March 28, 2013 | 5:17 am

The real Jeffrey Tambor

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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Jeffrey Tambor

March 20, 2013 | 7:26 am

Jeremy Piven plays a self(ridge)-made man

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

From left: Tom Goodman-Hill as Roger Grove, Jeremy Piven as Harry Selfridge and Ron Cook as Crabb in “Mr. Selfridge.” Photo by John Rogers/ITV Studios for Masterpiece Theater

Two minutes into a telephone interview, actor Jeremy Piven riffed on his Jewish background: “I grew up Reconstructionist, so my father used to joke that we prayed to ‘To whom it may concern,’ ” he said, then paused as if for a rim shot. “I’m waiting for the laugh to die down,” he quipped. “That’s how hams work.”

Throughout the eight seasons of HBO’s hit series “Entourage,” Piven played one of the most outrageous hams ever to appear on TV, stealing practically every scene he was in. His character of Ari Gold, the manic, merciless pit bull of an uber-agent to a young Hollywood A-list movie star and his posse of libidinous pals from Queens, N.Y., made him an iconic image of Hollywood excess. 

The mercurial Ari also hammed up his Judaism, throwing a lavish bat mitzvah for his daughter; sneaking a cell phone into synagogue on Yom Kippur (to his wife’s chagrin) in order to close a lucrative deal; and proclaiming in another scene, “It’s all gonna be fine … the Jew has arrived.”

No wonder Ari’s aura has been hard to shake for the 47-year-old Piven, who is still approached by fans who affectionately attempt to grip him in an Ari-style headlock and spout Ari-isms such as, “Hug it out, bitch!”

Even when Piven met Britain’s Prince Harry at a recent polo match, Harry, an avid “Entourage” fan, kept calling him “Ari.” “It was cute,” Piven recalled, sounding not too convinced.  

The actor said he is grateful for the chance to return to TV in a very different, albeit equally larger-than-life role, this time in the “Masterpiece Classic” eight-episode period drama “Mr. Selfridge,” about the wheeling-and-dealing entrepreneur who pioneered the modern department store, premiering in the United States on PBS SoCal on March 31. Looking dapper in a top hat and tails, Piven portrays Harry Gordon Selfridge, the exuberant, Chicago-born retail magnate and womanizer who in 1909 had the chutzpah to open a palatial (some said crass) shop in the oh-so-proper milieu of Edwardian England.  

“Harry’s goal was to make shopping as thrilling as sex, and he was all about glamour and razzmatazz,” said Piven, adding that the idea of going shopping as a leisure activity previously did not exist. “One of his heroes was P.T. Barnum, and he thought of himself as a bit of a performer and his theater as his shop.”  

Selfridge invented the idea of ornate window dressings and browsing, which at the time was considered uncouth, as well as the saying, “The customer is always right.”

“It was his idea to move makeup, formerly considered only for showgirls and prostitutes, to the very front of the store,” Piven said. “And he even convinced Louis Bleriot, the French hero who was the first person to successfully fly over the English Channel, to display his airplane in the shop.”

On display, along with the lavish merchandise, are all of Harry’s flaws, which Piven compared to those of his “Entourage” character.  “Both Ari and Harry ruled with an iron fist, but Harry’s bite ultimately was much worse than his bark, whereas Ari’s bark was much worse than his bite,” Piven said. “Ari was a monogamous guy who was seemingly a pig, while Harry was a man who could be so inspiring in business, but also had this other life where he was a risk addict and loved his gambling and his women.”

Although Selfridge was said to be very much in love with his wife, Rosalie, he famously bedded the burlesque actress Ellen Love, as well as the dancers Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova, among myriad other mistresses. But his fortunes eventually waned, and after the death of Rosalie in the 1918 influenza pandemic, he spiraled downward into financial and personal ruin, ultimately dying virtually a pauper in 1947, at the age of 83.

“Harry’s is a true story, and yet it feels Shakespearean,” Piven said.

And there’s another bonus to playing the part: “Being on ‘Masterpiece’ is like telling your Jewish mother that you’re going to become a doctor,” Piven said. “ ‘Entourage’ was a male wish fulfillment show, so, did my own mother have fun watching the boys trying to get laid because their best friend is famous? I don’t think so. Does she enjoy a turn-of-the-century period piece about an American entrepreneur with all of his beauty, warts and eccentricities?  She saw the pilot and was intrigued, so I’m pretty proud of that.”

Piven’s parents, both actors who studied with Uta Hagen, introduced him to the stage, courtesy of their Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Ill., where students included John Cusack and Aidan Quinn. In between performing Chekhov and Shakespeare, the young Piven also aspired to become a star football player on his high school team — to no avail. “If you fail in your own eyes early on, it stokes the fires of ambition and led to a lot of my tenacious ways with acting,” he said.

That persistence came in handy as Piven toiled for years to make it in Hollywood, playing secondary characters in dozens of films, including “Old School” and “Black Hawk Down.” His big break came in 2004, when “Entourage” creator Doug Ellin cast him as the character based on executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s real agent, Ari Emanuel. “Ari Gold was a proud Jew, but it was difficult for him to play by the rules, which led to some of our best comedy,” said Piven, who won three Emmy Awards and one Golden Globe for his work on the series.

Even so, “Playing Ari was physically exhausting, and it took a lot out of me,” said Piven, who relied on his training in commedia dell’arte to portray the volatile character.

“Mr. Selfridge” creator Andrew Davies (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Bleak House”) said it was Piven’s performance in “Entourage” that led him to cast the actor: “All of us are terrific fans of ‘Entourage,’ and we thought Jeremy showed the kind of energy and outrageousness we needed for our character.” Davies said.

These days, Piven said he’s thrilled that an “Entourage” movie is in the works, but he also seems glad to take a break from Ari. 

“The U.K. has really embraced ‘Mr. Selfridge,’ and in Britain I don’t see Ari attached to my name so much anymore. I’ve been typecast now as Harry Selfridge, which is really fun.” 

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March 13, 2013 | 4:24 am

Comedy-drama ‘Tribes’ communicates dysfunction of British-Jewish family

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

From left: Gayle Rankin, Lee Roy Rogers and Russell Harvard in “Tribes.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The tribes in Nina Raine’s comedy-drama “Tribes,” now at the Mark Taper Forum, are Jewish, literati and deaf — all as perceived through the lens of one garrulous, even antagonistic British-Jewish family.

The patriarch of this argumentative clan is Christopher, an elitist, politically incorrect academic and writer who not only rejects his membership in the Jewish tribe but also attacks what he perceives to be conformity of any kind. He is thus appalled when his youngest son, Billy, who was born deaf but is expected to read lips, brings home a new girlfriend, Sylvia, who is going deaf and who is introducing Billy to sign language as well as to members of London’s deaf community. Christopher retorts that the deaf community is a cult “founded on exclusivity,” that the deaf are “the f-----g Muslims of the handicapped world,” and that making one’s handicap the center of one’s personality is ludicrous.

Adding to the raucous discourse are Christopher’s wife, Beth; his oldest son, Daniel, who suffers from auditory hallucinations; and his daughter, Ruth, a wannabe opera singer, as power dynamics in the family shift over the course of the play.

Speaking by phone from London, where she was directing William Boyd’s new play, “Longing,” Raines said “Tribes” is as much about what it means to be a member of a tribe as it is about how we hear each other, literally and figuratively.

Her own family tribe, like the one in the play, is verbal, cerebral and at times quarrelsome. Her father is Craig Raine, the famously acerbic British poet and academic; he is not Jewish, while Raine’s mother, Ann Pasternak Slater, is an academic who has taught Shakespeare at Oxford, and hails from a Jewish family — her mother left the Soviet Union to study medicine in Germany, then fled the Nazis to England.

“Some of my cousins are very observant and keep kosher, and some are completely lax, but they all have a slightly sarcastic opinion of each other,” said Raine, who is in her mid-30s and was alternately breezy and thoughtful during the course of a conversation.  She noted that the fictional Christopher has no patience for a cousin who has become observant after marrying an Orthodox woman: “[Can’t his parents] just tease him out of being kosher?” he says.

Raine’s immediate family was hardly kosher: “We didn’t learn Hebrew, and we eat ham, but my mother felt like after the Holocaust you should be proud to be Jewish, and she named my brothers Moses and Isaac as if to say, ‘This is our heritage,’ ” she said. “And I don’t feel completely English, because I feel so connected to my family’s refugee history.”

Raine was one of only two Jewish students at her all-girls high school in London, during teenage years when “you’re quite vulnerable to feeling like you want to belong to something,” she said. She found that sense of belonging, in part, by attending synagogue and Shabbat dinners with her Jewish cousins, a practice she continues to this day.

“I also enjoy that game of figuring out whether people are Jewish or not,” she said, with a laugh. “It’s something I love to do, even though my boyfriend, who is not Jewish, just doesn’t understand why that is interesting at all.”

“Tribes” began several years ago, when Raine chanced to watch a documentary about expecting deaf parents who were elated to learn that their baby would be born deaf. “I was startled,” she said, “but then I thought that if I were to have a baby, and it turned out to have my nose and my blue eyes, it would delight me. There’s a kind of joy in putting an image of yourself out there in the world, of furthering your tribe, your family tree.

“Then I started looking around, and tribes seemed to be everywhere,” she said. During a visit to New York, Raine was fascinated by the Chasidim she saw walking the streets of Williamsburg, “who all wore a sort of uniform, like an extended family.”

“I realized that in the deaf community, everyone has opinions about whether you’re being deaf in the best way possible, a bit like I imagine if you decide to become an observant Jew, people are going to have opinions about how ‘kosher’ you are. It’s like intellectuals talking about other intellectuals, or even family members arguing with each other.”

It was Raine’s family that ushered her into the tribe of the theater; when she was 11, her parents took her to the opening night of the opera “The Electrification of the Soviet Union,” for which her father had written the libretto. “I remember meeting the director and wearing a pretty dress, staying up late and being allowed to have a bit of champagne,” she recalled. “I was quite young, and I found all that [glittering] stuff very cool and exciting.”

Raine began writing plays while studying at Oxford; when she couldn’t find a theater to produce her edgy 2006 play, “Rabbit,” she opted to direct it herself in a tiny theater above the Old Red Lion theater pub in the Islington section of London. She was rewarded for her efforts with good reviews and the Evening Standard Award — which came with 30,000 pounds — for most promising new playwright. Her play “Tiger Country,” which delves into the psyches of young doctors at a busy London hospital, also opened to good reviews in 2011.

It is Raine’s parents who have been among her harshest critics: “My mother can’t lie, so she’s crap at sugaring the pill,” Raine said. “But she never says things to deliberately hurt you, which actually is the most gutting thing. And my father is a brilliant editor, so he’s used to taking out his red pen.” 

Raine admits to bringing a bit of her father to the fictional Christopher, but she disagrees with viewers who have perceived the character as monstrous. “Christopher loves his family, but he also worships the individual, and he would never assimilate into any kind of group,” she explained. “And he’s just a complete contrarian — to the point where if someone told him it was inappropriate to wear a colorful waistcoat to a funeral, he would say, ‘F--k it,’ and wear it all the same.”

Jeff Still, who plays Christopher, has even encountered viewers who have congratulated him for convincingly portraying “such an ass----, in their words,” he said. “They think they’re being complimentary, but I see Christopher differently. He is above all a family man but he has his flaws.  He wants to be the star attraction in the room; he’s going to speak and he wants you to hear what he has to say, and he’s used to being right.”

Raine spent several months visiting hospitals in London to research “Tiger Country”; for “Tribes,” which debuted at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2010, she not only interviewed members of the city’s deaf community, but also attempted to learn sign language — an endeavor she found daunting. “I felt stupid, slow, uncomprehending,” she said. “I wondered, ‘Is this what it might be like to be a deaf person trying to follow a rapid spoken conversation?’ ”

In “Tribes,” she said, deafness becomes a metaphor: “It’s about communication, and what it means emotionally when we hear.”

For tickets and information, visit www.centertheatregroup.org.

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March 6, 2013 | 5:52 am

Boy on HBO’s ‘Girls’ is also a ‘restless’ filmmaker

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Alex Karpovsky in HBO’s “Girls.” Photo by Jessica Miglio

You might only know Alex Karpovsky as Ray Ploshansky, the caustic barista who fitfully romances the naïf Shoshanna on HBO’s zeitgeist-y hit, “Girls.”

But while shooting that show, Karpovsky also has managed to write, direct and star in two independent films that recently premiered at Lincoln Center in New York: “Red Flag,” a meta-comedy in which he plays a self-absorbed independent filmmaker named, well, Alex Karpovsky; and “Rubberneck,” a psychological thriller about a scientist who becomes dangerously obsessed with a co-worker.

And in December, Karpovsky will appear as a hopeless square (and wannabe bohemian) in the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a folk music saga set in 1961.

Why so busy? “I just have a restless drive to keep working,” said Karpovsky, who begins shooting the third season of “Girls” this month. He does see a thread connecting the roles, however.

“I’m drawn to characters who are lonely, neurotic and on journeys of self-discovery,” he said. “Many of them want to become better people, but the road is often tortuous.”

Speaking by phone from the apartment he sublets in Brooklyn, Karpovsky, 33, frankly discussed his own neuroses, which he sometimes draws upon to create his characters. “I have an acute death anxiety,” he said. “ I think about death all the time. It’s the root fear that creates a lot of my day-to-day insecurities.”

Like his character in “Red Flag,” Karpovsky was once dumped by a girlfriend who was fed up by his refusal to propose. “The character feels that if he gets married, his drive and ambition will stagnate, which he sees as a form of death,” Karpovsky said. The actor also has had issues with that kind of commitmentphobia, which, he said, has even extended beyond relationships to housing arrangements. Karpovsky said because of this he tends to sublet apartments, sometimes for short periods of time, and to date has never signed a lease.

“I’m hoping to get a place in April, but it’s hard because I don’t have any credit,” he said. No matter that Karpovsky is among the stars of one of the most talked-about shows on television. “Most of the landlords in my area are Eastern Europeans, and they don’t watch HBO, never mind ‘Girls,’ ” he said.

The fictional Ray’s living situation is even more tenuous: On a recent episode of the show created by its lead actress, Lena Dunham, Ray admitted that he has essentially moved in with Shoshanna because he is homeless and living out of his Mitsubishi.

“I love the fact that all the characters are very authentic, and the relationships are grounded in naturalism,” Karpovsky said. “Viewers are much more familiar with comedies expressed in broader tones, with beautiful people, but we’re doing something much more raw, and, hopefully, reflective of the world we see around us in Brooklyn every day.”
Karpovsky grew up in Boston, the son of a computer science professor, where the décor in his childhood home included paintings of shtetls and other images of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement. His parents are Russian Jews who immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s: “They had endured anti-Semitism and the many limits and quotas the Soviets placed on Jews,” Karpovsky said. “They left to create a better life for themselves, and also for me.”

While in his 20s, Karpovsky assumed he would follow his father’s footsteps into academia, but he left his doctoral program in visual ethnography at Oxford University when he discovered his penchant for the theater. Back in the United States, he began making his own movies while working at a film editing company, where he was allowed to borrow the in-house equipment to work on his own projects.

It was while screening his third movie, “Trust Us, This Is All Made Up,” at the South by Southwest film festival several years ago that Karpovsky met Dunham, who promptly cast him as a self-centered beau in her acclaimed, low-budget 2010 film “Tiny Furniture.”

When Dunham hired Karpovsky to play Ray in “Girls” the following year, the actor immediately grasped what she wanted from the character: “Ray is a contrarian who speaks his mind and calls out the other characters on their b.s.,” he said. “He’s 33, a bit older than everyone else, and he feels this strange obligation to blurt out his perspective on what others are doing, even if it is misguided and occasionally perverse.”

This season has revealed that Ray’s cynicism “actually comes from a sad, lonely place,” Karpovsky said; viewers have learned that Ray is an orphan, with plenty of abandonment issues.

They’ve also learned that Ray isn’t Jewish: “In a recent episode, someone calls Ray a kike, and he responds by saying that he’s actually Greek Orthodox,” Karposvky said. “That was a surprise for me as an actor, and from I’ve read on Twitter, it was also a surprise to some members of the viewing public as well.”

What’s it like for Karpovsky to be a boy on “Girls”? “I feel like a voyeur at times, when I’m hearing three or four of the female characters talk to each other on the show,” he said.

“Every man has the secret desire to overhear the conversations of women, and to know what they’re really thinking — and that’s incredibly juicy, delicious information to get ahold of.”

“Girls” will air the final episode of its second season on March 17.

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February 27, 2013 | 8:44 am

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

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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.

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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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