February 19, 2013 | 8:42 am

Bruce Cohen: A career full of ‘Silver Linings’

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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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.

February 7, 2013 | 2:53 pm

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

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Photo by Jeff Zucker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 6, 2013 | 1:46 pm

Dysfunctional first family

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 1, 2013 | 12:36 pm

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

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 23, 2013 | 5:40 pm

For David O. Russell, it takes family

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

From left: Bradley Cooper, director David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence on the set of “Silver Linings Playbook.” Photo by JoJo Whilden, courtesy of the Weinstein Co.

Director David O. Russell’s past efforts include the much-lauded “Three Kings” and the Oscar-winning “The Fighter,” but it is “Silver Linings Playbook,” the story of a bipolar teacher, that he sees as his most personal drama to date. The film is a contender for eight Oscar, including best picture, all four actor categories and received a directing and an adapted screenplay nod, as well, for Russell. 

In a telephone interview last weekend, the director’s voice shook with emotion at times as he described how he was inspired to make the film to honor his 18-year-old son, Matthew, who suffers from bipolar disorder as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 “It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life,” Russell said. 

Matthew first exhibited emotional disturbances as a small child, as Russell was directing his 1999 war drama, “Three Kings.” The boy later attended Kenter Canyon Elementary School in Brentwood for a time, but by the time he was 12, his symptoms had shifted, and Russell and his then-wife, Janet Grillo, had to make the heart-wrenching decision to send Matthew to a boarding school in Connecticut that could better help him cope. “It was devastating to me when he went away, but it was probably the best thing we did for him, because it put such a specific order in his life,” Russell said.

“It’s almost making me cry right now, because the shame would almost be crushing for [him] if the illness wasn’t,” said Russell, who is Russian-Jewish on his father’s side of the family and Italian-Catholic on his mother’s. “It’s the shame of, ‘Look at me, I just keep wrecking things.’

“But my son also taught me the value of finding the silver lining in any situation, that you shouldn’t go down any dark path too long — and the gratitude you have for everyone around you, because it takes everyone, the entire family, to deal with this kind of challenge, and that’s what the film is about.”

It was through this lens, as a father, that Russell first read Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel, “Silver Linings Playbook,” when Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella gave him the book several years ago. What caught his eye first was the story’s protagonist, Pat Solitano (played in the film by Bradley Cooper), a young man newly freed after an extended stint in a mental institution. The story describes Pat’s struggles to get his life back on track with the help of his hot-blooded family — including his obsessive-compulsive father (Robert De Niro) — and of Pat’s relationship with a tempestuous young widow (Jennifer Lawrence), who is battling her own depression and mood swings after the death of her husband.

“I wouldn’t have taken the book as seriously as I did had I not already been looking for a story that could include someone like my son — something to give him hope and the sense that he was part of the world,” Russell said of his first book-to-film adaptation. “And the story would include a family like ours, and could do so in a way that was very real.”

The sense of family rallying together while in crisis — in a specific neighborhood, on a specific block and even in a specific house — has a consistent theme in Russell’s recent films, from the Irish-Catholic working-class clan in Lowell, Mass., with a drug-addicted son in “The Fighter,” to the Italian-Americans in Philadelphia battling mental illness in “Silver Linings Playbook.” 

Russell said he drew heavily on his own family’s speech patterns and interactions to create the characters: “The way Robert De Niro speaks reminds me of my father,” he said, recalling the late nights he spent with his dad bonding over Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks movies. “A lot of the rhythm of how Bob talks is what I would call the intimacy, the warmth or the haimish nature of what I wanted to convey in the movie.”

Russell, 54, grew up in Mamaroneck, in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., but he often visited his mother’s relatives in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as his father’s extended tribe in Manhattan and the Bronx. “It was all very colorful, and it revolved around food, or whatever people were talking in politics; there was a lot of arguing, a lot of loud talking, and there was always a TV on and a lot of music playing,” he said.

Like the fictional Solitanos, the Russells could be volatile, albeit in amusing ways, the director recalled. There was the seder, when David was 13, where he drank far too much wine: “It was the first time I got drunk,” he said. “My father wanted to kill me, because he felt that I embarrassed him, but it was his friends’ kid who kept filling up my glass!”

Russell’s Jewish grandfather, a butcher on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who had lost many of his relatives in concentration camps, refused to have anything to do with his sister, Frieda, one of his few relatives to survive, after he fell on hard times and she refused to lend him money. “We had a lot of family on both sides where two people wouldn’t talk to each other and it would go on for, like, 30 years,” Russell said.

His mother grew up in Catholic schools, and his father attended Hebrew school, but neither parent wanted anything to do with religion. So much so that when David requested to become either a bar mitzvah or be confirmed in the Catholic Church, or at least to know “what’s my story,” they replied that he was Italian and Jewish and Russian and “so what?” he recalled. “Of course, that made me have a great deal of interest in all things spiritual, and now I can recite to you either a Jewish or a Christian prayer.”

When Matthew needed spiritual guidance, Russell took him to counselors of both faiths, including time spent with Moshe Rosenberg of the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles. 

Asked how he felt when the character of Pat becomes enraged and unlikable after going off his meds, Russell said, “Anybody who struggles with this kind of thing is not always likable, but we tempered all of that in the performance. … Pat’s [outspokenness] is like a lightning rod for everyone else in the film. He makes all the bulls--- stop. He makes all pretense fall away.”

To avoid any sense of pretense in the performances, Russell shot long sequences using a camera called a Steadicam, which was attached to an operator who could seamlessly weave his way among the actors. “It felt haimish because it involved the least amount of hardware,” Russell said. “There’s no dolly or track or crane or boom arm; it gets that out of the room, so it’s just the people, and the actors really got lost in it, like being in a play.”

Matthew Russell himself appears in the movie as a nosy neighbor who rings the doorbell to ask about Pat’s rages, which Russell found “kind of sweet,” he said. “Matthew is usually the kid in Pat Solitano’s shoes, who people are asking about, and I loved the fact that he was getting to be the one to ask those questions.”

His son is “extremely proud” of the film, Russell said, adding, “It’s a story that will be a landmark for our family maybe most of our lives. We’ve already referred to the story many times — Matthew will say, ‘How did Pat handle this?’ or ‘What did Pat do to pull himself together?’ ”

And, not surprisingly, Oscar nominations have meant a great deal to Russell’s entire family, but when a reporter concluded the interview by suggesting that he “break a leg” come the Oscar ceremony on Feb. 24, the director had a different idea. 

“Since this is the Jewish Journal, why don’t we just say mazel tov?” he said.

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January 23, 2013 | 4:32 pm

Saving the ‘Life of Pi’

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Elizabeth Gabler and director Ang Lee on the set of “Life of Pi.” Photo by Phil Bray

Elizabeth Gabler was warm, even motherly, as she ushered a reporter into her chintz-filled office in the cozy bungalow that houses the studio Fox 2000, the division of 20th Century Fox where she has served as president for the past dozen years. Dressed elegantly in an olive-colored dress and matching sweater, she insisted upon sitting in a hard-backed chair while her guest took an overstuffed armchair. 

But over the course of a 40-minute interview, Gabler exuded not only the graciousness but also the steely resolve that has made her one of the few women to head a studio in Hollywood — and which served her well as she has spearheaded her passion projects to the screen, including “Unfaithful,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and, most recently, Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” a transcendental spiritual epic that was widely considered unfilmable until she took on the movie a decade ago. 

Based on Yann Martel’s 2001 best-selling novel, the film — which has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards — tells the story of the journey of a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi confined with a tiger in a small lifeboat drifting across the Pacific Ocean after Pi’s family and the remnants of their zoo perish in a shipwreck. 

For Gabler, spearheading the adaptation of Martel’s novel was like taking the proverbial tiger by the tail. She fought ferociously to bring the story to cineplexes: “It is the biggest, riskiest gamble I’ve ever taken,” she said. 

And not just because the movie was shot in 3-D with lavish visual effects on a monumental $120 million budget and with unknown actors, including Suraj Sharma in the central role of Pi. While studios often eschew stories with religious undercurrents, “Life of Pi” draws heavily on the book’s spiritual themes — not only the three religions that Pi practices simultaneously (Hinduism, Catholicism, Islam) but also upon a perspective influenced by Jewish mysticism and the Old Testament, notably the story of Job.

Even Gabler, whose diverse work includes “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Walk the Line,” wasn’t sure “Pi” could be adapted when she first read the book in 2001. “I was fascinated by the subject matter of this boy adrift with an animal,” she said. “But at the same time, I was overwhelmed by the questions of, ‘How would you make it into a movie? Who would be that great of a filmmaker who could bring it to life?’ So I waited to see how the book took off with readers.”

In 2002, while on maternity leave, Gabler witnessed how the novel was displayed everywhere, as it remained a best seller week after week. “It wasn’t going away,” she said.

So Gabler was receptive when producer Gil Netter phoned her at her Santa Barbara farm to pitch the project. Netter has said that every other studio had passed on “Life of Pi” before Gabler said yes on that October day in 2002. “I knew it was going to be very tricky,” she said. Yet she believed the film, in the right hands, could be commercial — an adventure story appealing to all ages, even teenagers, who could relate to the young protagonist.

She saw the bold religious content as a plus, with spiritual connections that “transcended cultural, religious and language barriers,” Gabler said. Raised Catholic in Long Beach, she is married to Jewish TV agent Lee Gabler, a cousin of the famed novelist and pundit Neal Gabler. “The film tells of a communication between an animal and a person and nature. And I felt that it reached out to people of all religions because it doesn’t just embrace one faith.”

Nevertheless, three directors, including M. Night Shyamalan, signed on and off before Gabler found herself coaxing Lee, who won a best-director Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” to try his hand at the film. 

“I didn’t see it as a movie,” Lee said of his initial reaction during an interview with the Journal last year.

“I think Ang met with me because his curiosity was piqued, mostly because he thought I was crazy,” Gabler admitted. “But I told him I felt it could be the first international all-audience movie, that we saw it as a big commercial film and that he was the only person I thought could bring the book to the screen. Not only does Ang have the ability to tell a very large-scale story, but he is also a courageous man. Anything that scares him, he wants to do.”

Persuaded, Lee traveled to India with screenwriter David Magee, who adapted the book in an attempt to absorb the religious and cultural aspects of the story. But just as production was about to commence, in 2010, Gabler received a disappointing call from Fox co-chairs Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman: They were pulling the plug on the film. “It was just too much money and too daunting,” Gabler said. “I was saddened and just numb.”

With her heart heavy, Gabler waited up until midnight to break the news to Lee, who was traveling in Taiwan. “It was surreal,” Gabler recalled of that conversation. “It was pitch dark, and I was in the sunroom of our house, which is all glass, and just looking out over our farm in the night. I almost felt like Pi on the raft, surrounded by the vast skies. I thought Ang was going to say, ‘This is a terrible thing, but thank you.’ ” Instead, he said, “ ‘I’m getting on a plane and flying out to Los Angeles tomorrow.’ ”

Gabler pointed to the flowered armchair where Lee sat in her office the following day as he showed her a DVD of Sharma’s audition as well as a luminous previsualization sequence of the film’s shipwreck scene.

“I phoned Jim and Tom and said, ‘You’ve got to come to the screening room right away,’ ” Gabler recalled. “And they both saw it, and afterwards everyone was breathless, and our head of marketing leaned over the front of his chair and said, ‘We’ve got to make this movie.’ ”

The condition was that Gabler had to slash at least $25 million from the budget, which she did, in part, with the help of financial incentives from the country of Taiwan, where the production set up shop in an abandoned airport in Taichung.

Gabler’s gamble paid off when “Life of Pi” opened to good reviews, quickly earned $450 million at the box office and snagged 11 Oscar nods — only one less than Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” — including for best picture and director. 

“I was just floored,” Gabler said of the Oscar news. “I was so ecstatic to hear that almost every person who made such major contributions to the film was recognized.”

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January 23, 2013 | 1:41 pm

Play reveals naked truth behind ‘Deep Throat’

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

From left: Bart Tangredi and Herschel Savage star in “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal.” Photo by Ed Krieger

Herschel Savage, the skin-flick actor best known for his appearance in “Debbie Does Dallas,” was perched beside a bare mattress on the floor of the Zephyr Theatre in West Hollywood, preparing to rehearse a scene from “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” in which he plays a director. The new play by David Bertolino follows the making of the most famous sex movie of all time and the free-speech controversy that erupted after its release in 1972.

At the rehearsal, cast members were fully clothed, although they were about to run through a sequence in which their characters shoot a porn loop — some will be naked onstage during the show, and a couple of explicit sex scenes will be simulated (you’ve been warned).

Savage, 60, who keeps his clothes on throughout the play, was trying to figure out just how to artfully slip off the robe of Natasha Charles Parker, who portrays Linda Lovelace, the “Deep Throat” star. “This is the unveiling scene, make something of it,” advised the play’s director, Jerry Douglas, who is also an award-winning adult film director. 

Later in the run-through, the action turned from campy fun to a serious discussion of the First Amendment. Douglas reminded Savage that his character utters the phrase “free is a good word” four times in the play: “Make it sound carved in stone, or at least embroidered on a pillow,” Douglas said. “Frame the hell out of the word free, because that’s what the show is all about.”

Savage, who in his boyhood attended a Conservative synagogue, portrays Gerard Damiano, “Deep Throat’s” director, an intense fellow who regarded himself as “the Hitchcock of adult cinema,” said Savage, who worked with Damiano. Savage also portrays First Amendment attorney Alan Dershowitz. 

But the drama largely revolves around the journey of Harry Reems, the movie’s male star (played by Marc Ginsburg), whose real name is Herbert Streicher and who introduces himself in the play as a “nice Jewish boy” from Westchester County, N.Y. As the show opens, Reems aspires to become a hippie and an actor, and he goes on to star in assorted off-off-Broadway productions, and even plays Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” before money woes prompt him to take a chance on porn. 

His luck turns as he’s cast as a lusty doctor opposite Linda Lovelace’s nurse in “Deep Throat.” However, when the film opened in New York’s Times Square — a haven for X-rated films at the time — it was immediately shut down by the authorities, catalyst for a publicity blitz on censorship that turned the film into the topic of water-cooler conversation and spurred the term “porno chic.” As a result, we learn in the play, the hour-long movie earned a whopping $600 million at the box office and made Reems practically a household name. Meanwhile, the Nixon administration, in an attempt to crack down on pornography, pursued Reems, and he was tried and convicted in Memphis on obscenity charges, and faced jail time until attorney Alan Dershowitz got him acquitted on appeal. 

“This case is not just about the law; it’s also about politics,” Dershowitz warns Reems at one point in the play. “The Christian right has a well-oiled PR machine — you’re going to need one, too.”

Playwright Bertolino grew up in an Italian-Catholic home outside Boston, and he knows a thing or two about PR. Ruddy faced, jovial and clad in one of his trademark flamboyant shirts on a recent Saturday, he was planning to hire fake protesters to picket outside the Zephyr — the same publicity stunt used by the film’s original backers to draw people to the movie in Times Square. He’ll also have actresses clad in nurse costumes giving out tongue depressors in the lobby, and he envisions porn legend Ron Jeremy, who has a cameo in the play, walking with a giraffe (“Deep Throat” — get it?) down Melrose Avenue. 

Even so, Bertolino said he views his play in part as a cautionary tale on the boundaries of free speech — and it’s a very Jewish story, as well. “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” spotlights not only First Amendment lawyers like Dershowitz, but also calls attention to the Jewish porn stars who thrived in the industry in the 1970s, all the while viewing themselves as protestors against the Christian establishment and purveyors of the sexual revolution. 

Some of the most famous of those stars will appear in onstage cameos in “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal,” including Jeremy, nicknamed “The Hedgehog” because he is short and hirsute, porn impresarios Nina Hartley and Bill Margold as well as Savage. Of the preponderance of Jews working in the porn industry at the time, Margold said, “It was all about [social] rebellion.”

“Jewish families tend to be more liberal than Christian ones,” Jeremy said in a 2001 Journal interview. “They aren’t obsessed by the fear of the devil or going to hell.”

Bertolino said he first saw “Deep Throat” on a double bill with “The Devil in Miss Jones” around 1976, but he had nothing to do with the industry — nor had he ever written a play — until a fortuitous meeting in 2007. He was in the process of selling a haunted-house theme park called Spooky World that he owned near Boston, when his costume business brought him to the Las Vegas International Lingerie Show, where he set up a booth to hawk his sexy nurse and flight attendant outfits. The booth drew the attention of a spokesman for Arrow Productions, an adult-film company with a booth across the way, who asked Bertolino if he could stencil the words “Linda Lovelace” on the nurse costume. “I can, but we’d both get sued,” Bertolino said. The man promptly replied that Arrow Productions owned the rights to “Deep Throat.”

A Linda Lovelace nurse costume ensued, and — as Bertolino became more and more intrigued by the stories that Arrow Production’s owner, Raymond Pistol, told him about the movie — so did the idea for “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal.” Bertolino was fascinated to learn that the flick had been mob-financed and was shot in a Miami motel — and that backers actually bribed a judge to shut down the film in New York to generate publicity. The trial, he added, “stands as one of the great battles against censorship in modern American history — taken up by Alan Dershowitz, helping to expand the career of one of America’s best-known attorneys.” 

Bertolino undertook a series of interviews with people involved with the film, including Reems, who, he said, hung up on him the first three times he phoned. (Reems, Bertolino said, is currently ailing at his home in Utah and does not endorse the play.) 

After “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” gained an audience during a four-and-a-half week run with a largely different cast off-Broadway, Bertolino was able to persuade real porn veterans such as Savage to appear in the Los Angeles production.

While smoking a cigarette during a rehearsal break, Savage said he was drawn to the play, in part, because “it’s like a case of déjà vu.” And not just because he’s used to the on-set goings on the play describes. 

“I see a lot of similarities between myself and Harry Reems,” Savage said. Like the “Deep Throat” star, he initially aspired to become a professional actor, studying with Uta Hagen and Stella Adler before he found himself on a porn set to help pay his bills. He discovered he had a proclivity for the business and went on to star in hundreds of films. But along the way — also like Reems — he discovered that his adult cinema activities inhibited his ability to snag mainstream plays and films. Now out of the porn business, he’s recently starred in a Neil Simon play in Santa Monica; he’s been working on his standup-comedy routine and is hoping “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” will help further his acting career. “But I don’t know if I’ll use the name ‘Herschel Savage’ in the credits,” he said. “Even 40 years after ‘Deep Throat,’ there’s still so much bias out there against the industry.” 

The show, which begins previews Jan. 24, opens Jan. 31 and runs through March 3, will feature guest cast members in two cameo roles every week: Amber Lynn and Bill Margold (preview week, Jan. 24-27), Sally Kirkland and Bruce Vilanch (Jan. 31-Feb. 3), Nina Hartley and Christopher Knight (Feb. 7-10), and Georgina Spelvin and Ron Jeremy (Feb. 14-17). For tickets and information, visit deepthroattheplay.com or call (800) 838-3006.

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January 9, 2013 | 9:27 am

What Judd Apatow thinks of the Jewish Journal

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Judd Apatow

“It’s an honor to be insulted by you,” I told Judd Apatow during an interview about his new comedy-drama, “This is 40,” about the midlife angst suffered by record label owner Pete (Paul Rudd) and his wife, Debbie (Leslie Mann). 

“Yes, exactly!” Apatow replied.

I’d interviewed the comedy mogul several times  over the years, most recently about his flick “Funny People,” starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, and about his book “I Found This Funny: My Favorite Pieces of Humor and Some that Might Not be Funny at All.”  He’d opened up to me about how his Jewish childhood with atheist parents instilled in him a “frightening, empty” view of the universe that “certainly did more damage than they were aware of at the time.”   Whenever I’d asked him if he read the Journal, he’d responded with an enthusiastic, “Oh, yeah!”

So I was thrilled – and initially a tad mortified – to see that “This is 40” actually had a scene with a Journal reporter, which is played for laughs:  A schlumpy journalist wearing a yarmulke turns up to interview Pete’s star client, Graham Parker, asking him, “Why is this album different from all other albums.”  “It isn’t,” Parker retorts.

Yes, parody is a form of flattery, but is that what Judd really thought of the Journal?  Can we possibly appear less hip?  And is this what he thought of me?   “Well, I insult myself all the time in my films, so why not you?” he quipped when I asked him that question.

Q:  Where did the idea for the Journal scene come from?

A:  What I wanted to write about is that Pete feels like maybe he’s slipping.  He’s in the music business but he kind of likes the older bands, not the newer bands, and it’s a symbol that his taste is not keeping up with what’s happening in the world and it terrifies him.  He has this business model he thinks will work, which is, he’ll take these older artists, and he will have very little overhead; they don’t need to sell that many records and that’s enough, but then he’s not even going to be able to sell that many.  So when it came to, who’s interested in talking to Graham, we thought, the only people who want to talk to Graham is the Jewish Journal.  And we have our friend David Wilde, who writes for Rolling Stone magazine, playing the reporter from the Journal.  And then the joke in the movie is that the old people who still buy hard copies of records are older Jews because they don’t download; they don’t understand what that means. (Laughs.)  Which is probably because of the fact that my dad probably wouldn’t know how do download; he doesn’t have an iTunes music library.  I’m sure this makes no sense to the reality of the Jewish Journal, or who reads it or the ages or any of it; it’s just a general, we didn’t get Rolling stone to cover this.

Q: Does the character reflect any of your impressions of the Journal?

A:  No, not at all.  But when you think of like the cutting edge of the music scene, you don’t think of the Jewish Journal. I don’t mean to insult your readers, but they are not going to find out the next hot band in the Jewish Journal.

Q:  You never know.

A:  Well, you should change that.  If you find them, then you will prove my joke incorrect.  You and I have done a bunch of interviews over the years, for a long time, but the joke is literally coming from the fact that it just sounds funny.  Comedy is so much like a rhythm idea.  And to me, although there’s been many great Jewish rockers over the years, you don’t instantly think that our people are rocking that hard, although the truth is that they probably are (laughs). 

Q:  Someone on our staff was thinking of doing a videotaped response to your Journal scene.

A:  Yes!  That’s right.  You could, and it would be a great video for every person who doesn’t realize that the guy from that punk band is Jewish, or that the guy in that great rock ‘n’ roll band of all time is Jewish.  You could show all of them.  We could even get Adam Sandler to record it.

“This is 40” is now in theaters.

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