May 17, 2012 | 11:47 am

Donna Summer memories

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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When the news came that Donna Summer—the disco diva who rose to fame with pulsing hits such as “Last Dance” and “Bad Girl” – died today at 63, Jewish publicist Michael Levine called with some memories of the cultural icon.  “I grew up in New York, and when she became a big star, I could never in a thousand years imagine that I would get to meet her, much less represent her,” said Levine, who was Summer’s publicist for about a year back in 2002. 

At the time, the performer was struggling to reinvent herself, Levine said:  “She felt very strongly that she was kind of a victim of her own success,” recalled Levine, founder of LCO public relations, who has represented some 34 Grammy Award winners.  “She had a tremendously embedded image of someone who was a disco diva, and she wanted to move her career beyond that.” 

Summer was focusing more on pop rock, and also had become a born-again Christian: “Beyond her music, she was deeply committed to her spirituality and her religion,” Levine said.  “She would have Bible study classes at her house and even invited me to attend.”

Levine said he and Summer discussed whether to address the debate that had erupted when she was accused of making anti-gay statements relating to the AIDS crisis some years prior.  “She claimed she didn’t make any [such] remarks,” Levine said.  “But she didn’t want to get involved in the controversy.  We talked a lot about whether she wanted to address the controversy, and she didn’t.”

Levine remembers Summer, then in her early 50s, as a performer with “a deeply, deeply burning sense of ambition and drive….She had more damn energy than people I represent who are in their early 20s.  And she was very gracious,” he added.  Whenever she came to our office she would bring a gift, which is unique, because most people don’t.”

In 2008, Summer performed on “American Idol” and released her first full studio album in 17 years, titled “Crayons.”  She is survived by her husband, singer Bruce Sudano, three daughters and four grandchildren.

“Early this morning, we lost Donna Summer Sudano, a woman of many gifts, the greatest being her faith,” Summer’s family said in a statement today.  “While we grieve her passing, we are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy.”

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May 17, 2012 | 9:04 am

‘The Dictator’ reviews are in, and the verdict is…

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

The Dictator (2012)

The reviews are in for Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator,” ladies and gentlemen, and while there are pans and mixed notices, a number of the some 20 top critics I perused had good things to say about Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest spoof—mostly praising his social satire or crass comic antics to some degree. 

Sample headlines:  The Rude ‘dictator’ Rules,” accompanied Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun-Times; “He Has Ways of Making you Laugh,” proclaimed Richard Corliss’ Time review.

First a bit about the plot:  Admiral Gen. Aladeen (Baron Cohen) is Supreme Leader of a fictional North African country called Wadiya, and he’s been summoned to New York to address the United Nations about his nuclear weapons buildup.  Once in New York, however, he’s kidnapped, replaced with a body double (a goatherd) and finds refuge with a hippie-ish green grocer, Zoey (Anna Faris), who has alarming patches of armpit hair and whom he refers to as a “lesbian hobbit.”  A romance, natch, ensues, as do shenanigans involving the Israeli delegation to the United Nations (the klutzy goatherd accidentally pours urine on the diplomats, prompting the real Aladeen to enthuse, “That’s a good one.”) 

Suffice it to say, the dictator makes it to the U.N. in time to deliver a rousing speech that skewers American democracy – or lack thereof.  Along the way, there are plenty of jokes involving rape, torture, severed heads, masturbation and anti-Semitism – not to mention a full-frontal image of Baron Cohen’s flaccid member crashing into a hotel window.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers singled out gags such as “Zoey schooling her new squeeze in the how-to of jerking off and Aladeen panicking American tourists during a chopper ride over Manhattan.”  “’The Dictator’ zigs and zag through its scant 84 minutes as if running wild to save its crazy ass,” Travers writes.  “Oddly enough, this is a good thing…[it] leaves you laughing helplessly.  It starts at outrageous and rockets on from there.  Screw the occasional splutter.”

Ebert went so far as to claim that with “The Dictator,” Baron Cohen “establishes a claim as the best comic filmmaker now working.  And in a speech about dictatorships, he practices merciless political satire.”  The film “is funny,” he writes, “in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological [note: Osama bin Laden is the butt of some of the poop jokes] vulgar, crude and so on.”

More kudos came from NPR’s David Edelstein, who wrote that while “the film doesn’t approach the greatest of all American anti-war farces, the Marx Brothers’ ‘Duck Soup,’ Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles are certainly in the arena.  In a climactic speech, Aladeen extols the benefits of a dictatorship over a democracy, which gives leaders, he says, power to declare war unilaterally, violate civil liberties, and structure the economy so the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.  The speech is a triumph over the satirist’s art.”

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott disagreed, noting that “There is nothing especially outrageous here.  The movie’s blend of self-aware insult humor, self-indulgent grossness, celebrity cameos and strenuous whimsy represents a fairly standard recipe for sketch-comedy-derived feature films.”  Moreover, he adds,  the film “gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.”

The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, meanwhile, said the dictator’s budding romance with Zoey “invites nonstop jokes about lesbianism, underarm hair and fundamental cultural and political understandings.  “’The police here are so fascist!’” Zoey cries after Aladeen is temporarily taken into custody.  ‘Yeah, and not in a good way!’ Aladeen retorts.  That’s one of the few throwaway lines that is genuinely amusing in ‘The Dictator,’ which never achieves the stinging parodic heights of Cohen’s ‘Borat’ movie, but manages a better batting average than his most recent misfire, ‘Bruno.’….an early stunt involving a Wii game based on the 1972 Munich Olympics falls flatter than a stale matzo, a running gag about Hollwood stars selling sexual favors quickly loses steam and it can be stipulated that rape jokes simply aren’t funny.” 

Whether or not viewers laugh at “The Dictator,” it’s clearly one of the most unabashedly Jewish films this season, as Baron Cohen skewers anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments with impunity.  I liked the Wii joke, and so did Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir:  “We see the bearded North African tyrant Admiral General Aladeen…playing a first-person-shooter video game called ‘Munich Olympics.’  You’re groaning already, right?  Here’s how it works: You knock on the door marked ‘Israeli Olympic Team.’  When a cute little Smurf-like creaure in a yarmulke and side-curls answers the door – ‘Shalom!’ – a pop-up widget announces ‘Shoot the Jew!’ and you waste him…This is funny precisely because it’s not funny…let’s remember that we’re talking about a guy who has cited World War II-era historican Ian Kershaw, who was one of his professors at Cambridge, as a major influence.”

While Aladeen dislikes Jews and Israel, Baron Cohen and his co-screenwriters, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaeffer, deliberately keep his ethnicity vague.  “’I’m not an Arab’,” he says at one point, and ‘The Dictator,’ directed by Larry Charles, carefully avoids references to Islam,” A.O. Scott notes.  “Is this precaution enough to prevent the movie from giving offense?  Probably not. But it may be enough to turn the tables on anyone who decides to take offense, which is really the point.”

Even so, The Wrap reported that “While Baron Cohen’s shtick may be in good fun, some Arab groups and experts aren’t in on the joke, believing the comedian has perpetuated negative stereotypes that go back to the early days of Hollywood.”  Omar Baddar, New Media Coordinator for the Arab American Institute “argued that there was a double standard – that an anti-Jewish stereotype would never pass muster in Hollywood.”  Other observers complained “not that Arabs are portrayed negatively, but that they were not cast in the film.”

Baron Cohen, meanwhile, was busy promoting his film in character at the Cannes Film Festival Wednesday, where he was nearly unseated by his camel as he ordered his virgin bodyguards to point their assault rifles at the press. 

However, he did take time to answer a question about the Arab spring, posed via email by The Forward’s Dan Friedman:  “I think that the Arab Spring is a passing fad, like the Atkins diet, or human rights, and you’ll find that pretty soon it will turn into the Crackdown Summer, Torture Fall and Execution Winter,” Baron-Cohen-as-dictator emailed Friedman.  “But you know the Arab Spring could have been avoided. I told Mubarak a thousand times: “If you get Wi-Fi in your palace, put a f**king password on it. The people will start using it.”

Here’s another question Friedman posed in his Q & A:

DF: Did you ever use any products of the Jewish hairstylist and anti-racism fighter Vidal Sassoon, who recently passed away?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Wait — Vidal Sassoon was a Jew?! But the secret behind my luxuriously masculine beard is using one whole bottle of Vidal Sassoon Fortifying Shampoo each day. Now I must cleanse it of its Zionism by paying for an overpriced beard trim that does not include tip, and then afterward I won’t even complain about it! Well, I know who was behind this: the Mossad!

“The Dictator” is now in theaters.

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May 16, 2012 | 12:45 pm

‘Hysteria’ and the invention of the vibrator [VIDEO]

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Tanya Wexler’s film, “Hysteria,” a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian England opening May 18, begins with a note to the audience: “This story is based on true events. 

Really.”

It’s preposterous from a 21st century perspective, but back in the 1880s the vibrator was used as a cure-all for the (bogus) diagnosis of “hysteria,” a catchall phrase for symptoms such as nymphomania, frigidity, and melancholia, as we’re told in the film, as well as just being unhappy with one’s husband or – gasp – a suffragette.  The malady “stems from an overactive uterus,” we’re told.  And the, er, hands-on treatment was “manual massage to paroxysm,” which was regarded as a perfectly non-sexual release of the nervous system, but is – in translation –  an orgasm.  All of this was accomplished perfectly clinically in the doctor’s office, as the women, decked out in full Victorian garb, spread their legs behind a curtain.

These historical facts struck the 41-year-old Wexler (“Finding North,” “Ball in the House”) – as well as her screenwriters, Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer—as hysterical.  “Both the doctors and the patients seemed not to realize that there was anything sexual going on, and that just made me laugh so hard, like you can’t see the nose on your face, so to speak, ba-dump-bump,” Wexler said, with a resounding laugh at the Four Seasons hotel recently.  “It’s like they got the cure right, and the disease wrong.

“But if you make a film about the invention of the vibrator, and that’s the joke, it’s maybe a 15-minute sketch, so for me the joke was about the cultural denial that was going on,” she added.  “People back then didn’t think women’s sexuality existed.”

The idea for the movie came to Wexler via producer Tracey Becker, who suggested the vibrators-and-Victorians premise. “I [immediately] said, ‘I’m in,’” Wexler said with another booming laugh.

While the concept of hysteria and its massage “cure” is historically accurate, the story and characters are largely fictionalized.  There really was a Dr. Mortimer Granville, who invented an electrical device called Granville’s Hammer—ostensibly to be used for soothing muscle aches but which was quickly appropriated to scratch another kind of itch. A fictional version of Granville is the hero of the film; as played by Hugh Dancy, he’s an idealistic young doctor who goes to work for hysteria expert Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who literally needs another set of hands to service the women of all ages who frequent his clinic.  The fictional Mortimer eventually invents the vibrator as a laborsaving device after he gets hand cramps from massaging women all day long. 

Along the way, he romances Dalrymple’s prim daughter, Emily (Felicity Jones) while sparring with his older daughter, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a champion of women’s rights, as romantic sparks fly. 

The film is the latest in a series of projects that aim to realistically depict women’s sexuality:  In David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” (2011), Keira Knightley’s character suffers violent outbursts as a result of sadomasochistic desires stemming from childhood abuse; in HBO’s “Girls,” created by 25-year-old Lena Dunham, four twentysomething New York galpals are often reduced to bad sex on filthy couches.

In person, Wexler is a hoot, delivering one-liners at lightning speed, coming off more like a bawdy comedian than the director of a film about Victorian morays. Raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father in Chicago, Wexler said she strongly identifies as Jewish, quipping that while she’s unsure how many Jewish women used vibrators in the late 19th century, “If you’re really tired, it’s probably a bummer on Shabbat.”

Wexler had to watch her tribal sense of humor while making the movie: “I had to pull back from my Borsht Belt sensibilities,” she said.  “There’s an old sitcom saying, ‘Think Yiddish, speak British,’ and in a way, there are a lot of those kinds of jokes in my movie.  They could’ve been done with, like, Shecky Green and a rim shot, but we had people in these ridiculous dresses saying the lines.  I know there was, underneath, a bit of shtick, but having proper Victorian people say it just made it all the funnier.”

So how did Wexler approach all those treatments to “paroxysm?”  “It’s funny, but in my head, I just knew how to shoot them instantly,” she recalled.  “Jonathan’s character had a ‘This is like polishing furniture’ kind of approach; ‘it’s just tiresome, tedious work.’  And Mortimer had a more scientific approach.  And the women were in full corsets, full dresses and hats, which is just ridiculous and therefore funny.

“I knew it was about the reaction shots – the contrast between what the women were experiencing which were orgasms, and what the guys were experiencing, which was science and technology and labor and work. But the thing I was most concerned about with the orgasm scenes was getting the sound right, because I didn’t want it to sound too porn-y, and if it sounded too comic, we wouldn’t believe it either…. In the end, we realized that if the women sounded like they were having fun and enjoying themselves and laughing, it worked.”

I had to ask Wexler:  What were the good doctors actually touching during the massage sequences? “I was very concerned that Hugh and Jonathan would have something to actually manipulate, because it changes how you stand and how your body weight falls,” Wexler replied.  “I spent nights up before we shot trying to figure out what to put down there, and I had all sorts of ridiculous ideas.  And Hugh looked around and said, ‘There’s always a million sand bags available on the set to hold down the lights – why don’t we take one of them, put it under the curtain and be done with it?’  And it was too simple; it was just perfect.  But Jonathan Pryce got so into it that he rubbed the skin off the knuckle of one of his fingers.”

Wexler gifted modern vibrators to every member of her cast and crew;  when that raised eyebrows among some of the men, she offered some practical advice.  “Dude, it’s not competition, it’s a member of your team,” she said.

“Hysteria” opens on May 18.

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May 3, 2012 | 11:21 am

Meet the filmmakers of the French megahit “The Intouchables” [VIDEO]

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy

These are heady times for the French-Jewish filmmakers Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache.  Harvey Weinstein snatched up the rights to their French-language odd couple dramedy, “The Intouchables,” following The Weinstein Company’s penchant for purchasing Gallic fare such as the Oscar-winning “The Artist” and “Sarah’s Key.”

“The Intouchables,” which spotlights the unlikely friendship between Philippe, a quadriplegic French aristocrat (François Cluzet) and Driss, his Muslim Senegalese caretaker (Omar Sy), proved to be the second-highest grossing film ever in France and Germany, where it’s done better box office than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 – not to mention grossing $330 million worldwide, according to The Hollywood Reporter.  Plus the film scored a best actor Cesar for Sy, even beating out “The Artist’s “Jean Dujardin.  And now Hollywood has come calling, with “Bridesmaids’” Paul Feig signed on to direct an English-language version that may star Oscar-winner Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”).

“This movie is…a funny, extremely entertaining illustration of how simple human connection transcends socioeconomic, religious and racial divides,” Weinstein said in a press release for the film, which opens in Los Angeles on May 25.

During a recent interview at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, the affable filmmakers sat side by side at a vast conference table.  They said they didn’t intend their culture clash comedy to comment on the state of France’s attitudes towards Muslims (or even indirectly, the newer type of anti-Semitism generated by the kind of Islamic terrorists who committed the recent murders in Toulouse).  In fact, the perception many Americans have of their country as xenophobic is no longer correct, they said.  “I think that is the wrong image of France,” Toledano, 40, insisted, citing as an example the number of top French celebrities who come from diverse backgrounds, such as Sy.

For the filmmakers, “The Intouchables” is rather intended to further a new kind of cinematic hero.

“Our movie isn’t the typical Hollywood story of the healthy, big guy,” Toledano said.  “The hero of today is the hero we wanted to hide yesterday.  For example, people from the ghetto, people with paralysis – and we wanted to make them the heroes because we thought theirs is the most heroic story – more heroic than Superman or Jean Paul Belmondo.

“What Philippe and Driss have is a human relationship,” Toledano added.  “They have every possibility not to get along and yet they do get along.  It just goes beyond preconceptions because the odds for them to meet were almost none and yet they met and connected.”

Toledano and Nakache describe themselves as “two Sephardic boys;” both hail from families that fled North Africa – Toledano’s left Morocco when the Six Days War broke out in 1967, while Nakache’s left Algeria during a bloody civil war in 1962.

Growing up Jewish in Paris, Toledano said, ”We felt like the ‘others,’ but not more than blacks or Arabs. [The sentiment] was not especially against Jews, but when you grew up in France, people always asked you about where you were from if you’re not with a French name or a French face.”

Toledano was raised in a religiously observant family, speaks Hebrew, spent a year studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has an uncle, Joseph Toledano, who is an Israel-based scholar of Sephardic Jewry.  Nakache said he was raised in a traditional home, and met Toledano when as teenagers both were leaders of a French Jewish youth group.

It was in their early 20s that they began making short films together:  “We made a deal,” Toledano said.  “We said alone, it will be difficult, so let’s do it together.”  After screening an early movie that turned out to be “a disaster,” Toledano and Nakache said, they made a successful short, “Small Shoes,” (1999) based on their own experience of playing Santa Claus for Christian families, a Yuletide tradition among Jewish and Muslim youths.

“Those Happy Days” (2006) was based on the Jewish summer camp Toledano and Nakache attended, though they chose to make the fictional setting non-denominational, with black and Arab as well as other campers.  In 2004, their critically acclaimed “I Prefer That We Remain Friends” (2004) starred Gerard Depardieu as a Jewish hypochondriac who, together with a younger male friend, go on a quest looking for love.  “Our stories are [often] very autobiographical,” Toledano explained.  “When we did this film we weren’t married; we were lonely single guys, so we told the story about two lonely guys of two different ages who are looking for wives together.  But by the end of the movie, they discover that their own friendship is better. That was our story at the time because then we didn’t find the girl, but now we are both married.”

“The Intouchables” came about after Toledano and Nakache saw a documentary, “In Life and Death,” about the real-life aristocrat, Philippe Pozzo de Borgo, and his caretaker, Abdel, who is actually from Algeria rather than Senegal. “It was a beautiful metaphor of life and how we need each other,” Toledano said of why he and Nakache were drawn to the story. “These are both extremely lonely people who have nothing in common – not culture, money, color or religion.  On paper they have no chance to have an accord.  But it’s a true story and when we spoke to them, they said, ‘We saved each others’ lives. If I hadn’t met the other one, now I’d be dead.’”

In the film, Philippe’s aide is renamed Driss; the filmmakers said they merged actor Omar Sy’s own story with Abdel’s to create the ex-con character who, we learn, was born in Senegal, sent to live with relatives in the France, raised in the ghetto projects on the outskirts of Paris, and has had run-ins with the law.

The movie went on to become a critical and box office hit in France – and also made headlines when far right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen said he saw “The Intouchables “as a representation of the progression that France is making – which he is vitally against,” according to a Weinstein Company press release.

“France is like this handicapped person stuck in this wheelchair, and we are going to have to wait for the help of these suburban youngsters and the immigration in general,” Le Pen said in a speech. “I don’t subscribe to this point of view….It would be a disaster if France would find itself in the same situation as this poor handicapped person.”

In response, Harvey Weinstein said: “It’s not a surprise to hear such an intolerant statement from the man who founded and was president of the extreme-right, xenophobic, racist National Front party. Le Pen made a repulsive statement, representing a bigoted worldview. And right now, Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, is running for president of France as the leader of the National Front party—and she is fourth in the polls with almost 16% of the population intending to vote for her. That’s frightening to me, and I think it’s important to speak up and speak out against Le Pen and his ideas. That’s why I’m proud to bring ‘The Intouchables’ to American audiences. This movie is based on a true story, and it’s a funny, extremely entertaining illustration of how simple human connection trounces socioeconomic, religious and racial divides. “

“The Intouchables opens on May 25 in Los Angeles.

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May 2, 2012 | 10:46 am

‘Dictator’ scribes dish on Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene from “The Dictator.” Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Reuters/Paramount Pictures

David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, screenwriters of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film, “The Dictator,” were bantering in the comic actor’s office as Alec Berg, their co-writer, joined in by speakerphone — he was home babysitting his young daughter. Baron Cohen, star of the prankster mockumentaries “Brüno” and “Borat,” was about to move out, and the office was bare except for some black-leather furniture, wigs from his turn as a gay fashionista in an antechamber and posters of “The Dictator,” looming large.

Notoriously reclusive, Baron Cohen eschews interviews except in character, and on this day he was behind a closed door in a nearby office, where the screenwriters were about to join him to concoct further publicity stunts for the dictator character in advance of the film’s release on May 16.

Among other stunts so far, the writers helped plan Baron Cohen’s spilling “ashes of Kim Jong-il” all over Ryan Seacrest (it was actually pancake mix) while Seacrest was live on camera on the red carpet at the Oscars. They also helped Baron Cohen — er, the dictator — blame “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Zionists” for banning his character from the ensuing Academy Awards ceremony.

There is a philosophy behind even the crudest of their pranks and scenes, the writers say:  “What Sacha always tries to do, with ‘Borat,’ ‘Brüno’ and even ‘The Dictator,’ is to make sure your victims are worthy, so that there’s a satirical aspect to the comedy,” said Schaffer, who like Berg and Mandel, is a Harvard graduate in his early 40s with executive producing credits on “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “These aren’t innocent victims. And nobody is going to feel sorry for Ryan Seacrest.” Whether this last is true has been up for debate.

Baron Cohen became an international sensation in 2006 with his character Borat, a sexist, anti-Semitic TV anchor allegedly from Kazakhstan who descended upon the United States only to elicit the worst in American culture. In one cringe-worthy sequence, he enlisted unsuspecting patrons of a country-western bar to sing along to his ditty, “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” In “Brüno” (2009), his fashionista character tries to broker peace between dour Israelis and Palestinians while confusing the word “hummus” with “Hamas.”

The social satire may be pushed even further in “The Dictator,” Baron Cohen’s first scripted film, for which he shares writing credit with Mandel, Schaffer and Berg. The story spotlights Adm. Gen. Shabazz Aladeen, a fascist, misogynistic, Zionist-hating North African despot who is meant to skewer post-Sept. 11 America as he traipses about New York. Only trailers and a two-minute snippet of the film were available before press time, but the action appears to take off as Aladeen arrives in the United States to address the United Nations, only to be kidnapped, shaved and stripped of his identity and left to wander the city until he is rescued by a naive grocery manager played by Anna Faris.

Along the way, Aladeen spars with his ex-head of security (and “Chief Procurer of Women”) played by Ben Kingsley; teams up with his former top scientist, aka Nuclear Nadal; encounters post-Sept. 11 prejudice; and has a run-in with the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Will he shake the ambassador’s hand? “He does more than shake his hand,” Schaffer said, declining to reveal more.

During the interview, the three writers, who met while working on the Harvard Lampoon, weren’t above skewering their own Jewishness — or lack thereof. Mandel is an Upper West Sider who attended Hebrew school until his bar mitzvah and not a day afterward, Schaffer was such a prankster at his own religious school that he was expelled, and Berg has a Jewish wife but is actually a Swedish-American non-Jew — not that that prevents everyone from assuming he’s a member of the tribe. Berg, in fact, said he was the inspiration for a “Curb” episode in which Larry David’s prickly character is mortified to discover his divorce attorney, also named Berg, is not Jewish and is thus, he fears, “out to screw him.”

In person, “Curb’s” creator is actually a “total mensch,” unlike the show’s eponymous character, who says all the things David wishes he could say in real life, the writers said: “TV Larry is like Superman to real Larry’s Clark Kent,” Mandel said. “Even though Larry could not be more different than Sacha, what they share is a very businesslike approach to what is funny.”

Baron Cohen’s work hasn’t been without its critics. Back in 2006, the Anti-Defamation League worried that “Borat” might enhance, rather than dash, anti-Semitism in some quarters; “The Dictator” could well elicit charges of encouraging, instead of skewering, Islamophobia since the World Trade Center attacks.

In the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian writer Ray Hanania suggested that the observantly Jewish Baron Cohen would do better to satirize his own people, instead of “picking on easy targets,” such as Arab dictators.

Mandel, Schaffer and Berg quickly stop joking when confronted with these questions. “Let’s be as clear as humanly possible,” Mandel said. “Technically speaking, the dictator is North African. But he is not Muslim. There is no mention of Muslims, or Muslim humor.

“Of course, Aladeen is clearly not a Zionist,” Berg added. “He dislikes Jews, but only as part of an anti-Zionist, anti-West agenda. To us, he’s always been an amalgam of world dictators, like Kim Jong-il, Idi Amin, Gadhafi, and Serdar Turkmenbashi of Turkmenistan,” Mandel said.

The writing team came up with the idea for “The Dictator” after Baron Cohen, who had brought them in to collaborate on “Borat” and “Brüno,” asked them to pitch ideas for a new film. When they described a spoof based on the crazed despots of the world, Baron Cohen was hooked. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Mandel said of some real-life events that inspired scenes in the movie. Turkmenbashi really did pass a law changing the words for two days of the week to his own name; Kim Jong-il, according to North Korean propaganda, hit nine holes-in-one the first time he played golf; and Gaddafi traveled with his all-female security force, “so the dictator travels with his virgin guard,” Schaffer said. And don’t forget the kitschy, pseudo-heroic black-light portraits Saddam Hussein’s sons hung all over their palaces: “So, in the movie, there’s sort of a black-velvet painting of a muscular Aladeen riding a jaguar, clutching the severed head of Albert Einstein,” Mandel said with a laugh.

The writers describe “The Dictator” as the first mainstream-studio comedy to take on the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing fear of Arabs — or people mistaken as Arab —particularly where flying vehicles are concerned. “We do a scene in which Aladeen is somewhat innocently taking a ride in a helicopter, but it’s really about what the two other passengers, Midwestern Americans, are seeing and hearing,” Mandel said. “He’s having a normal conversation in his native tongue about all the wonderful things that New York has to offer, like the Empire State Building, while the other passengers begin to get worried. Then he’s telling a story about how he crashed his Porsche 911 so he’s hoping to get the new 2012 911. But he couldn’t be more innocent.”

The Arab Spring, which took place while “The Dictator” was shooting, required copious revisions of the script. “None of those countries took into account how much rewriting we had to do,” Schaffer quipped.

But for the trio, anyway, writing a scripted film may have proved in some ways easier than Baron Cohen’s previous mockumentaries. 

“Whereas in ‘Borat’ and ‘Brüno’ you’re going, ‘I hope this person says this,’ in a script you just go, he says this,’ ” Schaffer said.

“The Dictator” opens on May 16.

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April 25, 2012 | 10:20 am

‘Girls’ writer lays bare women’s insecurities

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

From left: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet in “Girls.” Photo by Mark Seliger/HBO

Lena Dunham, the writer, director and star of “Girls,” HBO’s much-talked-about new series, strode onto the stage at the Writers Guild Theater for a Women in Film Q-and-A recently, wearing a tight gray dress, emerald green flats and the buoyant attitude of a Hollywood “It” girl, albeit a somewhat unlikely one. The audience had cheered after viewing several episodes of “Girls,” her bleak comedy about post-collegiate angst in New York, and the exuberant Dunham delivered one-liners with the panache of a Borscht Belt comedian while radiating the same mix of brassy confidence and self-flagellation her character exudes on the show. 

Just 25, with a surprisingly successful ultra-low-budget film, “Tiny Furniture,” using her family and friends as cast members, under her belt, Dunham said her first day on the set of “Girls” “was like riding the tower of terror.” Her makeup artist told her the only person she worked with who’d squirmed more than Dunham was “Steve Martin, and only because he was playing the ukulele.”  As for all those scenes in which Dunham deliberately shows off her zaftig shape — during bad sex on fraying sofas, or with legs splayed in the gynecologist’s stirrups — she said, “I’ve been so prepared for people saying, ‘We don’t want to see your body.’ ”

Dunham allows herself to be naked both physically and psychologically in “Girls,” which revolves around her character, Hannah, an aspiring writer who proclaims she “may be the voice of my generation — or at least a voice of a generation,” and who at the opening of the first episode is cut off financially by her parents. Hannah’s quartet of gal pals includes her responsible best friend, Marnie (played by Allison Williams, daughter of NBC anchor Brian Williams); the bohemian Jessa (Jemima Kirke, daughter of Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke); and the naive Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet, daughter of playwright David Mamet), who gushes, in one of the show’s winking references to “Sex and the City,” that she is a “Carrie” with a splash of “Samantha” — never mind that she is still a virgin.

Eschewing the glamorous Manhattan of “Sex and the City,” with its Manolos and signature cocktails, “Girls” offers instead a gritty world of nebulous ambitions, unpaid internships, claustrophobic walk-ups and embarrassing sex, all complicated by the social media culture. 

On the one hand, New York magazine called “Girls” “the ballsiest show on TV,” while others hailed it as the most authentic of the recent spate of chick-centric shows (think “2 Broke Girls” and “New Girl”), offering a naturalistic glimpse of messy semi-adulthood in the throes of an economic recession. But a virulent lashback in the blogosphere erupted after the series’ April 15 premiere, charging that the show narrowly depicts only the children of privilege: Dunham is “an unsympathetic victim of First World Problems,” as one blogger put it; the series is “a huge f——-g disappointment,” opined another. Noted was that even the actors are the children of famous people; Dunham’s mother is the acclaimed photographer Laurie Simmons, her father the painter Carroll Dunham.

Dunham herself has referred to her series as “The Entitled Lena Dunham Project,” but in a telephone conversation from New York, she insisted, “I definitely have never claimed to be the voice of the current women. … [But] I think the personal can be really political, and the best way to tackle a lot of these issues is just to tell a really specific story about really specific girls and hope that resonates.” And, she added, “I’m ready to engage with whoever finds the work challenging or gross or sexy or whatever reaction erupts.”

In one cringe-worthy scene, Hannah’s lover plays with the rolls of fat around her belly, telling her, “Your stomach is funny,” as she retorts, “I don’t want my body to be funny.” Dunham is making a point: “He’s both complimenting her while telling her she doesn’t look the way that she’s supposed to,” she said. “It’s a really weird moment. … So I want to call attention to the fact that these girls may have body issues, but those don’t control them. It can be an ever-present part of every woman’s life, and she can be this weird mix of confident and anxious, beautiful and self-conscious. And so those ambiguities were things I really wanted to discuss.”

On the phone, Dunham sounded more like a chatty girlfriend than a wunderkind show runner. For her press day at HBO’s New York office, she had donned a pair of shoes that usually remain in her closet: “some very high heels that are unwalkable, which I only did because I was lucky enough to have a car [today],” she explained. “Otherwise, I’d be in my sneaker flats, feeling slightly mismatched, like every other girl I know.”

Dunham deliberately uses the word “girls,” as she does in the show’s title; saying she’s all grown up “would definitely be a stretch,” she said.

“There’s stuff that Hannah has done in her ignorance or good-hearted way that I would never, ever undertake in my life,” Dunham added. For example, after Hannah’s parents abruptly cut her off, she pockets the tip for the housekeeper they’ve left in their hotel room. “I’d like to think I’m one year older [than Hannah] and slightly wiser. But there is a lot of me in her, and in everything I do. I’m not, like, an actress with tremendous range, so there has to be some personal element driving each performance moment and each writing moment.”

Dunham has written plenty of humiliating sex scenes for herself to perform on “Girls,” such as the one in which Hannah nervously chatters away, until her lover suggests, “Let’s play the quiet game.”

“I say ‘I’m sorry’ a lot,” Dunham said of Hannah. “The [characters] all do, partially because they’re doing lots of things that they should be apologizing for, but also they’re kind of saying ‘I’m sorry’ for being me, for existing. There’s that sort of feeling a lot of young women get where they just feel so sorry for everything they’ve done even though they’ve done nothing. … [They’re facing] some of the same issues my mom faced as a young woman in New York in the 1970s. Both more and less has changed than we think.”

Even though Dunham now has her own apartment, she still prefers to crash at her parents’ Tribeca loft, where she grew up attending St. Ann’s school in Brooklyn and aspiring to become a writer. In the seventh grade, she attempted to channel Wendy Wasserstein with her own play, “The Goldman Girls,” which riffed on Simmons’ Jewish family.

Dunham said that Hannah shares her Jewish sensibility. “I went to Hebrew school for, like, two weeks, and then didn’t get the part I wanted in the play and quit,” she said. “But I’ve always had a great love of all the holidays that we celebrate together as a family: Passover, Chanukah. I’ve spent a good amount of time in temple, and I definitely feel very culturally Jewish, although that’s the biggest cliché for a Jewish woman to say.”

Most everything Dunham has written is somewhat autobiographical: Her early YouTube videos starred herself as an Oberlin College student — in one case, taking a bath in her bikini in the campus fountain, only to be admonished by a security guard; “Tiny Furniture” (2010) captured her post-graduation ennui upon returning to her parents’ loft, with her real mother playing her mother and her sister playing her sister. “Girls” — which is executive produced by Judd Apatow — picks up two years later, drawing on Dunham’s days of working menial jobs while struggling to become a filmmaker.

At least one other character on “Girls” is Jewish in her mind — the immature Shoshanna. “I think her bat mitzvah was like the best day of her entire life and she’s still pretty focused on the glory of that time,” Dunham said with a laugh.

“I took an amazing trip to Israel two years ago,” she added. “It was the most connected I’ve felt to that part of myself. I learned a lot both spiritually and personally, so it’s something that I would like to write about, although I’m not sure this show will be the outlet.”

“Girls” airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO.

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April 24, 2012 | 10:25 am

Jason Segel on the universe—and ‘The Five Year Engagement’

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt in 'The Five Year Engagement'

Not long ago I interviewed Jason Segel (“The Muppets”) about his Duplass brothers film, “Jeff Who Lives at Home,” when he also talked about his views on life, God, the universe and – oh yes – his new film “The Five Year Engagement,” which opens April 27.  This new comedy – which Segel co-authored with the film’s director, Nicholas Stoller – stars Segel and Emily Blunt (“The Adjustment Bureau,” “The Young Victoria”) as a an interfaith couple whose nuptials are put on hold.  Here are some excerpts from our conversation, in which the 32-year-old actor waxed philosophical on everything from his penchant for Joseph Campbell to himself growing up in an interfaith family in Los Angeles.

NPM:  Tell me a bit about your religious background.

JS:  My dad’s Jewish, and my mom’s Christian, so I was raised with a little bit of everything.  I went to an Episcopal school during the day and Hebrew school at night.  I actually have a pretty thorough religious education.  It’s a lot of guilt – guilt from all sides [laughs].

I wasn’t considered Jewish at Hebrew school because my mother isn’t Jewish, and I wasn’t considered Christian at Christian school.  What occurred to me is, “This is not God.”  It’s the antithesis of the point.  I was a young kid who would have been happy to believe whatever I was told and I was being excluded from both sides?  It really informed who I became as a person.  You either become misanthropic or you become funny.  I went with funny.

NPM:  Is there any difference between Jewish and Christian guilt?

JS:  No, it’s all the same. It’s all people who think they know; you know the word we use for God is meant to be the most powerful force that you could possibly imagine.  I’ve come to terms with the idea that any of us who have any claim to think that we know what’s going on is pretty arrogant; that’s not the God we’re talking about. Everyone is so sure of what they believe in, but they have no idea. I think the smartest opinion is to say, “ I have no idea.”

NPM:  Isn’t it just as arrogant to say there’s no God as to say there is one? 

JS:  Well, atheism makes no sense, just logically. Do you know the story of the watch and the watchmaker?  It’s pretty compelling.  If you were back in caveman days, and you found a watch, you would know implicitly it’s different than a rock or a tree. You’d know that something made it.  And if you’re able to pull back, our planets are revolving around the sun in perfect order; these are the gears of the watch.  I think it’s foolish to think the universe isn’t designed by something; the big question to me is, is it conscious?  And I don’t know the answer to that.

NPM:  Did you have a bar mitzvah?

JS:  I did, at Kehillath Israel in Pacific Palisades.  And I nailed it.  It was a really fun day, actually, and Wolfgang Puck catered my bar mitzvah; it was very fancy.  And it was very 90s in some fashion; I remember I wore like a long purple jacket with mustard green pants; like, I looked like a terrible standup comedian.

NPM:  Did you get any laughs on the bimah?

JS:  A bar mitzvah is not a particularly funny thing.  It’s tough to get laughs in Hebrew.

NPM:  Do you identify as culturally Jewish?

JS:  Yes. But in terms of organized religion, again, I think the notion of “I know better than someone else” is wildly arrogant.

NPM:  Tell me about the genesis of “The Five Year Engagement.”

JS:  Nick Stoller [the film’s director and co-author] and I are like the least masculine men in Hollywood.  We’re super interested in relationships; that’s always been something that sort of drives me.  And what we thought was interesting was to explore the way a power dynamic shifts over five years.  You know, relationships are so fluid, and you meet new people and people’s jobs change and you move and it’s never stagnant.

NPM:  In the movie, you’re Jewish and the character played by Emily Blunt is not; in the film’s trailer, there’s a scene in which the couple is talking about whether the men will wear yarmulkes, and you say you have one in your “Jewish drawer.”

JS:  Actually we had a whole family dynamic that she was Christian and I’m Jewish, and the [ensuing] religious discussion; her family wanted the Christian wedding and I wanted the Jewish wedding, and our families wanted it more than us.  But we ended up cutting a lot of it.

NPM:  Have you noticed that most films that revolve around a Jewish guy have him involved with a non-Jewish woman?

JS:  That is true [smiles broadly].  But that I don’t have an answer to.

NPM:  I heard you improvised the line about the Jewish drawer.  Do you have one? 

JS:  Yes I do.  I definitely have a Jewish drawer; it’s in my office at home.  It’s like where my tallis and stuff are, which I only open on the high holidays.

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April 22, 2012 | 11:53 am

About a dog, lost and found

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

My 7-year-old son’s room is covered with posters from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” The Empire Strikes Back” and other “Star Wars” films, and I myself have enjoyed the zeitgeist-y films “The Big Chill,” “Grand Canyon” and the “Accidental Tourist.”  So I was eager to meet Lawrence Kasden, the filmmaker who has written and/or directed those movies, along with his wife, Meg, Kasden’s co-screenwriter on “Big Chill” and “Grand Canyon,” at the Four Seasons hotel recently. 

I found their latest collaboration, “Darling Companion,” to be charming (although the reviews have not been so good); I’m a sucker for dogs and dog lovers so I wanted to find out the true story that inspired the film, which Meg describes as the tale of “a woman [Diane Keaton] who loves her dog more than her husband [Kevin Kline] – and then he loses the dog.”

Actually the idea for the movie began some years before the Kasdens adopted their now-geriatric pooch, Mac, who is a cattle dog mixed breed, judging from the photograph Larry proudly shows me on his iPhone.

About 15 years ago, the Kasdens didn’t have a dog, but they loved taking care of the mutt that had been adopted by their son, filmmaker Jake Kasden (“Bad Teacher,” “Orange County”).  “This dog, named Denver, came into our lives right at a time when things were very emotional and tumultuous,” Meg said.  “Our younger son, Jon, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease at the same time that Jake went away to make his first movie…Jon is now 32 and in good health [he’s also a filmmaker], but at the time he had to go through almost a year of chemo and it was rough. And we had that dog because Jake was away and for some reason she just was a tonic at that moment.”

“The experience of walking a dog in the Colorado mountains, after we decided to get a place there, has been very spiritually and psychologically significant for us,” Larry added.

After Jake adopted a second dog – this one named “Steve Rosenbaum” – the Kasdens eventually decided to adopt a stray of their own; one day seven years ago Meg received a photograph of a rescue dog and told Larry they had to go see him right away, because he was scheduled to be euthenized.  The dog looked sad but “irresistible,” Larry said.

So they went to see him and adopted Mac the next day; “We were empty nesters, we fell in love with him and he became a shared responsibility,” Meg said.

Then, one fall day when the family was up at their vacation home in the Rockies, a friend took Mac for a hike while the Kasdens attended a wedding.  Due to his abusive past, Mac was still skittish in certain situations, notably around men wearing hats, but this time it was a mountain biker who frightened him so badly that he ran off into the woods.  The woman followed him, calling his name, but to no avail; night fell and when he did not return home the next morning, the Kasdens panicked.

Over the next three weeks—during thunderstorms and even an early snow—the couple and their friends mounted an all-out search for Mac, enlisting the help of the local radio station, the sheriff, and posting his picture all over town.  The Kasdens hiked all day long in the woods, calling out Mac’s name, but there was no sign of the dog.

In the middle of the search, a friend confided to Meg that she believed she had psychic abilities:  “She’d actually say, ‘Try 9:30 p.m. between the church and the ice cream parlor,’ and we’d rush over there,” Larry said.  “We’d been so discouraged, that that did keep us going.”

On the thirteenth day, after yet another search in the woods, the Kasdens acknowledged that Mac was not coming home.  “We said, ‘We have to deal with this, we’ve done everything we can and Mac’s not coming back,’” Meg said.  “It was a very sad moment for us, but we went back home to L.A.”

Almost immediately after their return, Larry went out for a bike ride – and received a startling telephone call.  “Guess who’s sitting next to me?” the Kasdan’s friend said from Colorado.  Someone had spotted Mac playing with her dogs down by a river and the Kasdens’ friend had rushed over to pick him up.

“Mac had lost about 7 pounds, which is roughly 15 percent of his body weight, and he was filthy,” Larry said.  “He looked like he hadn’t been fed or touched in three weeks.”

“But he was OK,” Meg quickly added.

People were so rapt whenever Meg told the story that the Kasdens eventually decided to turn it into a movie; “Darling Companion” revolves around a couple, unlike the Kasdens, who are suffering a post-midlife crisis, as well as the kinds of companionships experienced by their assorted friends and relatives. 

The Kasdens see the ensemble film as the third in a trilogy that began with “The Big Chill” (1983) and continued with “Grand Canyon” (1991), both of which also deal with groups of friends, the Kasdens’ contemporaries, who come together and grow apart.

While Meg grew up in a Jewish community in Detroit, Larry was raised in small towns in West Virginia where he felt “other” as the only Jew in his circle of friends.  “People would say “I Jewed him down’ or ‘kike’ but they didn’t know the power that had over me,” he recalled.  “At those moments I felt, ‘These are my best friends and they didn’t understand that I didn’t want to be alienated like that;’ I didn’t want my people to be considered undesirable, or that they should be equated with cheapness or swindling.

“Every person who considers himself an artist, without being inflated about it, will tell you they’ve felt like an outsider during their childhood experiences, because that creates a kind of lonliness….You live in your head and think, ‘I’m going to make something that no one else can have any impact on, and I’m going to present it to this world that doesn’t “get” me.’”

Life at home was tumultuous; Kasden’s parents fought.  “We didn’t have a sense of a family that would take care of you,” he said.  “And I was looking for another family.”

He met Meg when both were juniors at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s; they were married in a humanistic Jewish ceremony near Detroit 40 years ago.

During the early years of their marriage, Larry worked in advertising as he struggled to become a screenwriter; his screenplay of “The Bodyguard” was rejected 57 times before it became a blockbuster starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in 1992.  After his script for “Continental Divide” became a hot commodity, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas came calling;” they wanted Kasden to write a film that would ultimately become “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“I had still been working in advertising just a month before, and then suddenly I had sold two scripts and here’s Steven Spielberg,” Kasden recalled.  “He and George told me our hero has a whip, he wears a fedora and a leather jacket, and he’s chasing the lost Ark of the Covenant, and that was it,” he recalled of the premise.

After “Raiders,” Kasden would go on to write a total of 11 feature films, most of which he directed; “The Big Chill” came about, 10 years after the Kasdens finished college, when their contemporaries “had gone out into the world and found we weren’t the center of everything,” Larry said.  “A lot of people had trouble finding their work or something they wanted to do that was nearly as meaningful as college [in the late 1960s].  The real world is always a shock process, and the movie is about that – coming into the real world, and then 10 years later when some people are still unsettled, some are really successful and others are really struggling.”

“Grand Canyon” was born when the Kasdens’ two sons were 16 and 11, respectively; it was an age “that added to our hyper vigilance about what could happen and how Los Angeles had changed,” Larry said.  The Grand Canyon became the central metaphor for the divide among Angelinos due to socioeconomic and racial differences.

Kasden hasn’t made a film since his last two movies, “Mumford” and “Dreamcatcher,” didn’t do so well critically, although he’s been busy writing and developing other projects.  “Darling Companion” is his first independent feature film and his first produced film in eight years.

There are two other shaggy dog stories associated with the movie; the collie mix who plays Freeway, the hero dog, was once himself a rescue found wandering in the desert with a rope embedded into his neck.  The other story concerns Meg’s sister, who rescued a bleeding dog she found in the snow on a freeway outside Detroit; that is how Keaton’s character rescues the hero dog, who is named Freeway, in “Darling Companion.”

Now Mac is 14 and his walks with the Kasdens have slowed to a crawl.  But he is as cherished as ever.  “I had loved this dog from the time we got him and I was not prepared for how I felt when we lost him,” Larry said.

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