracking their skulls in.”

Tarantino, a good friend, has joked that he deliberately hired the splatter-film director to play a character with a penchant for bludgeoning. But for Roth, the movie proved more than his first major acting role: “It was like kosher porn,” he said. “It was an orgasmic feeling to swing that bat.”

Which is not to say that he didn’t take the role seriously. Because his mother’s family was all but wiped out in Nazi-occupied Austria, and his parents’ friends included survivors of Auschwitz and Dachau, Roth grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. “We were taught that you do not buy German products,” he said. His mother, a respected painter, and his father, a psychoanalyst and psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, encouraged him to read the many books on the time period, and at the age of 8 — the same year he saw Ridley Scott’s horror classic, “Alien” — the budding filmmaker had already read Eli Wiesel’s “Night” and knew all about Dr. Mengele’s medical experiments. “That’s why horror movies always seemed so tame to me,” he said. “I thought it was absurd when people complained about movie violence, because the default in my brain was — what about the Holocaust?

“I never saw violence in movies as real. To me it was always a representation of violence,” he added. “And I couldn’t understand why people got so upset about it when they didn’t seem upset about violence in real life.”

In person, Roth is the antithesis of what people might expect based on his sickening films. He is funny, smart and professes an aversion to germs, which he eventually hopes to spoof in a movie starring himself as the neurotic Jew he proclaims to be. Roth said he was a polite child, which his parents verified in a Boston magazine article titled, “What’s a Nice Jewish Boy From Newton Doing Making Films Like This?” In it, his psychiatrist father explains, “Eli exemplifies what Plato often said — that the good dream of what the bad do. Basically the imagination handles all uncomfortable impulses and thoughts. In his everyday life, Eli is extremely well behaved…. In his creative work, you see the other side of his imagination.”

Roth began making gruesome films at an early age. “When you live in a safe place like Newton, [Mass.],” he said, “you imagine, ‘What if people came and invaded my home and killed my family? I guess I was extra sensitive to all the horrible things going on in the world.”

Roth’s love for the cinematic side of horror was clear when he persuaded his parents to hire a magician to pretend to hack him in half with a buzz saw — as he shrieked — at his bar mitzvah reception. His cake was shaped like a film slate embellished with dollops of oozing fake blood. Roth said he felt like an alien in the upper-middle-class suburb, where other kids aspired to become doctors or attorneys. When the rabbi at his bar mitzvah announced, from the pulpit, that Roth intended to become a “motion picture writer-director,” the entire congregation burst out laughing. “It seemed to them a freakish thing to do,” Roth recalls, adding mischievously, “Who’s laughing now?”

Roth’s directorial debut, “Cabin Fever,” premiered in 2002 at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where Quentin Tarantino chanced to see it at a midnight screening. Tarantino invited the younger director to watch “War of the Gargantuas” at his home, and eventually became a mentor to Roth and a collaborator on Roth’s 2005 film “Hostel.”

Although many critics have reviled Roth for what they perceive as gratuitous violence and misogyny, others view him as a maverick and see his work as far more thoughtful than, say, the “Friday the 13th” franchise. “Hostel” was inspired by the kind of American arrogance abroad Roth perceived during the Bush administration — as well as the smug entitlement of the privileged suburban teenagers of his youth. 

Tarantino also served as an executive producer on the poorly received “Hostel II” and previously hired Roth to act in the “Death Proof” segment of “Grindhouse” (2007).

For “Inglourious Basterds,” Roth also served as Tarantino’s unofficial Jewish technical advisor.

At times during “Basterd’s” six-month shoot in Berlin, life imitated art: When Roth’s parents broke their vow never to travel to Germany and visited the set, Roth was appalled when one of the crew’s drivers sneeringly referred to them as “Juden”; he had to be restrained from beating the man in Bear Jew fashion. Tarantino allowed Roth to shoot “Nation’s Pride,” the propaganda film within “Inglourious Basterds,” which screens at a pivotal moment in the movie. And while acting in the final conflagration scene in “Basterds,” Roth was nearly incinerated when a special effects fire burned much hotter than expected.

In the end, making “Inglourious Basterds” proved healing for Roth. “When we filmed the scenes where I killed Nazis, the German cast and crew were as excited about it as the Jews were — it was like we were killing them together,” Roth said. I remember [the actor who plays] Goebbels saying ‘Yeah — we get to kill those m————- today.’ They were so happy. And they wanted the deaths to be as violent as possible, because they’re tortured by the Holocaust as much as we are.”