The Journal recently caught up with Judd Apatow to talk about filmmaking, the plethora of Jewish characters in his films and working with his family in \”Knocked Up.\”
\”I go to my inner kid,\” said Kurtzman, who grew up culturally Jewish. \”Where do we find our inspiration? It\’s the movies that inspired us as kids, and a lot of that was sci-fi, but a lot of that sci-fi was fun.\”
Etgar Keret is coming to Los Angeles, but fear not. This brilliant young Israeli writer of his generation, a skillful satirist who seems to have a knack for expressing the emotions, thoughts and language of his peers, has not gone completely Hollywood.
Eric Roth\’s impressive resume as a Hollywood screenwriter includes an Oscar (for adapting \”Forrest Gump\”) and a string of reality-based screenplays about the difficulties important people face choosing between realpolitik and personal morality.
Shawn Slovo remembers how her Jewish parents, African National Congress activists, left home in the middle of the night to attend secret meetings. All the while, she said, she resented \”having to share my parents with a cause much greater than myself.\”\n\n
The Naumanns are the central characters of \”Bee Season,\” which opens this week in theaters. The film explores the dissolution of the Naumann family after the youngest member, 9-year-old Eliza (Flora Cross), discovers she\’s a spelling prodigy.
Can you imagine an Orthodox bar mitzvah celebrated in the Arizona desert soon after the Civil War — with a guest list that includes Apache warriors, gun-slinging outlaws and a minyan imported from Tombstone?
The set is a converted garage in Pico-Robertson. Eight Hollywood hopefuls dressed in T-shirts and cargo pants, holding shovels and frying pans, are waiting for the camera to start rolling.
A boom mike looms overhead and a klieg light shines in their faces, but for screenwriter Shlomo Heimler, these things matter less than the fact that for him this shoot, which advertises volunteering in Israel, is one with soul.
\”This is the most meaningful work I have ever done,\” the 38-year-old former advertising art director said. \”When you go to work, there are typically no emotions involved, but this is all heart and soul, for everyone.\”
\”It\’s All True\” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) by David Freeman offers us a portrait of an outsized Hollywood, so unbelievable that it must be dead on. It is, more precisely, a novel, lovingly unfolded about the movie business: How it works and how its players — adults spoiled by too much money and power — act out their lives. \”Oh me-oh, my-oh,\” as Henry Wearie would say.
Wearie is the novel\’s hero. He is actually a fictitious character, a screenwriter trying to hustle a script idea into a movie deal, but in a voice that sounds eerily like that of Freeman, who himself is a screenwriter. In its way, this book serves as a more knowing successor to Freeman\’s earlier work, \”A Hollywood Education,\” published 18 years ago, after the author had moved to Los Angeles from New York.
So what does a nice Jewish girl know about porn? Quite a bit.
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