February 27, 2013 | 8:44 am

New play, “Therapy,” explores the the lives and fears of therapist

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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Jeff Bernhardt

Jeff Bernhardt is an author, playwright, psychotherapist and Jewish educator who directs social-action programs at Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills; he is also the lead tutor for the b’nai mitzvah program at Temple Israel of Hollywood. But his new play, “Therapy” — opening March 2 at the Secret Rose Theatre in North Hollywood — draws on his experience as a social worker for Jewish Family Service and Occidental College’s student counseling center in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Wearing a colorful kippah and a clipped beard during a recent interview at Temple Israel, the intense, affable Bernhardt recalled how the idea for the play began, in part, with a telephone call that shook him to the core: One of his former psychotherapy clients, a man in his 20s, committed suicide about five months after completing some short-term counseling.

The young man had not come to Bernhardt specifically for symptoms of depression, nor had he expressed a desire to kill himself; rather the counseling had revolved around “normal developmental, identity and relationship issues,” Bernhard said. So when the news came that he had died, “I was devastated, shocked and paralyzed,” Bernhardt said. “I talked it through with the people I had worked with, and we revisited the experience of working with the client, but you don’t ever really get over it. There were the inevitable questions of ‘What could I have done differently?’ ”

Bernhardt began mulling over the challenges therapists face, and how therapists themselves often bring their own personal and work-related problems to their own therapists. He also thought about how some practitioners struggle to help patients, even as the patients’ crises trigger the therapist’s own emotional baggage (Sigmund Freud called this phenomenon “countertransference.”)

And so, “Therapy” emerged as a drama revolving around three therapists: Moira, an earthy, motherly social worker who is battling guilt over her mother, whose health is declining in a distant city; Moira’s therapist, Sandra, a reserved, rigid practitioner who very much keeps within the rules of traditional boundaries in psychotherapy; and Steven, a novice social worker who comes to Moira for counseling, in part to explore the lingering pain stemming from the death of his brother when Steven was a child. 

As the play opens, Steven begins treating a new patient, Lance, a disturbed young man who is skeptical about the therapeutic process; Lance’s journey will have unexpected repercussions for all the therapists in the play. 

“One of the things that all these therapists are struggling with is their feeling of failure — feeling like they didn’t, or simply couldn’t, give somebody what they needed,” Bernhardt said. “The play explores their grappling with ‘What am I able to give, and what am I professionally bound to give, given what’s going on in my own life?’

Bernhardt, 51, grew up in a Conservative home in New Jersey and attended Brandeis University, where his interest in social work was sparked, in part, by a classmate who confided to him that she had attempted suicide while in middle school. “It was as if somebody shook me and said, ‘You’re not living in the real world,’ ” he said. After graduation, Bernhardt went on to co-develop a suicide-prevention program for Jewish schools in Boston and Los Angeles.

In 1994, he earned his double master’s degree, in social work and Jewish communal service, from USC and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; along the way, dramatic events in his own life spurred him to become a writer. 

“Right after Sept. 11, I was at the Ahmanson Theatre and somebody had a medical emergency, and the show stopped,” he said by way of example. “I knew that a friend of mine was elsewhere in the audience who had recently had medical issues, so I felt the anxiety of, ‘Is that him?’ [Bernhardt later discovered it wasn’t.] And at the same time, some friends in Israel had a son who had had a swimming accident and was in a coma. All these things had happened right around the time of Rosh Hashanah and were swirling around in my brain, so I felt I needed to create characters who were struggling with some of these issues.”

The result was Bernhardt’s dramatic reading, “Who Shall Live…?” which has since been performed around the time of the High Holy Days at synagogues throughout the United States; a recent trip to Germany prompted his 2010 play, “Mixed Blessings,” the story of how a straight Jewish college student and his gay German roommate push each other to explore their respective identities. 

For “Therapy,” Bernhardt said he drew upon “what I, as a therapist, sometimes struggled with, which is how you put your own personal issues aside to help your client,” he said.

“I’m interested in writing about people who are human beings, who have vulnerabilities and weaknesses,” he added. “I am really interested in how all people struggle.”

“Therapy” runs through March 17. For tickets and information, call (800) 838-3006 or visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/322663.

February 20, 2013 | 11:59 am

‘The Americans’ - Straighten up and spy write

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Keidrich Sellati, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell and Holly Taylor star in “The Americans.” Photo by Craig Blankenhorn/FX.

Joe Weisberg is an ex-CIA agent and creator of FX’s new spy thriller “The Americans,” which spotlights KGB agents deep undercover in the United States. But back in 1989, he was a Yale University graduate flying to the Soviet Union on his own clandestine Jewish mission. His goal was to set up secret meetings with refuseniks, Jewish dissidents who had been fired from their jobs and otherwise persecuted by the KGB. Meeting with them in their modest apartments, he handed over the Levis jeans and Seiko watches he had smuggled into the country so they could sell the goods on the black market to augment their incomes. 

All the while, Weisberg wondered whether KGB agents were spying on him. “It was intimidating,” said Weisberg, who nevertheless went on to join the CIA in 1990 “to become a ‘cold warrior’ and to do my part to bring down the evil empire.”  

During his four years at the agency, Weisberg learned learning everything from how to recruit spies to light paramilitary combat — yet he quit before his first assignment abroad in 1994. “I realized I didn’t want to recruit other human beings and put them at risk to gather information that seemed dubious in terms of whether it was actually worth anything,” he said.

And so Weisberg turned to writing spy novels, such as “10th Grade” (2002) and “An Ordinary Spy” (2008). He was working as a staff writer on TNT’s sci-fi series “Falling Skies” when DreamWorks television executives phoned him about “The Americans” in 2010.

The FBI had just arrested 10 Russian sleeper agents who allegedly had been operating in the United States using techniques that seemed right out of a John le Carre novel: exchanging bags as they brushed past one another on the street, sending messages in invisible ink and burying stashes of cash underground, according to The New York Times.

The DreamWorks executives wanted Weisberg to concoct a series revolving around fictional KGB operatives, but the former CIA agent, for a time, was stumped.  It wasn’t that he was reluctant to make television heroes out of his old nemeses; the fall of the Soviet Union meant that these kinds of agents were no longer a true threat, and even the 10 arrested KGB officers had never managed to extract information of any import to send back home.

From left: Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, producers of “The Americans.” Photos courtesy of FX

“My response to these spies was, ‘Really? They’re still doing this even though the Cold War is over?’ It didn’t seem that the stakes were high enough to make for a compelling TV show. But then I realized that if we moved the action back to the Cold War, when we were really at each other’s throats, that could make for good drama.”

Along with his fellow “Americans” executive producers, Joel Fields and Graham Yost, Weisberg set the thriller in 1981, the year after Ronald Reagan was elected president and fanned the flames of the decades-old Cold War.

The show revolves around Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), two KGB agents who were set up in an arranged marriage in the 1960s and sent off to northern Virginia to establish a travel agency and have children as part of their cover. The husband and wife have been forbidden to speak Russian, and even to talk to one another about their pre-KGB pasts or tell their children about their true identities. As the new Reagan administration adds tension to their job, as well as to their marriage, Elizabeth and Philip manage to assassinate a turncoat KGB officer, plant a bug in the home of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and to elude the suspicious FBI counterintelligence agent (played by Noah Emmerich), who has moved in across the street.

Weisberg said he drew on his recollections of operatives sent abroad to create the fictional Jenningses.  “I had been very struck by the fact that these parents can’t tell their kids what they do when the children are young, because they’ll just go to school and tell all their friends and blow the parents’ cover,” he said. “It’s when they’re mature enough to keep a secret that their parents have what’s called ‘The Talk,’ and for some children this can be very traumatic. Spying isn’t just about the gadgets; it’s about the lies that come into the family and the damage that can do, and I felt that was a very powerful dynamic to bring to the show.”

Not that “The Americans” asks audiences to cheer for the enemy. “It’s not about wanting people to root for totalitarian socialism, because we know that the U.S.S.R. collapsed and that oppressive communism didn’t work,” Fields (“Rizzoli & Isles”), 48, said. “The show is asking you, rather, to root for this couple and this marriage, and that the Jenningses can find their humanity in this horrible situation.”

Like Weisberg, Fields, the son of Rabbi Emeritus Harvey Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, first learned about the “evil empire” while learning about refuseniks at religious school in the 1970s. During a joint conversation from their New York offices, both men said they were also inspired as children by stories of Jewish agents and covert operatives: for example, Eli Cohen, the Israeli who was caught and publicly hanged in Damascus in 1965, and Yoni Netanyahu, the Israeli assault commander killed in the 1976 top-secret raid on Entebbe. “I got a book of his letters for my bar mitzvah, and his story just bored into me and made me feel like he was the kind of man you’re supposed to be — an intellectual and a hero,” Weisberg said.

It was Weisberg, the former CIA agent, who vetted the circa-1980s spy craft depicted on “The Americans”: “At the time, there was a lot more Morse code and dead drops, where you leave a coded message for somebody in a concealed way,” Weisberg said.

The fictional Elizabeth makes use of the notorious KGB poisoned umbrella, created with a spiked tip to inoculate targets, and both of the Jenningses employ the so-called “honey trap” technique, drawing on their sexuality to recruit other spies. “The KGB had very liberal attitudes about sex for both their male and female officers,” said Weisberg, who also read former KGB agents’ memoirs as research for the show. “For example, they had something called the Secretary’s Defensive, when they noticed that many of their officers were having luck seducing secretaries of powerful officials and thus gaining access to their secrets.”

Per documents he signed upon leaving the CIA, Weisberg must submit all his scripts to the agency for approval: “They just check them to make sure there’s no classified information, and so far they’ve approved everything,” he said.

Will the show draw on Fields’ and Weisberg’s interest in Jewish spies? “We wrote a great story with a Mossad and a refusenik twist, but ultimately it didn’t pan out for this season,” Fields said. “Yet it’s stuff that’s very much on our minds, given both of our backgrounds, and in future seasons, it’s fare I’m sure we’ll explore.”

“The Americans” airs on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. 

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February 19, 2013 | 8:42 am

Bruce Cohen: A career full of ‘Silver Linings’

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper star in “Silver Linings Playbook.” Photo by JoJo Whilden/© 2012 The Weinstein Company.

Producer Bruce Cohen, a best-picture nominee for his work on “Silver Linings Playbook,” has been obsessed with the Academy Awards since he was 8. During a recent interview at his Hollywood Hills home, looking dapper in plaid pants and shoulder-length blond curls , Cohen exuberantly recalled how his grandmothers, who were babysitting at the time, allowed him to stay up late to watch his first Oscar telecast at his childhood home in Falls Church, Va. “It was love at first sight,” he said. “I thought it was the most glamorous, most spectacular thing I had ever seen, and I decided that night that I was going to win an Oscar one day.”

Cohen — who ran away from home, albeit for only an hour, when his parents refused to let him stay up to watch the Oscars a couple of years later — has more than realized his dream. A place of honor in his office is reserved for his best-picture Oscar for 1999’s “American Beauty,” the searing story of two generations of a suburban family in crisis. “It was in the living room for a while, but then I thought that was a bit gauche,” he said.

Cohen’s second Oscar nod came a decade later, this time for “Milk,” the much-lauded biopic about the life of gay activist and San Francisco Mayor Harvey Milk, who was assassinated while in office in 1978. In 2011, Cohen produced the Academy Awards telecast along with Dan Mischer.

And now he is up for his third Oscar, for “Silver Linings Playbook,” David O. Russell’s offbeat comedy-drama about a bipolar young teacher (Bradley Cooper) and his tempestuous relationship with a troubled widow, played by Jennifer Lawrence. But the joy of an Oscar nod never gets old, Cohen said. His response to his own third nomination was “to scream at the top of my lungs,” he said.

When the conversation turned to what helped prepare Cohen, now 51, to become a producer in the first place, he said he honed his political and organizational skills while serving as a leader within the National Federation of Temple Youth, and later at Yale, where he headed the campus’ United Jewish Appeal drive.  

A week after graduating from Yale in 1983, Cohen flew out to Los Angeles to take a clerical job at Warner Bros., where he talked his way into an internship run by the Directors Guild of America and wound up working on the set of Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” in the mid-1980s.  

But he didn’t go out of his way to meet the uber-director. “I was a pisher, and what I figured out is that not only didn’t he know me, but I didn’t want him to know me just yet,” Cohen said. “My job was to keep my head down and work for the first and second assistant directors.”

But Spielberg did end up noticing Cohen — initially for his work with the children on the set — and a collaboration began that eventually led to Cohen producing “The Flintstones” for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in 1994. However, there was one matter of business to take care of before Cohen accepted the job: He felt he needed to come out as a gay man to Spielberg — even though not many people were gay and out in Hollywood back in the early 1990s, Cohen said. Spielberg, it turns out, was nonplussed and said to Cohen, “Why do you think I would care?” 

Producer Bruce Cohen Photo by Matt Petit/©A.M.P.A.S.

The following year, Cohen co-founded Out There, which was among the first activist coalitions of gays and lesbians in Hollywood, and it was during the group’s early years that he and fellow member Dan Jinks became producing partners and zeroed in on a screenplay by Alan Ball that would become “American Beauty.”

“It was the best script I’ve ever read, to date, in my life,” Cohen said. “But all the studios initially thought it was too dark, too weird and controversial.” Undaunted, Cohen drew on his relationship with executives at Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG to push the project, which was quickly picked up by the then-fledgling studio and received a green light within months.

“American Beauty” — Cohen’s first effort as an independent producer — went on to receive not only rave reviews, but also to sweep the Oscars with five awards, including a screenwriting prize for Ball and a best-actor statuette for actor Kevin Spacey.

“Milk” also seemed like a hard sell when Cohen first signed on to the film in the mid-2000s. “It was gay-themed, and about a gay politician who gets killed at the end, which doesn’t fit any of the financial models for a how a movie finds audiences and makes money,” said Cohen, who is now president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is managing and running the California Supreme Court case to overturn Proposition 8. The filmmakers found a solution to that problem by casting the critically acclaimed but bankable Sean Penn in the title role.

Cohen had set up his own production company in 2010 when Donna Gigliotti of The Weinstein Co. invited him to help her produce Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” along with Jonathan Gordon (“Good Will Hunting”). Cohen jumped at the chance because he was a fan of Russell’s previous films, including “Flirting With Disaster” and “The Fighter,” and, he said, he also was riveted by the characters at the heart of “Silver Linings’ ” edgy romantic comedy. “It was ‘boy meets girl,’ but it was the most f----d-up boy and the most disturbed girl you’re ever going to meet — and they’re mean to each other,” he said. “The characters are uncompromising, and they don’t make any concessions to what one might think of as the traditional Hollywood protagonist.”

During the 33-day shoot in Philadelphia and beyond, Cohen oversaw both financial and creative choices, including the decision to tone down Cooper’s bipolar outbursts early in the film. “We found that a little went a long way,” he said. 

Cohen said he relates to the marginalized character, in part, as a gay man, in a state where his own marriage is not yet recognized as legal. “On any film, I immediately identify with the characters who are thought of as ‘less than,’ ” he said.

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February 7, 2013 | 2:53 pm

Film editor William Goldenberg faces off at the Oscars with…himself

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Photo by Jeff Zucker

At this year’s Oscars ceremony film editor William Goldenberg will have the rare and coveted distinction of competing against himself. 

Goldenberg is nominated not only for editing Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” the story of how a CIA operative (played by Affleck) sneaked six American embassy workers disguised as a science fiction film crew out of revolutionary Iran, but also for his work with editor Dylan Tichenor on Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” a thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden starring Jessica Chastain as the CIA agent who doggedly spearheads the search.

Goldenberg, 53, has earned previous Oscar nominations for his work on Michael Mann’s “The Insider” and 2003’s “Seabiscuit.”  But he is the first film editor to receive dual nominations since 1990, when Walter Murch earned nods for both “Ghost” and “The Godfather,  Part III.”  This year Goldenberg also happens to be competing against his mentor, Michael Kahn (“Lincoln”), who arranged for Goldenberg’s first film editing credit on 1993’s “Alive.”          

“It was surreal,” Goldenberg recalled of that early morning moment when the nominees were announced on  Jan. 10.  “I was so surprised and elated.”

Goldenberg, who edited Affleck’s 2007 directorial debut, “Gone Baby Gone.” got the invitation to work on “Argo” in February 2011, a task that required assembling and cutting one-million feet of film – about 175 hours of raw footage -- for this film based on a jaw-dropping true story.

But his biggest challenge, Goldenberg said, was in balancing the movie’s wildly divergent tones: The action shifts from tense CIA maneuvers to the human drama of the six fugitives to a Hollywood satire of film producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who set up a fake sci-fi flick company in Los Angeles.  “We were very [picky] about our juxtapositions,” Goldenberg recalled.  “We wouldn’t directly cut from a man being shot in the street to Alan Arkin saying, ‘If I’m going to direct a fake movie, it’s gonna be a fake hit.’” 

One tricky sequence includes a “reading” of the bogus film, set in a Los Angeles hotel, which was shot in a glossy, colorful style to reflect the Hollywood environs. Complicating the drama, the action cuts back and forth with a mock execution of hooded hostages in Tehran, (also shot on a set in L.A.) made to look like grainy, newsreel-style footage.  Images of the filmmakers and actors, wearing cheesy outer-space costumes for the faux film, are juxtaposed with the footage of a grim basement where the prisoners are lined up against a wall and shot, only to discover that the execution was faked and intended only to terrorize and humiliate them. 

One key to seamlessly merging these two very different storylines was toning down the amusing aspects of the Hollywood reading: 

“Ben and I chose the performances very carefully,” Goldenberg said.  “We wanted the jokes to seem more like throwaway lines, rather than like rim-shot performances.  We didn’t want the comedic elements to be too over-the-top.”

While preparing to edit Argo’s opening sequence, in which protestors storm the American Embassy in 1979, Goldenberg watched hours of newsreel footage shot at the time of the events, he said, “to get the feel of the crowd, and how angry and organized they were.”  But the filmmakers created their own footage of the takeover, shot with hand-held cameras amidst crowds of extras in Turkey and Los Angeles, rather than intercutting with real archival footage. 

“We found that when we tried that, it was jarring and took people out of the moment,” Goldenberg said.  Even so, he edited the sequence to reflect the real events of the takeover as much as possible, and often cut away from protesters in the middle of a movement or action to create a sense of panic.

Capturing the drama of the American’s harrowing escape to the Tehran airport in a 40-minute sequence at the end of the film turned out to require far more subtlty than the usual Hollywood chase scene. “Initially I tried setting it to action music, which just sounded silly,” he said.  “It made me realize that this sequence wasn’t about action, but about building tension and suspense.”  When Goldenberg cut between the CIA agents, the Republican Guard and the terrified embassy workers, “I tried to make each [segment] end with an unanswered question, so that the audience would be breathless, wondering what was going to happen next.”

Just two days after Goldenberg finished his work on Argo,” Bigelow hired him to help Dylan Tichenor cut the nearly two-million feet of footage she had shot for “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film that has criticized by some pundits, including members of Congress, for allegedly sanctioning torture as an effective information gathering tool. “My opinion of those scenes, and our opinion as filmmakers, is that depiction is not endorsement,” Goldenberg said of the film’s scenes of waterboarding prisoners and other grueling torture sequences.  “As Kathryn has said, part of art is showing the ugly stuff; we’re not saying torture worked or didn’t work, just that this is a part of what happened in response to Sept. 11.”

 “Initially there was a lot more of those scenes,” Goldenberg added, but we decided that it was enough that the audience understood how difficult this was without sticking their noses in it.”

The attitude toward torture of the film’s central character of Maya, a CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain, shifts over the course of the film: “We wanted to see an evolution in her character, to see how she’s at first revolted and can barely look at it, to where she’s actually participating, because her drive to find Bin Laden is so unrelenting,” Goldenberg said.

Her quest culminates when the Navy SEALS, following Maya’s intuition about bin Laden’s whereabouts, storm a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on a moonless night in May 2011, and in the editing room, there was a delicate balancing act between maintaining authenticity and moviemaking.  “The difficulty was making it true to what happened while keeping it exciting, because the raid wasn’t what people necessarily might have thought – the SEALS didn’t charge in, storm up the stairs and exchange a lot of gunfire; it was basically slow-moving and methodical,” he said.  “Kathryn referred to it as a march, or a wave of death -- these trained killers walking through the compound in the pitch-black night, never knowing what they might find next.  That’s what we tried to do in the editing -- keeping the audience wondering what was just around the corner.”

Goldenberg’s anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony is dampened only by the fact that both Affleck and Bigelow were overlooked in the directing category, although both films are up for the best-picture award.  (It’s surmised that Bigelow was snubbed, at least in part, because of the torture controversy surrounding her film.)

“Having cut their movies, I know what great directors they are,” he said.

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February 6, 2013 | 1:46 pm

Dysfunctional first family

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

The cast of “1600 Penn”: front row from left: Martha MacIsaac, Bill Pullman, Jenna Elfman; back row from left: Benjamin Stockham, Amara Miller, Josh Gad, Andre Holland. Photo by Chris Haston/NBC

When Barack Obama heard that his speechwriter Jon Lovett would be leaving the White House to follow his dream of becoming a Hollywood comedy writer, the president joked something in the vein of, “You’re not going to write about me, right?”

The commander in chief didn’t need to worry. True, Lovett, along with actor Josh Gad (a Tony nominee for “The Book of Mormon”) and “Modern Family’s” Jason Winer, has created the new NBC sitcom “1600 Penn,” about a first family. However, the fictional Gilchrists are decidedly not the Obamas: “This is a show about a family with dysfunctions and screw-ups, but it’s pretty clear that this current first family doesn’t fit that mold,” Lovett said by phone recently.

“The Obamas seem extraordinarily normal, which, frankly, is a little boring when it comes to comedy,” Winer said in a recent interview in his office on the 20th Century Fox lot.

It’s also not about Beltway intrigue, like HBO’s wickedly funny “Veep,” nor heady political fare, as on Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing.” “1600 Penn,” rather, is a family sitcom set in a White House led by President Dale Gilchrist (played by Bill Pullman, in his first role as commander in chief since saving Earth from aliens in “Independence Day”), who is having more tsuris managing his family than the nation. 

There’s Gilchrist’s gaffe-prone son, Skip (Gad), who is called home after seven years in college in an attempt to keep his Billy Carter-like antics in check; his overachieving teenage daughter, Becca (“Superbad’s” Martha
MacIsaac), who is appalled to discover that she is pregnant after a rare one-night stand; his two arch younger children; and his second wife, Emily (Jenna Elfman), who is struggling not only in her role as stepmom but also with the scheming Washington press corps.

When, for example, Emily hosts a school event and a student asks her what it means when her father says the first lady is a “trophy wife,” Emily erupts in an outburst that has the beleaguered press secretary, played by Andre Holland, hauling her away from the cameras. When the media pounces on news of Becca’s pregnancy, even Al Jazeera picks up the story.

“The press corps on the show serves the same role as it does in real life,” Lovett, 30, said. “They’re just so annoying, but they’re really necessary in that they hold the White House to the fire — although we portray that in a heightened, comedic way.”

Otherwise, the show remains apolitical: “The goal on network TV is to reach the broadest-possible audience, and politics is, by its nature, divisive,” Winer, 40, explained. “We don’t even mention the words ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’ in the entire series. It’s more about a family that just happens to be in the fishbowl of the most famous address in America. I’ve always loved the theme of public versus private — of those things that we try to keep to ourselves and, yet, can’t.”

Winer said he draws inspiration from his childhood in Baltimore, where he had his bar mitzvah at an Orthodox synagogue, and “Jewish humor in my family started with laughing at others — not in a mean-spirited way, but looking out at the world around you and marveling at the craziness.”

All that came in handy for him as an Emmy Award-winning executive producer and director of ABC’s hit sitcom “Modern Family.” and now for “1600 Penn.” The show’s history also dates back to when he met Gad as the actor was auditioning for a role on “Modern Family” six years ago. “Josh dropped out of the process to go do this silly little musical about Mormons, which baffled us all at the time,” Winer recalled.

But he was impressed by Gad’s finesse in portraying what he calls “a lovable idiot,” and kept that persona in mind when he and Gad agreed to collaborate on what would become “1600 Penn” around 2011. “We wanted to take advantage of the bull-in-a-china-shop character that Josh plays so well, and we decided that the White House was the biggest china shop in the world,” Winer said. “But I didn’t know if we could give the show enough real-life texture and detail, which is where Jon Lovett came into the picture.”

Turns out Lovett — who grew up Reform on Long Island — got into politics almost by accident in the mid-2000s. After graduating with a math degree from Williams College and trying his hand at stand-up comedy for a year in New York, he went to work for the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign, where Hillary Rodham Clinton noticed his pithy wit and asked him to write jokes to help her roast Barbara Walters. Before long, Lovett had become Clinton’s full-time speechwriter, and he went on to work for the Obama administration the week of the president’s inauguration. In 2010, he was named Washington’s funniest celebrity, in part for his spoof of pundit Arianna Huffington. 

“I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted,” Lovett said. “But I felt like I owed it to myself to take a chance on, for lack of a less cheesy word, my dream.”

And so, while he knew it would be hard to watch President Obama’s re-election campaign from the sidelines, Lovett packed up his belongings and moved out of the home he shared with White House co-workers to sleep on friends’ couches in Los Angeles. 

Just three days after he arrived, he found himself at a meeting with Winer and Gad at a coffee shop on Larchmont Boulevard, insisting that “literally the only thing I didn’t want to write about was the White House. 

“It was, in part, because comedy inherently makes fun of its subjects, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that to the president and the people I had worked with. So I was very reluctant about the whole idea, but the more we talked about it, the more I felt like the things I had experienced could lend itself to the show without being a satire of this administration.”

The “1600 Penn” creators have drawn on some of the shenanigans of past presidential relatives, like Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger Clinton — whom the Secret Service dubbed with the code name “Headache,” due to his penchant for landing in hot water — as well as a visit to the White House, where Winer was stunned to discover that “the Situation Room was just this simple room in a hallway, not like something out of a Kubrick movie or some bunker in the basement.

“Just outside that room, there’s a brown plastic phone like you’d find in your mother’s kitchen from 1983, and our guide said that if you’ve never been there before, they tell you to pick up that phone and give all kinds of personal information — and then they tell you the phone doesn’t work. So there’s actually this prank phone in the White House, and that’s the spirit of our show in a nutshell.”

When the real commander in chief presided over a screening of “1600 Penn” at the White House last month, Winer said, “It was just art and life commingling in a way that just blew my mind. The president said that at the real 1600 Penn, we have to laugh at ourselves, because we have to deal with a lot of serious stuff every day. I was just so honored when he said it’s great that we’ve been able to create something for TV that brings some levity to this place.”

“1600 Penn” airs Thursdays at 9:30 p.m.
on NBC.

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February 1, 2013 | 12:36 pm

Bar Refaeli makes out with nerd in Go Daddy Super Bowl commercial

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Bar Refaeli makes out with "Walter" for GoDaddy.com's Super Bowl commericial

Wanna see blonde bombshell Bar Refaeli making out with a nerd on TV? 

Check out the new Super Bowl commercial in which the Israeli supermodel smooches a guy introduced as “Walter,” who bears more than a passing resemblance to the portly (and MOT) performer “Josh Gad” of “The Book of Mormon.” 

It’s all the name of hyping a web site, GoDaddy.com:  “There’s the sexy side [of the company] represented by Bar Refaeli, and the smart side that creates a killer website for your small business, represented by Walter. 

Together, they’re perfect,” the commercial insists.

It seems Godaddy has a thing for Jewish women...check out 2011's ad starring another Jewish goddess...

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