December 13, 2012 | 10:35 am

Travis Fine on “Any Day Now”

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

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Alan Cumming

In the first image of Travis Fine’s heartrending new film, “Any Day Now,” set in the 1970s, Marco (Isaac Leyva), a 12-year-old with Down’s syndrome, roams the streets of a city, lost, bewildered and clutching a child’s doll. The film then flashes back to tell of how Marco was taken in by Rudy and Paul, a gay couple played by Alan Cummings (“The Good Wife”) and Garrett Dillahunt, after his junkie mother abandoned him; a custody battle erupts that cannot help but reflect on gay rights issues today. The film has already swept up audience awards at festivals from Seattle to Tribeca.

Fine, a 44-year-old actor (“Young Riders,” “Girl, Interrupted”) turned commercial airline pilot turned independent filmmaker, is straight, married with three children, and active at Temple Beth Ami, his Conservative synagogue in Santa Clarita. “I didn’t set out just to tell a story of gay rights and gay adoption, but also a human story about human rights, and my firm belief that nobody should stand in the way of anyone who has love to give to another human being,” he said of the film.

“Any Day Now” came about when Fine had funding in place for a new movie after returning to show business with 2011’s “The Space Between,” starring Oscar-winner Melissa Leo (“The Fighter”). The problem was finding a story, said the filmmaker, who had read and rejected about 50 screenplays when he came across a 1980 script by Arthur Bloom.

“My music supervisor, PJ Bloom, who is also an old friend of mine from Beverly Hills High, told me that his father, Arthur, had written this script about a man named Rudy, who had lived near his apartment in Brooklyn in the late 1970s,” Fine said. "Rudy was a flamboyantly gay man with a sassy mouth, the kind of guy that everyone in the neighborhood knew. And in Rudy’s apartment building there was this 12-year-old kid who barely spoke, barely could say his own name, who wore a diaper and crawled around. The kid had a mother who was a pretty horrific drug addict, and Rudy kind of took the boy in and looked after him, got him into school and really tried to be the kid’s parent. And George was so inspired by their connection that he wrote the original script.”

“It was the only script I read where I kept saying, ‘There’s some connection to me in this story, something that moves me,” Fine added. “But it didn’t reveal itself to me until my daughter’s 16th birthday, when I found myself on the floor of my closet in my bedroom, sobbing hysterically.” At the time, Fine was acutely feeling the distance that had developed between himself and his oldest daughter, his child by a previous marriage -- distance that was a byproduct of his divorce.

“Once I wiped my tears away, I grasped the real understanding and compassion I had for my lead character,” Fine said, meaning Rudy’s angst upon being separated from Marco. “And I understood that I wanted to tell a story about what it means to be a family.  I didn’t want to make sweeping political statements, but rather wanted to explore a love story between three unlikely people.”

Here are further excerpts from our interview:

Q: You originally wrote the character of Marco as ill tempered. How was it that you decided to change the character into a gentler soul?

A: Isaac Leyva had auditioned for us on videotape and when I finally met with him, I asked him to do the scenes driven by conflict, which included foul language and throwing things and being belligerent. But he just wouldn’t do it; he emotionally and physically would not go there.

Then I had an interesting conversation with the man who runs the school where Isaac studies acting; he said Down’s Syndrome kids generally shy away from that kind of thing; they’re not going to throw things and scream and yell and cuss, because that generally makes them very uncomfortable. So I said to my wife, “Maybe Isaac’s not our kid.” And then she said something very smart: She brought up the young man who played Michael Oher from “The Blind Side;” how silent he was for so much of the first half of the movie and how that made viewers want to know more about what was going on inside of his head. She suggested that I do the same thing with the character of Marco; that I allow his silence to be something that prompts us to want to learn more about who he is. So I stayed up until about 4 a.m. that morning, in March of 2011, and rewrote the script, then went back and had Isaac read the new scenes. He was wonderful.

I asked him, “Do you want to star in my film?” and he nodded really vigorously, yes. Later on I heard him crying in the corner of the room; there were tears streaming down his face. I asked if he was OK; his acting teacher was holding him, and when he finally wiped the tears away he looked at me and said, “The dream of my life just came true.” It was a beautiful moment.

Q: In your film, Rudy is an aspiring singer who works as a drag queen to earn a living. Does he identify with Marco because as a gay man, he, too, feels marginalized by others -- a kind of social outcast?

A: Absolutely. There was a monologue that ultimately we took out of the film, in which Rudy explains to Paul what his life was like growing up with parents who didn’t accept him; there were kids who would beat him up and he had to run away from home at a young age. But we felt at a certain point that the monologue was a little bit too on the nose in trying to draw those connections to Marco. My hope is that people will get that Rudy is a guy who clearly had lived on the fringes of society and had to fight his way to get anything he’s had. So I think there is a deep connection and understanding on his part of this kid who no one wants.

Q: Why did you choose to set the film in the 1970s?

A: The first reason is that it’s based on a true story that really did happen in the 1970s.  The second is that I’m a huge fan of ‘70s cinema, and I wanted to tackle that visually:  Could we make the film using modern digital technology to create not only the wardrobe and sets but also the look and texture of a ‘70s film using certain color choices and palettes? Also, by setting the movie in the 1970s, it allows contemporary viewers to look back and see where we were [in terms of gay rights], and affords us an opportunity to ask ourselves if we’re really in a different place.

Q: How was it that you cast Alan Cumming as Rudy?

A: He’s not only a great actor but he has great performing and singing capabilities; he’s also been knighted by the Queen of England for his work on behalf of LGBT rights and equality through the arts. This is a guy who’s not only talked the talk of gay rights but he’s really walked the walk. He has the same agent as Melissa Leo, who had starred in my last film. She told her agent, in her own colorful, expletive filled way, that she blanking loved my blanking writing and of course he should read my blanking script and she passed it along to him right away. It was a matter of days before Cumming read the script and said he wanted to be a part of this.

Q: What Jewish values do you perceive in the film?

A: The sense of ethical mitzvot. When Rudy sees that child he has two choices; he can either help or not. And he does the right thing.

“Any Day Now” opens Dec. 14.

December 12, 2012 | 3:16 pm

Bette Midler: The Divine Miss Bubbe

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Bette Midler

Who is Bette Midler? There’s her onstage alter ego, The Divine Miss M, the brash and bawdy chanteuse with risqué sequin-clad décolletage she invented back in the 1970s at Manhattan’s Continental Baths gay spa. And the hilariously over-the-top characters she’s played in such films as “Ruthless People,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “The First Wives Club.”

But in a telephone interview from her New York home, the 67-year-old Oscar-nominated actress and Grammy-winning performer came off as low-key, no-nonsense, almost aristocratic, eschewing the vaguely New Yawk accent of her comic characters for crisp thespian tones. Midler can certainly be amusing: Ask about the secret to the success of her 28-year marriage to former commodities broker Martin von Haselberg, and she quips: “Be away a lot.” 

“ ‘Home Alone’ for grandparents” is how she describes her new movie, “Parental Guidance,” in which she and Billy Crystal play a couple unexpectedly asked to baby-sit their estranged grandchildren. (The film opens Dec. 25.) 

But as she speaks, Midler seems settled into her role as a homebody: as a longtime wife and mother to her 26-year-old daughter, Sophie, as well as an avid reader, gardener, cook, philanthropist and Twitter enthusiast. Last Passover she tweeted: “The brisket’s in the oven and the Alka-Seltzer by the sink! Charge!”

She also seems genuinely pleased, even honored, to hear she is considered a Jewish icon of sorts. Midler once told Johnny Carson that she had a Venus flytrap: “I don’t have any flies, so I gave it bacon. It spit it out! A Jewish Venus Flytrap, I suppose.” In another gag, she claimed to be working on a sequel to the X-rated film “Emmanuelle,” which would feature lots of kissing of mezuzahs as well as a risqué encounter with a kreplach.

“I’m glad I’m called any kind of icon,” she said with a throaty laugh. “It’s very sweet, very nice for people to want to claim me. Much better than the other way around, like ‘Uch, she doesn’t belong to us.’ ” Midler once aspired to become a legend: “Ambition used to eat me up alive,” she recalled. “But with age, things change. Certain things come to the forefront, and others recede.” From 2008 to 2010, Midler headlined in “The Showgirl Must Go On” in Las Vegas — a city she dubbed onstage as “the only town that could teach Kraft something about cheese” — but she admits her film career has been one of the casualties of age. Back in the 1980s, Midler was reportedly one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, but the calls from producers have not been coming as much in recent years. 

Then came the chance to star in “Parental Guidance,” a Fox studio film directed by Andy Fickman. “I loved the script,” she said. “It’s a kind of second-chance movie — the idea that there’s this man who’s so self-involved that his own daughter won’t even let him in the house near her children. He goes, against his will, kicking and screaming, to meet these dragons, who are really his grandchildren. And then he has to go through this journey where he comes out on the other side transformed into the good person his wife always suspected he could be.”

Just as Midler’s character of Diane, the generous grandmother, has overtones of the Jewish mother, Midler has often used her Judaism as part of her persona. But her tribal sense of humor – and identity – was honed in a distinctly non-Jewish milieu: a low-income part of Honolulu, where Midler grew up in the only white, or haole, family in the neighborhood. “I did feel very much alien, an outsider,” she said of her time there. “People knew what a white person was — they didn’t like them — but they had no idea of what a Jew was. In fact, when my father made us stay home for Yom Kippur, the school wouldn’t allow it because they thought it was some kind of fake, made-up holiday. I’m sure if people had known what a Jew was, things would have been worse,” she added.

Midler got by because her mostly Asian and Polynesian classmates assumed she was Portuguese. “Not to stereotype, but the Portuguese were very outspoken people who talked a lot and really loud, and I did the same thing,” she said.

Even though her home was mostly non-religious, she continued, “In the seventh grade, I was struck by Judaism. I took Hebrew lessons and tried to get through the five books of Moses. I think it was hormones,” she joked, before adding, “at some point you do have a kind of awakening, and wonder who and what you are.”

While outdoors the landscape was “paradise,” she said, “indoors, not so much.” Her father, a housepainter, was controlling and a screamer — “I was afraid of him until I turned 14, and then it was just silly,” she said, adding that she later cared for him as he was dying of heart issues in the mid-1980s, while she was pregnant with Sophie. 

Midler’s mother, an avid movie-star fan who named Midler after Bette Davis, was a timid soul who tried to shelter her three daughters and developmentally disabled son from the world. “My mother’s family was incredibly superstitious,” Midler recalled. “They were old-country Jews who never laughed, because, they said, ‘You’re going to attract the evil eye.’ They’d been through two world wars, the Depression and the Nazi slaughter in Europe. So my mother was an extremely frightened person, almost to the point where it was crazy, and I picked that up as well. I think I’ve allowed myself to be isolated as a person of note, or whatever you want to call me, for a very long time, and I’ve realized that’s terrible; I’ve got to learn how to do things for myself. … I also tend to imagine other people’s reactions when they’re not really thinking that sort of thing at all; it’s called over-thinking.”

Despite — or perhaps because of — her own problematic childhood, Midler developed what she calls “tremendous perseverance.”

“I discovered that if I stood up for myself, there weren’t that many people who would try to stand me down.”

She got one of her first breaks rising from the chorus to play Tzeitel, Tevye’s oldest daughter, in “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway in 1970 — no matter that the casting director had initially deemed her, bizarrely, as too Jewish for the part. 

When roles dried up, Midler burst into the popular culture at the Continental Baths in the basement of Manhattan’s Ansonia Hotel, where her torch songs lured the gay patrons — many of them wearing only towels — from more carnal activities and solidified what would become her gay fan base.

Then came her first album, “The Divine Miss M,” released in 1972; Midler’s Oscar-nominated turn as a self-destructive rock star in “The Rose” (1979) was followed by more than 30 other movies, including the sudsy “Beaches,” in which she played a self-centered singer opposite Barbara Hershey.

As for why Midler identified with the Janis Joplin-esque character she portrayed in “The Rose,” she said it was, in part, “Your parents telling you you’re never going to amount to a hill of beans, and don’t do this or that, and you’d better be a teacher so you have something to fall back on.” 

She described her own parenting style as firm and loving, but not overprotective, and perhaps as a result, her daughter is “fearless,” she said. Sophie skydives, rides dirt bikes and even trekked through China for three months on her own. And even though Midler told Sophie as a child that she would never speak to her again if she went into show business (“I wanted to spare her the pain,” she said), her daughter is now studying drama at an Ivy League school. “But don’t say which one,” Midler asked, slipping into protective mode for a moment. “It would kill me.”

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December 8, 2012 | 12:02 pm

Elie Wiesel on Oprah Dec. 9: Sneak peak Q & A [VIDEO]

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Wiesel and Winfrey

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November 21, 2012 | 2:44 pm

‘Anything Goes’ is high jinks on the high seas

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Rachel York and the cast of “Anything Goes.” Photo by Joan Marcus

Erich Bergen identifies easily with the brash, impetuous character of Billy Crocker, the romantic lead Bergen plays in Cole Porter’s insouciant 1934 musical “Anything Goes,” which opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Nov. 28.  

“I’m horrible at waiting for auditions,” the 26-year-old actor said during a phone interview from Wilmington, Del., where the show was playing recently as part of the national tour of the 2011 Tony Award-winning Broadway revival production. “I’ve waited outside casting directors’ doors. If someone won’t see me, I’ll finagle an invitation to a party or somehow find a way to get myself in front of that person.” 

And when it comes to love, he said, “I don’t really have a middle ground; I have a zero and a 10. I’ve jumped on a plane after a show in Las Vegas and flown to L.A. to surprise my girlfriend at her door and loved that rush. I’ve written and videotaped songs to women. My whole album ‘Vegas Sessions’ is like that.”

The musical’s director, Kathleen Marshall, calls the 6-foot-3 Bergen (best-known for “Jersey Boys”) “tall, dark and handsome,” with “the deft comic touch of a young Cary Grant.”  

That comes in handy in his portrayal of Billy, an ambitious stockbroker who stows away on an ocean liner to woo his beloved, Hope (Alex Finke) — never mind that she is already engaged to a wealthy aristocrat. With the help of his gal pal Reno Sweeney (Rachel York, in the role originated by Ethel Merman), Billy eludes the watchful eyes of the ship’s purser by disguising himself as a sailor and a gangster. High jinks on the high seas erupt in Porter’s lavish, Art Deco musical, which was written as escapist fare during the Great Depression and is jam-packed with leggy dancers as well as well as classic Porter standards like “You’re the Top,” “It’s De-Lovely” and “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

Creating his own, distinctive Billy became paramount for Bergen after Marshall cast him earlier this year. The actor had seen his friend Colin Donnell perform the part on Broadway but knew he had to take a different route. “I wish I could be as smooth as Colin is, but I’m not,” he said. “So I just had to figure out a way to make the role something I was comfortable with. What I discovered is that Billy is sort of a street kid, someone who talks his way to the top. He watches how the successful businessmen and playboys around him dress and walk, and he sort of found the right suit and talked his way into this job where he’s making $35 a week, which he’s very proud of.

“Our director was very specific that because the play is a farce — you can’t intentionally go to that place or everyone’s going to become a clown,” Bergen added. “So I’ve tried to keep Billy as real as possible, so he doesn’t become a caricature.”

Erich Bergman and Rachel York in “Anything Goes.” Photo by Joan Marcus

For Bergen, that meant going further than just watching MGM ballroom dancing classics starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  He studied photographs of stylish men in Manhattan in the 1930s and envisioned himself walking down those New York City streets.

Bergen also refused to dismiss “Anything Goes” as mere escapist fluff. He notes that Cole Porter was a gay man who married a woman in order to adhere to convention, and that the composer must have brought some of that romantic angst to his lovelorn characters. He thus brings a tangible longing to numbers such as “All Through the Night,” where his character yearns for an unavailable lover. “I remember listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of the song and thinking, ‘You can really hear the sadness and the despair,’ ” he said.

Bergen was practically born to perform. His parents met as fellow students at the Actors Institute in Manhattan, and while they went on to practice other professions (his mother was an art director in the fashion industry), Bergen grew up among their theatrical friends in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.  At age 3, at his parents’ dinner parties, Erich performed Michael Jackson’s 1980s peace song “We Are the World” — which featured the performances of more than 30 celebrities — doing all of the voices himself. He learned to read by studying the songs and record jackets of the family’s CDs and envisioned himself as King-of-Pop Jackson bursting through the floor (or descending through the roof) at the beginning of every performance. “I still do,” Bergen said.

While his mother is a nonpracticing Catholic, Bergen strongly identified with his father’s Jewish family, lighting the Chanukiyah every year as well as attending synagogue and family Passover gatherings. “I found the seder to be a fun, theatrical, improvisational experience that everyone could take part in,” said the actor, who identifies as Jewish.

He likens theater — including “Anything Goes” — to the Passover experience:  “We’re all in one room together witnessing something that people for many years have done before us,” he said. “We are not new to this story, but we are experiencing it for the first time together. To me, that’s what I’ve found in the Jewish religion: that the tradition of keeping the story going is what’s most important — of making sure that everyone knows and is affected by the story.”

The national tour of “Anything Goes” isn’t the first time Bergen has performed in the musical. At 11, he was cast as the ship’s purser in a production at the rigorous performing-arts summer camp Stagedoor Manor, in New York, where child performers were treated like adults and Bergen got in trouble during the dress rehearsal. “There was a mishap where we were using a live dog in the show,” said the actor, who was supposed to carry the canine onstage in one scene but panicked when he discovered that Fido was AWOL.  “I walked onstage in the middle of the show and yelled, ‘I can’t find the dog!’ And then I could hear the director screaming at me from the back of the theater. Someone actually had to take him out of the theater to calm him down.” It was Bergen’s first lesson in the old adage, “The show must go on.” 

“Thank God we’re using a stuffed dog in this production,” he said.

The Stagedoor experience, however, gave Bergen an appreciation for Porter’s precise, sophisticated style; he still remembers dissecting the complex rhyme and meter in lyrics such as, “When every night, the set that’s smart/is intruding in nudist parties in studios.”  “And of course, the songs can be extremely risqué,” he added. “The double entendres in ‘You’re the Top’ alone are scandalous. I don’t know what they were thinking, doing this with 11-year-olds.”

Bergen’s big break came nine years later, when he was cast as Bob Gaudio in the national tour of the Broadway hit “Jersey Boys.” He received kudos for his performance, he said, but, “I let it go to my head and behaved like an ass.” Three years into the run, his contract was terminated, he said, due to “toxic behavior on my part and others. I had been shot out of a cannon on the road at 20 without paying any dues in summer stock or regional theater, and I never learned the real way to behave in that kind of situation. At the end of the day, it was my fault, and I take responsibility for it now. But none of that has impinged on the love I have for the show.”

Nor, apparently, did it impinge on his career: Two weeks after he left “Jersey Boys,” Bergen was cast as a guest star on “Gossip Girls” and went on to appear on “Desperate Housewives” as well as in a film, “How Sweet It Is,” opposite Paul Sorvino and Joe Piscopo, before being cast in “Anything Goes.” 

His current gig has come with a lion’s share of challenges: Several of the songs, if sung by rote, can come off as “lists” (“Think: ‘It’s de-lightful, it’s de-licious, it’s de-lovely,’ ” Bergen said.) The actor found his way into that ditty by envisioning himself as the suave Cole Porter at a dinner party, pretending to be making up the lyrics on the spot.

Then there’s the five-minute dance break in the middle of “De-Lovely,” “when we’re breathing hard, and we’re just exhausted, and I then have to run up a flight of stairs and start singing again,” he said. “The trick is how to make it look romantic, and that you’re in love with your dance partner. My way in was to just envision myself as Fred Astaire.”

Even so, he said, “Every night, I come off the stage spent. I’ve lost weight since the beginning of the tour: I was 192 pounds, and now I’m 177.”

And yet, Bergen makes it all look effortless, director Marshall said in an e-mail.  “Erich is that rarity in theater — a genuine triple-threat leading man. He sings beautifully, dances with style and grace, and he is a wonderful actor.”

Finke said the actor brings an endearing quality to the subversive Billy. “He’s able to create this mischievous character who does some troublemaking but still has such a good heart,” she said in a telephone interview. “He manages to keep the audience rooting for him, despite all of his shenanigans.”

For tickets and information, visit centertheatregroup.org.

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November 21, 2012 | 1:50 pm

‘Coney Island’: A Christmas Story for Jews

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Donald Margulies

Donald Margulies was in his New Haven study when a surprising call came from Gil Cates, the renowned artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse.

Cates — who died last November at 77 — had overseen four Margulies productions at the Geffen, had just directed the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s fanciful fairy tale “Shipwrecked!” and had in mind another family play for the author. 

“He said, ‘Donald, how would you like to write me a Christmas show?’ And I was amused,” Margulies, 58, said, speaking at the Geffen just before a rehearsal of his new play, “Coney Island Christmas.” 

“You don’t usually seek out a Jewish playwright to write you a Christmas show. So I said, ‘Gil, if I’m going to write you a Christmas show, you know it’s going to be a Jewish Christmas show, right?’ And he said, ‘Great!’ ”

Margulies’ response was hardly unexpected. Joe Papp, the late founder of New York’s Public Theater, dubbed Margulies “my Jewish playwright.” Throughout his more than 35 years as a dramatist, Margulies has often explored Jewish identity and family dynamics, from his early plays, like “The Loman Family Picnic” and “The Model Apartment,” through to later works, including his Pulitzer nominees “Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories” as well as 2005’s “Brooklyn Boy.” In varied ways that have evolved over the years, he has, at times, drawn on his childhood in a tiny apartment in 1960s Brooklyn, where his father toiled as a wallpaper salesman and Holocaust survivors, with their mysterious and terrifying forearm tattoos, walked the neighborhood.  

For Margulies, “Coney Island Christmas” represents a more ebullient return to Brooklyn, as well as a lighter take on what he calls the “ghetto mentality.”

Based on the short story “The Loudest Voice,” by Grace Paley, the comedy opens in the San Fernando Valley, as the elderly Shirley Abramowitz regales her great-granddaughter with a tale of how she came to play Jesus in her grammar-school Christmas pageant in 1930s Brooklyn. The action then shifts back in time, as the pageant is rehearsed and conflict ensues: Shirley’s mother sees the pageant and its implications as “a creeping pogrom” that will “make our children forget who they are”; Mr. Abramowitz (Arye Gross) argues for open-mindedness and contends that participation does not equal assimilation, while young Shirley longs only to perform.

Cates’ sudden death from heart failure last year, however, is what prompted Margulies, who was then preparing his play “Time Stands Still” for Broadway, to give himself a deadline of January 2012 to finish a first draft of the play, which he dedicated to his old friend. He remembers Cates as an “indomitable” figure and a “mensch” who identified strongly with the Jewish sensibilities in Margulies’ work. “His death just crushed me,” the playwright said, his voice hushed. “It seems quite hollow here at the Geffen without him.”

Cates envisioned “Coney Island Christmas” as becoming an annual holiday production at the Geffen. But if a yuletide pageant seems like something of a departure for Margulies, its themes fit snugly into his oeuvre. “I wasn’t invested in exploring Christmas, but rather in exploring the phenomenon of assimilation,” he said. He saw Paley’s story as “an opportunity to write about what it means to be an American, and to be of faith, any faith. The very comic notion of a Jewish girl asked to play Jesus is such a wonderful metaphor for lack of prejudice and a kind of ecumenical approach.” 

Director Bart DeLorenzo said the play’s “central question” is, “Where is your allegiance?” 

“Every character is trying to figure out where they stand — ‘Am I a Jew or a Christian or an American?’ — and a holiday like Christmas suddenly can make you feel you must choose some sort of side in this debate,” DeLorenzo said in a telephone interview.

Gross, who grew up in a Conservative home in Reseda, connects the characters to his late grandparents: “I can almost hear members of my family speaking the words as they are said in the play.” 

Margulies said he based the characters and their worldview, in part, on his own beloved grandparents, as well as the immigrant and first-generation Jews of his childhood neighborhood, who saw America as a land of opportunity but harbored suspicions and distrust of non-Jews.  

He was sitting in an upstairs office at the Geffen, where he wore a tweed jacket and round spectacles and exuded both the quietly confident manner of a successful artist and Yale professor.  

Yet, at one point, the conversation turned again to his fraught childhood in Brooklyn, where his family “never had any money,” he said, and learning about the survivors in the neighborhood “was the beginning of my fear of Nazi persecution and a Germanophobia I still struggle with today.” As his alter ego, a newly successful novelist named Eric Weiss, says in “Brooklyn Boy,” he had to escape Brooklyn because he feared the chokehold the legacies of the Depression and the Holocaust had around his parents’ throats.  

Margulies’ range of plays about Brooklyn, some written in the voice of a young man, others in the voice of artists in midlife, have helped him to exorcise some of those demons. “I’ve also been happily wed and well-analyzed,” he added, with a laugh. “But when I visit my friends in Park Slope, I still get a little creeped out. It’s just a primal feeling.”

It’s thus significant that Margulies set “Coney Island Christmas” in a more vibrant New York milieu decades before his time. “I had romanticized 1930s Brooklyn as being the golden years, of [immigrants] being new to America, when the country was still promising in a way it wasn’t when I was growing up in the 1960s,” he explained.  

Not that the setting is without its share of urban grit. For visual inspiration, Margulies turned to the Depression-era paintings of Reginald Marsh, “where you can see the grime, the patina of urban dust,” he said. 

And yet, overall, he said, “The play is very joyful. It’s life-affirming.”

For tickets and information about “Coney Island Christmas,” visit www.geffenplayhouse.com.

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November 20, 2012 | 4:05 pm

‘Pi’ is approximately 3.1416% Jewish

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Suraj Sharma as Pi. Photos courtesy of “Life of Pi” photostream

Ang Lee, the 58-year-old Oscar-winning director of “Brokeback Mountain” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” was understated and thoughtful recently as he settled into a velvet couch at the L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills. He had arrived to discuss his new film, “Life of Pi,” the story of the journey of Pi, a religious teenager from India whose entire family and the remnants of the family’s zoo sinks in a shipwreck, leaving Pi alone and adrift in a small boat, along with a tiger.

Lee brought up his memory of the last time we spoke, before the release of his 2009 film “Taking Woodstock,” a tale of hippies descending upon a Jewish resort in the Catskills to attend the legendary 1969 rock music festival. “That film was very Jewish,” the soft-spoken Lee said, with a quiet laugh. “And this new one, ‘Life of Pi’ is somewhat, a little bit Jewish as well.”

Based on Yann Martel’s 2001 best-selling novel, the film draws on imagery and motifs from the three religions Pi practices simultaneously — Hinduism, Catholicism and Islam — but its worldview is also influenced by the Old Testament and the Jewish mysticism of kabbalah. Lee said he specifically researched Rabbi Isaac Luria’s 16th-century concept of tsimtsum: how God, the infinite, created the world by opening up a vacuum within Himself. “In tsimtsum, God shrunk part of Himself in order to create the world,” Lee said. “God is perfect, but he had to shrink back to create as messy and imperfect a life as ours. It’s the essential energy of the universe.”

In the film, the sinking of the freighter, aptly named the Tsimtsum, literally and figuratively represents the stripping away of Pi’s sheltered previous life in his family’s Pondicherry zoo, as well as of the comforting religious concepts he had been taught, respectively, by his imam, priest and Hindu pandit. “On the lifeboat, Pi has no organized religion, no society, no priest or monk or any human being to tell him, ‘This is what is supposed to be.’ He is on his own,’ ” Lee said of Pi’s spiritual journey. “He’s always had faith in the abstract idea of God, but he has to be cast away to be tested, to test the strength of his faith.”

“It’s kind of like the story of Job,” the film’s screenwriter, David Magee, said during an interview at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel. “Pi finds himself questioning at every turn, why has God put these impediments in front of him, and not only through his suffering on the ocean, but then to put a tiger on the boat along with him. Yet the fear of what he must confront forces Pi into action that he might not have done otherwise. And, in the end, he comes to realize that without the tiger he probably would not have survived.”

The Old Testament power of the Divine is on display in some of the transcendent images in the film: Pi and his lifeboat are dwarfed by the stars shining above and reflecting in the water below, creating an immersion in a bowl-like universe; phosphorescent sea life glimmers magically on the vast night ocean, and, at one point, Pi loses all his supplies in a maelstrom worthy of Noah.  

Director Ang Lee

Rabbi David Wolpe, who attended an early screening of the film, described the mythic character of the moment: “That scene reminded me the chaos of creation, and the tohu vavohu, the unformed void,” he said. “In the middle of nowhere, all of nature is intent on both displaying itself to [Pi] and destroying him.” 

The filmmakers also were inspired by Steven Callahan, whose book “Adrift” chronicles Callahan’s 76 days as a castaway, and who became a consultant on the film. “Steven talked to us not only about the mechanics of survival but also the humility brought on by his journey,” Magee said. “It put him into both a profoundly awed respect for the universe and his very tiny place in it.”

Lee — who was raised as a Christian but now incorporates Buddhism and Hindu concepts into his personal faith — identifies with Pi’s journey because for much of his life he has felt proverbially at sea. The Chinese, like the Jews, have the concept of Diaspora, he said: “My parents escaped the Chinese revolution to Taiwan, and while we still felt we were authentically Chinese, we were outsiders there,” he recalled. While Lee considers himself an Asian filmmaker, his current home is in Larchmont, N.Y., and, “When I go back to China, I’m an outsider, too. So there’s a sense of being alien, adrift.”

“Life of Pi” merges Aesopian fable, varied religious motifs and wondrous 3-D graphics, but tackling the complex metaphysical film proved daunting for Lee, who signed on after the directors M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuaron and Jean-Pierre Jeunet dropped out of the project.  

To write the screenplay, Lee turned to Magee (“Finding Neverland,” “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”) who first read Martel’s novel on the “Neverland” set about 10 years ago and described it as unfilmable. But he jumped at the chance, about four years ago, to tackle the movie when he learned that Lee would direct. 

Lee and Magee began collaborating on the film in 2010, meeting daily for months in Lee’s Manhattan loft near Chinatown. Along the way, they embarked upon meticulous research not only into 3-D technology, which Lee believed would help viewers to “feel like an insider in Pi’s world,” but also on world religions — including mystical Judaism. (In the film, the middle-aged Pi, who serves as narrator, recounting his story to a journalist, reveals that he teaches kabbalah at a university near his home in Canada.)

The kabbalistic model of creation, the tree of life, with its 10 sefirot, was part of the research leading to the design of a tree that becomes Pi’s sleeping place when he and the tiger land on a lush island that appears to be an abundant Eden. “It’s there that God gives Pi some little, imperfect but closer insight into His nature, and of the nature of the universe,” Magee said. “It’s a very Judeo-Christian concept: ‘God giveth and God taketh away.’ ”

By day, the island is a nourishing land, filled with bounty, peace and comfort. By night, it all turns carnivorous and devouring — the other side of God. That duality plays out throughout the story, in the duality of the vegetarian Pi and the carnivorous tiger, the philosopher and the animal.”

The tiger, who has the unusual name of Richard Parker, becomes a metaphor for Pi’s animal nature, which he must embrace (and train) in order to brave the elements. “I don’t see the tiger as ‘the other,’ Lee said. “Even though on the surface, he is an obstacle Pi has to overcome, he is also the inner beast that must emerge for Pi to survive.”  

Richard Parker, thus, is no cute and cuddly animal, but unabashedly vicious. “Ang was very firm about not wanting to anthropomorphize him,” said Magee, who drew from a real encounter with a ferocious tiger in India while writing the film. “I can’t describe the feeling of a tiger roaring at you from four feet away,” he said. “It goes through your body like a jet engine rumbling, and you feel it viscerally; you don’t so much hear it as you feel that beast touching you with its sound.”

Variety noted the film’s “warm-hearted plea for religious faith,” but Magee sees “Life of Pi” somewhat differently. “It’s more like a warm-hearted plea for faith in storytelling,” he said. “In religion, we tell stories to make sense of this incomprehensible universe, and we were writing about the power of different stories to help you connect to the world around you and how they can help you to organize the chaos.”

“Life of Pi” opens in theaters on Nov. 21.

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November 7, 2012 | 2:01 pm

Mayim Bialik and Elon Gold on Obama victory

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

This week I phoned actor-comedian Elon Gold and "The Big Bang Theory's" Mayim Bialik to get their take on the election coverage and results.  Here's what they had to say:

What a close race! It had me on the edge of my seat! I had no reservations about the President's or Governor Romney's ability to support Israel or protect Israel so that wasn't stressing me out. However, the chances of me missing filming The Big Bang Theory because I'd be taking to the streets protesting a possible eventual overturn of Roe v Wade are now nil. So I guess Big Bang Theory fans can be happy President Obama won if they like my character.

-- Mayim Bialik, "The Big Bang Theory"

I am saying kaddish right now for all my doctor friends' careers!

- Elon Gold, comedian

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November 3, 2012 | 12:06 am

Brandon Cronenberg’s ‘Antiviral’ oozes into AFI Fest

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Caleb Landry Jones in 'Antiviral'

Exploding heads, techno-genitals, mutant offspring, a humanoid fly. Such are some of the monstrous images in David Cronenberg’s early “body horror” films, a la “Videodrome,” “Scanners,” “The Brood” and, of course, 1986’s “The Fly, ” starring Jeff Goldblum. Now Cronenberg’s 32-year-old son, Brandon Cronenberg, has spawned his own distinctive contribution to the body horror genre:  the viscerally gruesome dark satire “Antiviral” -- starring Caleb Landry Jones and Malcolm McDowell -- which won the best Canadian first feature award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and will screen at the AFI Film Festival Nov. 4 and 7 before opening theatrically in April. 

The movie revolves around Syd March (Landry Jones), who works at a clinic that sells injections of viruses cultivated from sick celebrities to obsessed fans.  “It’s biological communion, for a price,” the younger Cronenberg said by phone from his home in Toronto.

Syd also sells some of the more select germs on the black market, smuggling them out of the lab in his own body, meaning that he is always nauseatingly ill.  Plenty of disturbing images ensue, from viscous blood pouring out of sickened orifices to needles penetrating pale tissue to gray-colored steaks – also for fan consumption – cloned from the flesh of the stars.

When Syd becomes infected with what turns out to be a deadly virus courtesy of superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he must unravel the microbiological mystery before he, too, becomes dead meat.

Here are some excerpts from my conversation with Brandon Cronenberg this past week:

Q:  Your father is a well-known (Jewish) atheist/existentialist who has said that his grisly images are meant to remind people that life and death begins and ends with the body. Do you have a similar outlook about religion?

A:  I identify as Jewish, and I feel totally Jewish, but not in a religious sense.  I’m a total atheist, but I think that came to me on my own.  My parents never pushed me; they were very careful not to tell me how the universe is or to expose me to atheistic propaganda.  I guess I never did believe in God.  I was never told that God exists and I never experienced anything that led me to believe that God exists.

I don’t believe in the soul, that the body is this inanimate thing that then becomes animated by a life force and then at a certain point stops being animated by a life force. I think the idea of the soul comes from the desire to see ourselves as somehow perfect and immortal despite the physical reality of our bodies.

Q:  Is that why you use such visceral physical imagery in the film?

A:  Part of it is that; and part of it is to show the divide between celebrities as ideas, as cultural icons, media constructs, and then to contrast that with the human beings behind those constructs.  I think we’re very uncomfortable with our bodies; we don’t want to look at ourselves too closely and see the decay, the animal reality of the human body. So in the film, making the body so explicit was partly  because of this theme.

Q:  How did you get the idea for “Antiviral?”

A:  It was 2004; I had just started film school, I had a baddish flu and was very sick in bed.  And I was having a kind of fever dream where I was half awake and sort of obsessing over the physicality of my illness and how I had something in my body, my cells, that had come from someone else’s body. The penetration of the virus into your cells is totally erotic and intimate, if you see it that way.  Afterwards, when I was more sane, I started thinking about who might see disease as something intimate, and I thought a celebrity-obsessed fan might want to be infected with a virus from the object of their obsession as a way of feeling physically connected to them.  And that developed into a metaphor for dissecting celebrity culture.

Q:  You’ve been able to witness some of the unpleasant aspects of celebrity through the public spotlight on your own father.  What kinds of things did you want to explore about celebrity culture in the film?

A: The commodification of celebrity is a huge theme.  The cannibalism aspect, for me, becomes a metaphor for (literally) consuming celebrity.  I think the film may take things to the extreme, but I think it’s only a slight exaggeration of what’s already out there – like people buying John Lennon’s teeth, which sold for quite a lot of money recently.  Or people will buy scraps of someone’s underwear.  Anything that is associated with a celebrity immediately has some market value because there’s this kind of physical fetishism. 

And speaking of religion, I think this fetishism is very connected to the religious impulse.   I was thinking about, say, sainthood, which is sort of like the creation of celebrities in a way; saints are people essentially elevated to the status of gods, and there’s also that element of deification when it comes to celebrity. And just as with sainthood, where old churches claim to have the finger bone of such and such saint, we fetishize celebrity “relics.”  (Coughs.)

Q:  Are you sick?

A:  Yes, I have a cold.

Q:  Can I have some?

A: (Laughs.) Yes, come to Toronto and you can catch my cold.

Q:  Was there a limit on how far you would go with sickening imagery in the film?

A:  I think that that imagery feeds the satire, because the film is meant as a commentary on a part of our culture that I find disgusting at times – so the film makes it viscerally disgusting as well.  But I wasn’t just trying to be gross for the sake of being gross; I think it’s thematically relevant and also ties into the themes I mentioned about the body.

Q:  Did you use fake needles or dummy arms to create the injection effects?

A:  No, we used real needles – we had a medical professional on board – and yes, there were quite a lot of them.

Some people have fainted while watching the movie in the theater; the thing I didn’t realize is that [viewers] are very uncomfortable with needle imagery.  I didn’t realize how extreme it got, so now it feels like a kind of cheap way of freaking people out.

Q:  For a long time you told people you didn’t want to be a filmmaker.  What changed your mind?

A: There were people who approached me with all these preconceptions based on who my father was or who they felt he was and to a certain extent that turned me off to film, because people assumed that I absolutely must be a huge cinephile and that I must want to follow in my father’s footsteps. It was very obnoxious, so it gave me great pleasure to say, no, I have no interest in film whatsoever.  But then at a certain point that seemed like a bad reason not to do something that could be potentially interesting.

Q:  How do you feel about being compared to your father as a filmmaker?

A:  I don’t mind being compared to my father if it’s legitimate, but I do think some people overstate the comparisons.  We do share the interest in issues of the body and technology; those are some of the things he explored particularly in his earlier films, although I think he’s really evolved as a filmmaker over the years.

Q:  What do you like about the horror/science fiction genre?

A:  It’s a good medium for caricature, and for dissecting our culture, because you can take things that we’ve become habituated to, or become too used to to see clearly, and exaggerate them to heighten the context.

“Antiviral” will screen at Mann’s Chinese 1 theater on Nov. 4 at 6:15 p.m., and at Mann’s Chinese 4 on Nov. 7 at 7:15 p.m.  The festival will also screen Eran Riklis' new film, "Zaytoun," starring American actor Stephen Dorff and set in 1980s Beirut.  For more information, visit AFI.com/AFIFEST.

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