Filmmaker Pola Rapaport grew up in a family of secrets.\n\nHer psychiatrist father never spoke of his life before meeting Pola\’s mother. He never spoke of his family. He never mentioned that he was Jewish, though Pola figured that out when he took her to Yom Kippur services when she was 10. And just before he died of cancer in 1972 — Pola was then 16 — his last words to his wife were, \”Be discreet.\”
\nHenry Bean can barely contain his anger when he talks about the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Years ago I\’d heard from someone or read somewhere that Wyatt Earp is buried in Colma, near San Francisco, a bit of provocative trivia whose truth I\’d never been sure of. One day a while back I decided to check it out. I would have thought that one of the most famous figures in the history of the Old West would have ended up in the landscape of his legend. In the case of Wyatt Earp, this would mean Dodge City, Wichita, or more appropriately, Tombstone.
\nIn our Jan. 26 issue, veteran screenwriter Henry Bean told The Journal he wasn\’t sure his provocative directorial debut, \”The Believer,\” inspired by the true story of a Jewish Nazi, would be well-received at Sundance. He\’d heard that distributors were wary of the controversial subject matter. So he was shocked last week when his film won the festival\’s Grand Jury Prize, the top award in the dramatic competition — prompting serious discussions with potential distributors. Now that \”The Believer\” seems poised to have an audience, at least with the art-house crowd, Bean has a particular group of viewers in mind. \”There is no audience I\’d rather show this to than one of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis,\” he told The Journal. \”I\’d love to know what they think.\”
Back when Rod Lurie was the meanest film critic in L.A., he used to gush about actress Joan Allen on his KABC radio show. The guy who once called Danny DeVito a \”testicle with legs\” lauded Allen as \”the greatest working actor in the world.\” \”I\’d manage to slip that in every other week,\” admits the Israeli-born critic-turned-director, whose debut film, \”Deterrence,\” revolved around a Jewish U.S. president in crisis. Allen had heard all about the fawning critic, so she was receptive when he offered to write a screenplay for her in 1998.
\”Merton of the Movies,\” the wonderfully funny production at the Geffen Playhouse, shows that not all that much has changed in Hollywood since the comedy\’s première in 1922.
The list of films for which Elmer Bernstein has written orchestral scores reads like a roll call of cinema\’s all-time classics: \”The Ten Commandments,\” \”The Age of Innocence,\” \”The Magnificent Seven,\” \”Ghostbusters,\” \”To Kill A Mockingbird,\” \”CapeFear,\” \”True Grit,\” \”Animal House,\” \”The Great Escape,\” \”My Left Foot\”…just to name a few.
Despite the abundance of Jewish filmmakers in the entertainment industry, Jewish Americans fall somewhere ahead of Asian-Americans and well below Anglo- and African-Americans as a group represented on celluloid. And no one is more aware of that than film historian and author Harry Medved, whose \”Cinema Beshert: Meeting Your Mate at the Movies\” film series at the University of Judaism focuses on love,Jewish-American style.
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