Interview: Directors/Writer/Star of “Desperate Acts of Magic”

Posted on May 17, 2013 at 8:00 am

Magic is in the air.  And on the screen.  Two big-budget films with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars playing magicians are being released within a few months of each other.  In March, we had the silly comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, with Steve Carell and Jim Carrey.  Coming up is the enormously entertaining “Now You See Me,” with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, and Isla Fisher.

And there is also a very nice little indie romantic comedy, with magicians played by real-life magicians, called Desperate Acts of Magic.  I enjoyed it very much, and was very glad to get a chance to speak with Joe Tyler Gold, who wrote, produced, and stars in the film, and his co-director, Tammy Caplan.

Tell me how this movie came about.

Joe: I was a magician for many years and I did tons of kids’ birthday parties and entered lots of magic competitions.  We were looking for something we could produce on a low budget.  I had a lot of magician friends and there was a magic convention in San Diego happening in 2010 that we knew was coming up, so we went at it and put a script together and there you go.

Tammy: Joe was trying to figure out what we should work on next, what he should write next.  I said to him, and this is based on an acting exercise that we know,  “If you were to write about something that was deep and personal to you, very meaningful, what would you write about?”  And he talked about this one event that happened at this magic convention that he did and the impact of that event always stayed with him and so I said, “That’s what you should write about, that’s what you should go with.”

Joe:  Back in 1998 I competed in a magic competition actually with that very act, the act that I do in the movie.  We didn’t get into the finals. They said there wasn’t enough magic but that they liked the act a lot and they asked us to perform on the evening show.  The girl that I was doing the act with at the time was an actress and she wasn’t my girlfriend and she went off with a new boyfriend to a bed & breakfast.  And so the performance actually never happened.  And so that was always something that was kind of a regret of mine…

Tammy: Because at the time in Los Angeles at this convention it really was full of the cream of the crop of the magic community and he kind of regrets that this could have made Joe’s career really go along better.  So we decided the film should have a happier ending.

Well that’s the beauty of fiction, isn’t it, that you can give yourself a happy ending.

Tammy: Yes and this is sort of life imitating art because the movie itself is a happy ending.  I do think it’s kind of interesting the way we shot it because we shot it on such a low budget and because Tammy and I took on so many of the roles of the crew.  We shot a day or two a month over 18 months. We kept our day jobs and each month we would save up the money to pay for the next shoot day.  And that also allowed us to very carefully craft each shoot day and figure out how the magic was going to be done.  And teach Valerie Dillman the magic since Valerie, who plays the role of Stacy Dietz is not an actual magician. She learned magic for the role.

What do you think people will be surprised by, when they see it?  What will they learn about the magic community?

Tammy:  I think one thing is the way we portray female magicians because there never has really been a magic movie with a character, a fictional magic movie, with a character of a female magician. And you know when you see characters on TV, women playing doctors, lawyers, teachers, musicians, then it feels natural in the real world, to see these types of people. You don’t think twice these days when a doctor is a man or a woman.  But when you think of a magician, you think of a stereotype that comes up and it’s always a guy, sometimes very stereotypically, in the tuxedo with the rabbit in the hat. But magic is a really beautiful art form.  It takes as much skill as playing an instrument or dance.  There is a great way of telling stories through magic.  Once there are more women in magic, I think you’ll see more interesting stories and I think it’s really  going to help the art of magic as a whole.

Do you think there are still a lot of barriers to women in the world of magic?

Joe: Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s opening up and there are a lot of women in magic. There really are.  But one of the difficulties is it is still very much a man’s profession. And you know I mean the Magic Circle in London only recently started to allow women into their organization. I just think that it’s more difficult to gain respect in the world of magic as a woman. And that there is an assumption when you see a woman involved in a magic act, that she’s an assistant. They always have to work a little bit harder to convince anybody that they are actually a magician. I almost think that the word “assistant” is kind of ridiculous.  When you have a play and you have a couple people in that play who might have smaller roles you would never call them something else. You know, if they have ten lines in the play they’re still an actor in the play and they are in the program and they get a bow at the end.  It’s strange to me that if two people are performing an illusion, and one is sawing the other in half, that one is automatically in some sort of a superior position than the other. And even stranger, and I mention this in the movie, is that when you do have the woman sawing the man in half, they still call it “the Assistant’s Revenge.”  She’s sawing the magician in half and she’s still the assistant.

Tammy: I mean it’s just weird that …the fact that you even have to call a female magician, “a female magician.” You know, you don’t call a painter, “a female painter” or “a male painter”.  It’s just “a painter.”  And oftentimes, what’s so strange is that a magician will have a female assistant and maybe the magician is doing some act where, I don’t know, let’s say he’s making fun of the fact that, you know that he’s this middle-aged balding guy, let’s just say.  But then there’s the assistant comes on and she’s this 19 year old in a skimpy dress and that has absolutely nothing to do with his act.  It’s almost as if there is some disconnect story-wise, between what the magician is doing and what the assistant is doing.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the movie is the way that there was a story to the act.  The audience in the movie and the audience at the movie both wonder if the magicians are really fighting.

Joe: I always like telling stories with my magic and many magicians do this. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoyed making the movie is that it really allowed me to tell a longer story through magic. Because I tried to use the magic to advance the story and incorporate it into the story as much as I could. And it can sometimes be difficult to do that in a 6-minute act.

One of the things that I thought about as I was watching the film is that you had a very big challenge in that difference between a film and a live performance.  We’re very used to “Bewitched” with Samantha Stevens twitching her nose and something appearing or disappearing on screen.   You had to really do all those tricks and persuade the audience that you were really doing all those tricks.  How did you stage the tricks so that we know they were really being performed and were not special effects?

Joe: It’s a challenge for sure, because and Harry Potter and all the special effects movies, people just assume that it is effects.  And we contemplated putting something at the beginning of the movie, you know, “There are no camera tricks involved.”  One thing that we did was, we tried not to cut away in the middle of the effects as much as possible except for story.  And we tried to keep people’s faces and hands in the shot at the same time.

Tammy:  There’s very few places where you are just seeing hands alone and not the person.  It was always important to us and sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to be able to get the person’s face and the trick because you need to be able to see what’s going on with the trick.  So we really want to be able to see what the actor was doing at the same time.

Joe: We also populated the movie with a lot of real magicians. Most of the cast were actual magicians. Now, not everybody is going to know that, but you know, those who do, will know that those are real magicians and hopefully they’ll understand that they are really doing legitimate magic.  There’s a lot of slight of hand in the movie.  When you see a movie and Harry Potter is flying around on a broomstick you know it is special effect. But when you see slight of hand, you frequently will go, “That must be dexterity.”  Once you know that, you kind of prove to the audience that you are doing slight of hand. Then later when you do other types of magic, hopefully they go for the ride and assume that it’s also legitimate magic.

Tammy: And also because we are a lower budget, independent movie you know that we’re doing the magic for real. We didn’t have the money to do the Harry Potter special effects.

What got you interested in magic to begin with?

Joe:  I was interested since I was 8 years old, but I started performing probably about 13. And you know, “Burt Wonderstone” has it right. A lot of guys get into magic to, you know, to meet girls, you know. I don’t know that that was the motivation. But you know, it’s a fun thing to do.  When you’re a teenager, it’s nice to kind of feel empowered and maybe that you know something that other people don’t know.  That eventually evolved into being at a party and not knowing what to say and having an icebreaker. I would stand around in college just riffling a deck of cards.

Tammy:  Well, you meet people in the magic community.  Joe met people at magic camp that are in the movie that he’s known for years, practically his whole life.

Joe: It’s true, it’s true. I attended Cannon’s Magic Camp which is actually where I met Jonathan Levitt who played the role of Steve and where I met several other cast members, as well.  And these are friendships that have lasted my whole life.  And so that was something that really fed the interest for me.  As a teenager I was the editor of a magic magazine and I would go to magic conventions and I would go to Magic Club meetings. So you know, certainly I wasn’t meeting girls at a lot of these places.  It must have been something else.  When I sent out my college applications, my essay statement was, “I like to make people laugh.” And that’s what I always really enjoyed is making people laugh. And I continue to try to put a lot of humor into my magic and into movies that I’m making.

Who are your magic idols?

Joe: I’d say Penn & Teller, for sure.  What they do is so unique and also they always have a strong point of view and a statement that they make.  Female magicians, I love Tina Leonert. Oh my gosh! Google her and take a look at her act.  It’s so beautiful. She always tells a story.

Tammy: Mac King.

Joe: He’s my mom’s favorite magician, too, so she’s not alone.

Where can people see the movie?

Joe:  It’s playing in NY and LA.   And then we’re also doing these “Tugg” screenings.

 

 

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Interview: Maiken Baird and Michelle Major of “Venus and Serena”

Posted on May 9, 2013 at 10:07 pm

“Venus and Serena” is an enthralling new documentary about two of the most acclaimed athletes of our time.  Their story is even more extraordinary because they are sisters.  Venus and Serena Williams have won world trophies and broken records since they were teenagers.  Both have come back from daunting health issues.  I spoke to directors Maiken Baird and Michelle Major about the three years it took to gain the Williams sisters trust and how what they thought would be a documentary about competition became an even bigger story about and even bigger triumph, fighting their way back to the top.

How did you get the Williams sisters and their family to trust you?

MB: It took perseverance and not taking no for an answer.  We just kept pushing.  We began in April of 2007 and it took a good three years.

MM: In ’07 we came together with the idea and began to approach them.  It was countless meetings and hundreds of emails later when they finally agreed.  We started filming in 2011.   

In retrospect, from a dramatic standpoint, that was perfect timing.  You could not have anticipated a more tumultuous year. venus and serena

MB: It was not a great year for them.  From the point of view of the movie, we were extraordinarily lucky.  Serena had a near death experience, a pulmonary embolism.  She couldn’t walk.  We didn’t know if she would ever play tennis again.  And Venus had an auto-immune disease we discovered during filming.  It was a remarkable comeback story from a really bad place.

MM: We were planning on following tennis players playing tennis.  We didn’t know what was going to become of the film, what it was going to be.  We thought we would be on tennis courts and we found ourselves in medical facilities.

One of the most striking moments in the film is archival footage of the girls’ father interrupting a reporter, very upset at the questions he is asking Venus when she was a young teenager. Did he try to control your story?

MM: Venus actually saw the film after we completed it and she said, “I wish you had left more of that interview in the film so everyone could see that the reporter was badgering me.  I was happy that my father came to my defense.”  Richard loves them fiercely and is very protective of them.  But now they’re older and can do what they want.  He’s a live wire.  Sometimes he left us alone and sometimes he wanted us to go away, as you see in the film.

What will be most surprising to people who see this film?

MM: One of the most surprising moments for me was when Serena was on the treadmill after the third round of the U.S. Open.  She felt even though she didn’t drop a set that she had played really poorly — which I didn’t even understand.  And she was incredibly frustrated with her hitting partner and felt that he wasn’t training her hard enough for the match.  It’s like everybody dropped away.  The cameras weren’t there for her.  It was just the two of them and she was going to let him have it.  The most important thing to her was winning the tournament and playing excellent tennis.  She really ripped into him very honestly.  And her honesty in that moment, how in the zone she was, that was remarkable.

She wanted him to to be better to make her better.  That’s what it takes to be a champion.

MM: Absolutely.

You had some surprising fans in the film.  How did you get Bill Clinton?

MB: I pursued him for about a year.  He was President when Venus won her first Open, when she was 19.  He called to congratulate her and she told him that his motorcade made her late to her match!  And that he should lower the taxes in Florida.

Were they born to be champions or was it their father, who coached them continuously from the time they were preschoolers?

MM: In every situation, nature and nurture are always combined.  It helps that they are tall.  And in the film Serena even says that she has natural muscles and does not want to lift weights to make them bigger.  But we witnessed how hard they work to stay in top physical condition and hit for hours, take their lunch on the court, and keep hitting, the most unpleasant workout you can imagine, every single day.  Richard devised incredibly clever training methods, using the techniques of football players and basketball players, boxers, male athletes, techniques that had not been used for tennis players.  And their mother instilled in both of them this incredible strength of character and determination never to let anyone get you down.  So I would say more nurture than nature.

Do you think they are held to a different standard in arguing with the line judges than the men?

MB: Yes.  I love the scene when John MacEnroe tells Serena to apologize.  She has looked up to him her whole life and thinks that if he can do it, she can do it.

MM: She definitely gets into the zone.  You’re so in the moment that you’re going to go off every once in a while.  It happens to many players.  But she is tough-looking, imposing, African-American, and so her particular style of yelling receives a certain kind of pushback from the world, and it’s not equal.

What do you want people to get from this movie?

MM: We started out with the idea that this story would be inspirational.  It’s the American story — triumph over adversity of every single kind — it’s about how to maintain a close loving relationship with your sibling even if you have the ultimate rivalry.  There’s nothing you can’t do or accomplish if you set your mind to it and if you have the support of the people around you.

 

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Interview: Tina Gordon Chism of “Peeples”

Posted on May 9, 2013 at 8:00 am

Peeples_5It was a delight to talk with”Peeples” writer-director Tina Gordon Chism, who instantly made me feel like an old friend.  She wrote a movie I love, Drumline, (featured in my new book).  And now she is a first-time director with a movie produced by Tyler Perry, starring Craig Robinson as Wade Walker, who meets the family of his girlfriend Grace (Kerry Washington), including her terrifying father, a judge (David Alan Grier).  Gordon Chism is as beautiful and charismatic as any actor in her all-star film.

I was so happy to see Diahann Carroll in this film!

To write a cheeky comedic grandmother and give it to Diahann Carroll — she’s so specific about the roles she takes and we’re having fun with her in this way — I’ve never seen her do anything like this before.  My casting director ran down the hall yelling, “SHE SAID YES!!!”  I owe her quite a lot because the first day of shooting was her day, with Melvin Van Peebles (who plays her husband), and I’m just thinking, “Oh, God.”  It was tough to face that on my first day.  And it was set outside but it was snowing, so I had to move everyone indoors.  Then it stopped snowing, so I could move half of the scene outside.  My head was spinning out of control.  I was just out of my body with first-day jitters.  And Diahann Carroll made a speech, saying she was very excited to play with this new group of actors and she was very excited to play this grandmother who was a little risque and funny.  That settled me.  It brought me down for a moment so I was able to do my job and think.  She blessed the Peeples movie and all of us were just in awe and grateful and kept the vibe going from there.

I heard there was a special culinary benefit from having Tyler Perry as a producer!

In Tyler Perry’s studio, there is a woman who makes exquisite honey-baked biscuits.

Your movie is about a situation we all suffer through — the daunting introduction to the family of our significant other.  

I was dating a guy who seemed so perfect and his family seemed so gorgeous and perfect — the “chocolate Kennedys,” like the way Wade describes the Peeples in the movie.  Then when I met them, I was like, “Do you ever talk about the fact that your father is this and your mother is that?”  No.  My family is like Wade’s, more accepting and grateful and open, encouraging everyone to be honest with each other and with themselves.

You assembled a very impressive cast.

More than anything, I wanted everyone in the cast to be very intelligent and witty.  I was looking for something real and alive behind their eyes, where I know someone’s home. With Kerry Washington, I admired her social activism and came from a high achieving family like the one in the movie.  After she came on, I worked around her to find the mix. Craig Robinson is a classically trained musician and just so lovable as a man. And for the younger brother, I could have picked a rapper with a huge fan base but Tyler James Williams brought an openness and lack of self-consciousness.  And Kali Hawk as the sister — she would not give up.  After we did not initially pick her, she did another audition tape and showed she could improve.

There are two key songs in the movie — Wade sings a silly potty training song to kids and later does what was supposed to be a 70’s disco hit called “Turn You On” that sounds like the B-Side of a forgotten Donna Summer record.

Stephen Bray is an amazing musician, and he understood we needed comedic tones but genuinely catchy tunes.

It is still very rare for a woman to be a director.  Was it a big challenge for you? 

I really think females are more suited for directing, and it baffles me that you still have to push the boys club to see that.  We want the same things they do, but we are natural multi-taskers!

 

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Interview: Tom Shadyac of Life’s Operating Manual

Posted on May 5, 2013 at 3:59 pm

I am always happy to get another chance to talk to Tom Shadyac, the mega-successful Hollywood director (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Bruce Almighty) who now devotes his time to exploring the meaning of life and sharing what he has learned. I last spoke to him about his documentary I AM.  Now he has written a book, Life’s Operating Manual: With the Fear and Truth Dialogues, and was nice enough to talk to me about it.

I like your imagined dialogue between fear and truth, especially when fear says you have to own things and truth says “I own this choice.”That was a really meaningful exchange.  Can you to talk a little bit about what ownership means?

We’ve limited ownership to things. And truth is saying is that ownership can be in a much larger context. So our society values ownership of material goods, properties, personal possessions and what I wanted to do is say you also must own the choices you make in your life. And so you must own the fact that you value community more than you value your things. You can own the fact that you value love more than you value profit. So it’s just a way again of looking at some of the concepts that we take as truth and turning them upside down.

If you turn it upside down you at least look what is scaring you right in the face and it’s generally less scary than you think.life's operating manual

That’s all how dragons disappear. Not only in mythology but in our lives. I believe that any fear examines and if it doesn’t dissipate it very well may be a truth. So I don’t run across the freeway because it’s true because I will get hit by a car. If my fear is telling me I can’t have an honest conversation with my spouse or my parents, examine it and you see that it dissipates. You can actually can stand up in your own voice and have a respectful conversation.

It seems we live in a moment in history where it seems very easy to feel despair. How do you maintain a sense of joy when it must feel very frustrating?

Well first of all the results are not up to me. So my job is to share what I’m experiencing and what I am seeing and then feed the results into bigger hands. But I also know that a body kicks the hardest when it’s dying. So fear often peaks when something is about to be lost. So I think we see a lot of that fear even in the way we do business with each other. I think that people can see that it’s built on a house of stone and see that it’s going to fall and so I think that at that point fear begins to peak. So I don’t know where we are in this cycle. But I know that regardless of late in the cycle or early in the cycle of change, the truth remains the truth and you just want to stand on that.

But you feel called upon to deliver the message, so doesn’t it get frustrating when people don’t listen?

Well I’m a human being and I am having human experience so I would be telling you a half-truth if sometimes I don’t become frustrated or sad. But I get a hold on that quickly because I can see the arc of justice, the arc of the universe is bending towards justice and it may a long arc but it is still bending toward justice. So I can imagine how frustrating the first twelve people who started the anti-slavery movement were. Because people just didn’t see that beauty in all races. And now you look back and you say, “Wow.” Because they were standing on a truth it was just a matter of time. The way it is now for the rights for the gay and lesbian and transgendered community. The result to me is already written. The arc is bending toward their justice. And it may be frustrating now in the immediacy of it today but if you look at human history we always move towards justice even though we don’t see it in the present. So if you look at the arc of the human species over time it is an evolving arc. You see these turns. We don’t see them because we stay stuck in the day to day, in the crimes committed today. But we don’t see the acts of love. We don’t see the tending in the overall towards justice. So slavery while it still exists its illegal and while women are no longer considered property in most countries they are gaining more and more right believe it or not wars are happening with less frequency. So I lean on that and I think whoever set this universe up knows what , that energy knows what it’s doing and I do believe that energy makes love more powerful than hate. And if it were the other way around I would have no hope. But because it is so I believe that I trust in that law and that we will eventually wake up.

You write about the idea that DNA somehow knows the difference between joy and negative feelings.  And that a lot of the feelings of isolation are loneliness that people have is because they just don’t open their eyes to see that everything is connected to everything else and that they are a part of that.

If you could use your question as my answer I would be very happy.

What can you say in a book that you could not say in a movie? There so many different ways of getting a message across. Why do a book?

A movie is for visual imagery.  In the book you can get more into the thought process. You can dive a little deeper into an argument and a discussion. A movie is grounded in the term “move” so you’ve got to keep moving from image to image.  In a book you get to move but you move from idea to idea. So they are both moving but one is using visual imagery and that can be expansive but it also can limit you. So in a book I got to expand somewhat on some of the ideas. And also I am creating a lot of questions. I am shaking people’s foundational paradigm. That’s where fear comes in, the dialogue between fear and truth. As I was writing this book I could hear the questions. I could hear them through my own fear and in the questions of others. So that’s why I believe I created and followed that thread and wrote the book, with half of the book in dialogue. Because it’s one thing to read an essay and talk about the economy of the way we educate and fear immediately rises up and tries to stand on what is known and not what could be. And so fear calls everything unrealistic. And I think a book can be a potent tool for answering that. So the conversation is furthered. It becomes furthered inside the book itself. Whereas if I had written this book as simply essays there could have been a million questions arising and I could have written a follow up to answer those questions but I think with this one  we are able to widen the conversation and include the answers or a perspective on some of those questions.

Your research is so far reaching and multidisciplinary. How do you go about it?

I am a layman when it comes to much of this stuff but I read a lot. I am fascinated and curious. So I look for evidence when someone tells me a philosophical trope I know that trope needs to stand in the world or it is a trope. It doesn’t have any bearing on how we live. I found a wealth of evidence that science is discovering. And I have had the fortune of talking with some of the leading thinkers in cellular biology. Or whether it’s in other of the physical sciences that some like Linda Kaggert who is a friend and whose research and she’s a journalist and whose writings have opened me up to, I’ve been fortunate enough to get a sampling across many disciplines. And it makes sense to me. This gives me the philosophical reading and the spiritual reading that I have been doing for my whole life. Those connective ideas that support all the major faiths. Even our laws, that laws that we write are under girded by the same principles that our moral leaders espouse. And now I’m finding that morality inside of nature. And nature can be what we call aggressive and cruel but it’s not how nature thrives. And the moralists are simply coming on to tell us that if you want to live and you want to thrive. If you want to be a system that works well this is what you’ll follow. You’ll follow those moral laws that have been set up inside of life. And I heard that many times from Gandhi and Martin Luther King that they believe the moral principles were actually physical laws like gravity is a law. And just like gravity that law exacts itself whether you believe in it or not. So if I go out and hate today the law will tell me that will somehow diminish my health and my path, the freedom of my path. And we see that all the time in the lives of others. From stories of people who have chosen lives of hate and aggression and murder we see how it breaks down from their cellular biology to their ability to be free if you will. A murderer whether he’s convicted or not is always a murderer. He has to lie he has to create a world of lies and a web of lies that he is now stuck in.

Would you describe yourself today as happy?

Yes but let’s talk about what happiness is.  I’m much happier than ever. But I prefer the word contentment. I don’t walk around 24/7 smiling and with birds chirping around me.

There’s a difference between pleasure and happiness.

Happiness to me as I write in the book is an indication of the system working well. Like you say your computer is happy and it’s working well et cetera. And it’s not up to me to judge whether I am working well. I can tell you that I am working in a more content, efficient and joyous way than I have ever worked before. I embrace the ups and downs.  I am in all kinds of uncertainties now. I have such joy and fulfillment and I have areas of deep sorrow. And I embrace them all. I think that life is symphony and without the low notes you don’t get the base for the explosion of the high notes. I’ve learned to embrace and continuing to learn to embrace all of life’s colors.

We make a terrible mistake if we think that happiness is the essence of all sadness. I don’t think that’s true.  It’s sort of like white is all the colors of light mixed together. Happiness is all the emotions together.

Beautifully said.  Once again I choose your answer.

What’s next for you?

Have you seen the French film “The Intouchables?”  We’re remaking that here. Most of the English speaking world has not seen it. So we are remaking it here and were getting our cast together now.  Iit was a beautiful film. Hopefully we can bring to America and English speaking countries what worked about the French film and then we can add a layer of depth and maybe even humor. Because we get a second crack at their brilliant work.

 

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Mel Brooks on American Masters

Posted on May 5, 2013 at 8:00 am

mel brooks carl reinerAmerican Masters salutes Mel Brooks on May 20 (check your local PBS station listings for details).  I love this photo of Brooks with his 2000 Year Old Man collaborator (and fellow Sid Caesar “Your Show of Shows” writer) Carl Reiner.  Brooks is an Oscar and Tony winner (for “The Producers”), one of the creators of the classic “Get Smart” spy spoof television series, and the mad genius behind “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.”  He also produced the serious drama “The Elephant Man” and the bittersweet gem “84 Charing Cross Road,” both starring his wife, Oscar-winner Anne Bancroft.

Some great Mel Brooks quotes:

Why should I indulge myself and do a David Lean-ish kind of film? I could do my little Jewish Brief Encounter and disguise it – shorten the noses. But it wouldn’t be as much fun as delivering my dish of insanity.”

My movies rise below vulgarity.

Oh, I’m not a true genius. I’m a near genius. I would say I’m a short genius. I’d rather be tall and normal than a short genius.

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

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