The Real Story: True Story with Jonah Hill and James Franco

Posted on April 15, 2015 at 3:46 pm

“True Story” opens this week, starring Jonah Hill and James Franco. It is based on the real-life experiences of a disgraced journalist and the murderer who took his name.

The movie is about a reporter fired by the New York Times for fabricating part of his story with an important connection to a man he has never met, a murderer who killed his wife and children. The name they share: Michael Finkel.

Michael Finkel was the name given by the murderer when he was arrested. By then he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List after he fled the country.

Finkel was not his real name, which is Christian Longo. When the real Finkel found out Longo was using his name, he wanted to know why. One reason was his natural curiosity as a journalist. Another was the spookiness of it. And another was his sense, or at least his hope, that this was a story that could be his ticket back to a career in journalism. But who was using whom? Who was the bigger liar?

Finkel wrote a book about his experiences called Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa. And now it is a movie starring Jonah Hill and James Franco.

CBS News told the story on “48 Hours” in 2005.

“Mike was empty. He was a little lost,” says Barker, Finkel’s ex-girlfriend at the time. “Mike was not sure who he was. And Chris came along, the timing was perfect. He just came along at the right time and a real relationship developed.”

Finkel adds, “He was the only friend or person in my life to whom I felt morally superior,” says Finkel.

Years later, on death row, Longo called Finkel to ask for a favor. As Finkel explained in Esquire magazine, Longo was influenced by the movie “Seven Pounds” and wanted to set up a program for organ donation by prisoners scheduled for execution. This contact led Longo, for the first time, to tell the real story about the murders, at least what he could tell. “I can’t remember who I killed first,” he explained to the man whose identity he tried to take. Finkel wrote of this encounter:

It’s never been easy to say how I feel about Longo. I’ve been tugged, from the start, between revulsion and fascination, between hoping to know the truth and wanting to imagine that Longo couldn’t actually murder his own family. But after hearing this story, there was no doubt. Hate seems too flat a word, too glib, but that is what I felt. I hated the crime, I hated hearing about it, thinking about it, imagining it, and I hated the person who did it. And it was the worst kind of hate, too, because it really didn’t matter.

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The Woman in Gold — The Real Story

Posted on April 2, 2015 at 3:28 pm

The Woman in Gold by Gustav Klimt All rights reserved Neue Galerie

This week’s “The Woman in Gold” stars Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, who fought to get the portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer returned to her family. The painting, considered an Austrian national treasure, was taken from Bloch-Bauer’s family by the Nazis when they invaded Austria. It was on display in a Viennese museum when Altmann, who escaped to the United States with her husband before WWII, brought a lawsuit that involved two countries and the United States Supreme Court before binding arbitration in Austria awarded the painting to Altmann. It’s now on display at the Neue Galerie in New York.

Some of the details were changed to make the movie less complicated, but most of it stays pretty close to the real story. Maria Altmann was represented by Randy Schoenberg, the grandson of the celebrated composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was a friend of Altmann’s parents and grandparents. As shown in the movie, Altmann’s parents and her aunt and uncle were wealthy and cultured and lived in a beautiful apartment that was visited by the height of Belle Epoque intelligentsia, including Sigmund Freud. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the young and beautiful wife of an much-older industrialist. She was a very vibrant person who loved art and artists. She is the only person Klimt painted twice.

Adele Bloch-Bauer died in 1925. She said she wanted the paintings to go to the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, but, as the movie shows, legally they belonged to her husband, who left them to his only relatives, Maria Altmann and her sister. Also as the movie shows, Ronald Lauder (the son of Estee Lauder) offered to pay for very expensive, experienced lawyers to take over from Schoenberg, but she stayed with the lawyer who was with her from the beginning. He didn’t let his wife go to the hospital to deliver their baby alone while he went to argue the case at the Supreme Court, but he did get a call from her when he was in Washington and about to appear before the Court, telling him she had gone into early labor. Fortunately, she did not have the baby until later. But that may be part of the reason that he really did get so nervous at the Supreme Court that he told the Chief Justice he did not understand his question. You can hear their exchange here.

To learn more about the story behind the painting, read The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer or watch the documentaries Adele’s Wish and The Rape of Europa.

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Interview: The Woman in Gold’s Simon Curtis and E. Randol Schoenberg

Posted on March 31, 2015 at 3:37 pm

Director Simon Curtis told me, “My last film was My Week with Marilyn, and this one is my century with Maria.” He is referring to “The Woman in Gold,” with Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, who brought a lawsuit to get back the portrait of her aunt Adele, painted by Gustav Klimt, which had been stolen by the Nazis. The story covers much of the 20th century, from Maria’s childhood in a wealthy Viennese Jewish family, in a luxurious apartment, where the portrait was on the wall. I met with Curtis and Randy Schoenberg, the real-life lawyer who represented Ms. Altmann, who is played by Ryan Reynolds in the film.

It is an extremely complicated story, so I asked Curtis how he decided what he needed to focus on. “It could have been so many different movies. Adele could have been a movie in her own right. We wanted to tell the story of Maria and Randy’s relationship and their campaigns. Once we were telling that story we realized we needed to just go back into the past and get a sense of that incredible time in Vienna before the second World War and in particular that sense of community, that extraordinary community that produced so much that the world benefited from and that was kind of shattered overnight in 1938. I was influenced by the Bergman film Fanny and Alexander and I felt the sense of that apartment where all these people, all the different generations who bumped into each other and thrived on each other.”

Schoenberg, whose grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, was one of the luminaries who visited Altmann’s family in Vienna, knew Ms. Altmann because their families stayed in touch when they emigrated to the United States. As shown in the film, he was young and inexperienced when she asked him to help her get the painting back. I asked if their relationship was as spirited as the one portrayed in the film. “Sometimes it was,” he said. “Every part of the film where you think, ‘Oh, that must have been made up’ has this core of truth to it. So I told Alexi Kaye Campbell that I had at one time an argument with Maria. It was actually after we won the case but Austria had required us to do a whole procedure where they could have an option to buy the paintings. This was after they decided, and Maria was feeling so magnanimous that they flew out to meet with us. They said, ‘We need more time.’ She was 89 years old. And she said, ‘Oh of course, there is no problem,’ and I pulled her aside and I said, ‘Maria, you cannot do this to me after eight years of working on this. You can’t let them do this. They are going to stall; they are going to find out some way not to give back the pictures and it’s all going to be lost.’ And I had to really sort of fight with her. So that shows up in the film in other ways. We had a very friendly relationship obviously because she was very close with my family, very close with my grandmother and she would tell stories about my grandmother and great grandmother. So normally we had a very friendly relationship like being with my own grandmother.”

As shown in the film, Ronald Lauder (who ultimately bought the portrait) did offer to pay for a more experienced team of lawyers. In real life, Schoenberg urged her to get advice from some independent law firms about whether he was up to the job. After she consulted them, she decided to keep him. And, as shown in the film, he was so nonplussed by the first question he was asked at the Supreme Court that all he could do was say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

This was not the first time Curtis worked with Dame Helen Mirren. He was a production assistant on one of her films, where he said his job was bringing her coffee. “That’s pretty much all I did with her on this film as well,” he laughed.

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Danny Collins: The Real Story

Posted on March 18, 2015 at 10:00 am

Writer/director Dan Fogelman (“Cars,” “Tangled,” “Crazy Stupid Love”) saw the headline: musician Steve Tilston received a letter written to him 34 years earlier by John Lennon, including his phone number and an invitation to call. That inspired Fogelman’s new film, “Danny Collins,” with Al Pacino as a very successful but not very happy rock star who, like Tilston, does not find out until decades later that John Lennon wrote him a letter and invited him to call. And in both, the topic of the letter from Lennon was the same: he was reassuring a young musician that he could maintain his integrity even if he became rich and famous.

In the film, the letter inspires the title character to make some enormous changes in his life. In real life, the man the letter was addressed to was successful in his home country of the UK, but never so much of a superstar that his life was out of control.

Here is Tilston singing “The Road When I Was Young”:

And here he is covering a Beatles song, showing the real Lennon letter he did not see until 34 years after it was sent.

A nice Beatles touch — Yoko Ono gave Fogelman permission to use nine Lennon songs in the film.

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Spare Parts — The Real Story

Posted on January 15, 2015 at 8:00 am

If it did not actually happen, no one would believe it. Four undocumented high school students with no money entered an underwater robotics competition, decided to compete against the college teams instead of the other high schools, and won, triumphing over past winner MIT, which had not only some of the top engineering students in the world but a budget more than 20 times bigger.

Wired Magazine wrote the story in 2004. It is well worth a read — the real story is even more improbable and exciting than the film, which is fine, but which adds some unnecessary Hollywood sweeteners, combining the two teacher/sponsors into one character played by George Lopez and adding some superfluous backstory and romance for him. One unforgettable detail from real life becomes one of the movie’s high points. No spoilers here — I’ll just say that the kids had to act quickly to find something small and super-absorbent when their machine had a leak and they came up with an ingenious solution.

Wired also has updates on what the team members are doing now.

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