April 4, 2012 | 2:43 pm

Schlossberg, Hurwitz Create a Heartfelt ‘Reunion’ of Raunch

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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From left: Jason Biggs, Eugene Levy and Seann William Scott tie one on in “American Reunion.” Photo © 2012 Universal Pictures

Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, two of the most subversive writer-directors in the realm of the R-rated youth comedy, have been friends since they were in high school together in Randolph, N.J. Their “Harold & Kumar” franchise, which revolves around an Asian-American and an Indian-American odd couple (and to some extent, their Jewish pals, nicknamed “Manny” and “Shevitz”), transcends the stoner genre to become a sharp satire about race and cultural stereotyping. When Shevitz (a k a Goldstein, played by David Krumholtz) converts to Christianity in 2011’s “A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas,” for example, “He’s talking about how amazing it is to be Christian in the most Jewish way you’ve ever heard,” Schlossberg said, laughing with Hurwitz during a recent interview at the Four Seasons Hotel. 

About two years ago, when Schlossberg and Hurwitz, now 33 and 34, respectively, were asked to reboot the “American Pie” franchise with the highly anticipated “American Reunion,” their multicultural options were more limited than in the “Harold & Kumar” films. It’s their first venture into the series originally created by writer Adam Herz and directors Paul and Chris Weitz; this fourth film revisits the libidinous East Great Falls class of 1999, with the culturally Jewish Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) and friends, who are probably best remembered for their pact to lose their virginity before graduation. We catch up with Jim, now married to former band-camp geek Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy) and buddies such as the perpetually immature Stifler.

“East Great Falls is not an incredibly diverse town, but that being said, we couldn’t help but get in a couple of Jewish shout-outs,” Hurwitz said. “Coming from the ‘Harold & Kumar’ movies, where we’re constantly making racial or religious jokes, it was tough for us not to constantly do that.”

And so, Jim encourages his widowed father to try JDate, even trimming his bushy eyebrows for his online photo; when Jim asks how his dad and mom kept their sex life alive with small kids, the reply is, “Why do you think you went to Hebrew school three times a week?”

It’s all in the context of how Jim has typically related to his dad over three previous films’ worth of sweet but cringe-worthy moments. (Who can forget Jim’s mortification when Levy walks in on him, in the first movie, getting fresh with a pie?) “There’s a closeness and a certain Jewish awkwardness in their relationship,” Hurwitz said. “They speak in a way that Jews from our world tend to speak, where there is a certain level of banter, arguing, neurosis — and way too much information.”

The 1999 sleeper hit “American Pie” was a revelation to Hurwitz and Schlossberg, who at the time were pleasing their Jewish parents by attending the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, respectively, while penning a semiautobiographical film, titled “Filthy,” in which the leads “sounded like young people talking about what young people talk about,” Schlossberg said. Hurwitz offered a hint: “Even good Jewish boys think about sex.”

When Hurwitz saw a trailer for “American Pie,” however, his first response was to call Schlossberg and lament, “They made our movie.” “Pie” combined the kind of bawdiness with heart they aspired to in their own writing. “It also connected with Jewish youth because Eugene Levy is the quintessential Jewish father in the sense that he’s not puritanical,” Schlossberg said. “And while they didn’t say Jason’s character was Jewish in the first film, Jews knew it,” Hurwitz added. “Jason’s character, Jim, is trying to be a nice Jewish boy, but he makes himself constantly a shlimazel. Everything bad that can happen to him does; every time he tries to do something, it just goes wrong. And that’s classic Jewish comedy.”

The budding writer-directors saw the movie as many as 100 times, they say, and routinely quoted lines from it, so after their “Harold & Kumar” films became a success, it was only natural that Universal would come to them for “American Reunion.” “We never for a split second thought we wouldn’t get the job,” Hurwitz said. “We knew ‘American Pie’ better than anyone, and we had created a franchise in a similar vein, so if they didn’t hire us, they’d be making a horrible business decision.”

The filmmakers did not attend their own high school reunion, but weddings where old friends congregated — including Hurwitz’s 2007 nuptials — provided some ideas for “American Reunion.” “People were all in different phases of their lives,” Schlossberg said. Some were married, some single, some successful, some frustrated. “We knew, obviously, that Jim and Michelle were married, because we saw them get hitched in ‘American Wedding,’ and we figured they’d now have a kid,” Hurwitz said. “So immediately our minds went to, ‘OK, what are the awkward situations that can emerge when you have a child scampering around the house?’ Since Jim is a guy who is best when he’s sexually frustrated, we asked ourselves what could happen that would be to great comedic effect.” Suffice it to say that fans of the iconic pie scene from the first film will not be disappointed.

One hilarious sequence in “American Reunion” features Jim’s bar mitzvah video, in which we see the notorious prankster Stifler yank off Jim’s tallit, taunting, “I stole your Jewish scarf.”

But while shooting that scene in a church dressed up as a synagogue, the filmmakers were distressed to discover that the crew had failed to procure a tallit. “Props thought it was wardrobe’s responsibility, and wardrobe thought it was props,” Schlossberg said. “We only had a few hours to shoot, and we needed a tallis, obviously, to make the joke work.”

After unsuccessfully trying to stitch napkins together to create the garment, the filmmakers borrowed one of the church’s vestments and embellished it with blue trimmings. “So we had a tallis,” Hurwitz said, “but it was secretly a Catholic scarf.”

“American Reunion” opens April 6.

April 4, 2012 | 2:35 pm

Jews navigate ‘Magic City’  of midcentury Miami

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans and Olga Kurylenko as Vera Evans in “Magic City.” Photo © 2011 STARZ Entertainment, LLC.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays the Miami Jewish hotel mogul Isaac “Ike” Evans in STARZ’s “Magic City,” set in 1959, recalled scenes in which his character encounters genteel and not-so-genteel anti-Semitism. One takes place at a club that does not normally admit Jews, where his former sister-in-law has insisted they meet on her “turf.” “It’s very white and upper class, and the waiter won’t even acknowledge me,” Morgan (“Grey’s Anatomy”) said in an interview not long before the show’s April 6 premiere.  “And I ask her when the ‘Jew hunt’ will begin.”

Then there’s the sequence in which Ike is attempting to woo a state senator, who is busy ogling the blondes in a beauty pageant that will take place at Ike’s luxurious Miramar Playa hotel. Miss Iceland, in particular, catches his eye as a “Nordic goddess” who will improve the gene pool. “Then he starts in on this ‘You people’ s—-,” Morgan said, “and my own instinct was to jump across the table and put his head through it. But as Ike Evans, I had to be smarter than that. Even though Miami then was very Jewish, Ike’s grown up at a time where at every corner there were people making these kinds of cracks.  So he’ll take care of business first, and get even later.”

Jewish dynamics play a significant role in “Magic City,” a sprawling drama with vast period sets that has already garnered so much buzz that STARZ has picked it up for a second season even before airing the pilot. Spotlighting the charming, self-made Ike and his complexly Jewish family, the plot also involves Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro, the CIA buildup in Miami, Jewish gangsters, Weeki Watchee mermaids, call girls, bubbes, Frank Sinatra and the black entertainers who are allowed to perform at the resorts but not stay in them.

Inspired by the childhood memories of Mitch Glazer, the show’s creator, “Magic City” also highlights Ike’s struggle to keep his family and empire safe while at odds with his dangerous financier, mobster Ben “The Butcher” Diamond (Danny Huston, whose childhood in a Dickensian Orthodox orphanage has helped create a monster).

Ike’s father is the Russian Jew Arthur Evans, a communist and former union organizer who refuses to set foot in a synagogue, even for his granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. Meanwhile, Ike’s second wife, Vera (former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), a refugee who lost all her Romany relatives in the Holocaust, desperately wants to feel connected to her new family by converting to Judaism. “I went to bed with Rita Hayworth, and woke up with Golda Meir,” says Ike, who is puzzled and a bit uncomfortable with her preoccupation.

“Ike is Jewish to the bone, but in a social, cultural way, and in the kind of human way he relates to the world — the mensch in him,” Glazer, 59, said recently, while eating a bagel and cream cheese in his Hollywood office, with Sinatra playing on the radio and books and postcards of old Miami gracing the room. “Being Jewish doesn’t absolutely define him, until the outside world — the Miami WASP establishment — reminds him.”

Glazer’s show is the latest series to focus on the glamorous Rat Pack era of the late 1950s and ’60s, including the “Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” as well as AMC’s critically acclaimed “Mad Men.” While the comparison to the Emmy-winning “Mad Men” has been inevitable, Glazer says the similarities lie mainly in their aesthetic. He points out that he sold the pilot to CBS seven years ago, though the show went nowhere at the time: “I’ve been collecting stories about Miami almost all my life, because they’ve always seemed so powerful and cinematic,” he said. “Doing something about this place and time has always been a part of me.

“My father, Len, was the electric engineer who worked with the great Miami modern architect Morris Lapidus — Uncle Morrie in my house,” Glazer continued. “My dad designed the lighting for all the great hotels of the day — the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc and the Deauville — and my memories of those hotels is profound. I almost grew up in them. Their function was to astound — to blow people’s minds. There was just acres of marble and terrazzo, and in the show I’ve tried to capture my 7-year-old’s amazement at that world.”

Many of the show’s anecdotes come from Glazer’s childhood recollections, his work as a cabana boy at the Deauville or stories he’s heard from old timers. Like the fictional Arthur, Glazer’s grandfather was an atheist who refused to set foot in a synagogue, and the young Mitch, like Ike, did not become a bar mitzvah. He did, however, march in civil rights demonstrations with his liberal parents; concentration camp survivors elbowed him out of the way at Thrifty’s grocery; and mobster Meyer Lansky glowered into his brisket at Wolfie’s deli, where the waitresses told Glazer and his friends to keep it down lest they disturb the elderly gangster. The hotel lobbies were kept freezing so the women could wear their furs, and, once, Glazer discovered a friend’s brother hastily packing his bags after unwittingly picking up a woman at one of the hotels who turned out to be the wife of a gangster named “Trigger Mike.”

Glazer set the show in 1959 because it was a powder-keg year for Miami: Cuban refugees, CIA operatives and gun molls mingled with tourists in lounges with names like the Boom Boom Room. “It was like ‘Casablanca’ on the Atlantic,” he said.

During his copious research, Glazer not only read everything he could on the era, but also interviewed hoteliers and even a Miami rabbi who advised him on how Vera’s conversion might unfold.

One major conflict in the Evans family involves the bat mitzvah of Ike’s daughter, Lauren. Arthur virulently opposes it, while Vera proclaims Ike “the worst Jew in the world” for considering serving treif at the reception. His tongue-in-cheek reply is that, actually, his father is the worst Jew in the world.

Some months ago, Glazer brought his own elderly father, then in a wheelchair, to the Miramar Playa set in Florida and showed him the grand chandelier in the fictional hotel’s lobby. “I wheeled him right under it and said, ‘Do you remember that?’ and his eyes welled up,” Glazer recalled. Coincidentally, the set designers had bought the same fixture that the elder Glazer had assembled in Cuba and installed in the Eden Roc in the 1950s. 

“Now, more than 50 years later, it’s hanging in the Miramar Playa,” Glazer said. “And my father looked at me and said, ‘Mitch, you’ve built a hotel.’ ”

“Magic City” premieres on STARZ April 6 at 10 p.m.

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