August 2005Archives

Lately, I’ve been thinking about two novels I recently enjoyed: “The Other Shulman” by Alan Zweibel (Villard, $23.95), and “Joy Comes in the Morning” by Jonathan Rosen (Picador, $14).

The two novels are strikingly different: One deals with confronting a marriage of long standing; the other is about getting married. One is comic with serious moments; the other serious with comic moments. Yet both feature protagonists trying to decide whether they are running toward something, or away from it.

“Shulman” is the tale of a middle-aged New Jersey stationery store owner. Married for more than 20 years, with three kids out of the house, he’s stuck, personally and professionally, until he decides to run his way out of his life crisis. As he runs the New York City Marathon to benefit AIDS research, he narrates how he defeated his fears and “the Other Shulman.”

Zweibel is happy to admit that the novel is autobiographical. Overall, Zweibel is so happy that his e-mail address begins with “happyalan.” (I kid you not.) He’s had an amazing run as a writer — TV, plays, articles, jokes, screenplays, novels — not too long ago, Billy Crystal thanked him from the stage of the Tonys for helping him create “700 Sundays.”

He grew up on Long Island, attended college in Buffalo and, at an early age, started selling jokes for $7 apiece to Borscht Belt regulars like Morty Gundy. After college, he took all the jokes that were too contemporary for those comics and started performing them at Manhattan clubs such as Catch a Rising Star and The Improv, where he first met Larry David and Crystal, who used to drive him in from Long Island.

One night after performing, he was approached by a young man who said, “You are the worst comedian I’ve ever seen.” Zweibel agreed. But Lorne Michaels liked his writing and hired him for his new show, “Saturday Night Live.”

Zweibel’s writing career has led to working with such diverse talents as Gilda Radner (their friendship inspired “Bunny, Bunny,” a successful book and stage play that mixed fact and fiction), Eddie Murphy, Garry Shandling (Zweibel co-created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), Jesse Jackson (for his appearance hosting “Saturday Night Live”) and, more recently, Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

But a few years ago, Zweibel started to wonder about his life, his career and his marriage.

One day, he saw a flier offering to train people to run a marathon to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). Out of shape, and possibly out of his mind, he signed up. In 2001, he ran (and completed) the New York City Marathon, held just months after Sept. 11. As he ran through the various New York City boroughs, Zweibel felt like he was running — and occasionally walking — through his life.

The plot for “The Other Shulman” arose out of that experience and a long-standing joke that goes: With all the weight he’s lost over the years, there’s another Zweibel out there. A portion of the book’s proceeds are being donated to APLA.

Caveat emptor: If you are hankering for a challenging literary work set in the third world, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you enjoy light summer reading that is comic, haimish and heartfelt, this is for you.

In another corner of the literary universe, Rosen’s “Joy Comes in the Morning,” also deals with characters who are stuck, and also contains glimmers of autobiography.

“Joy Comes in the Morning” (a quote from Psalms) begins with the attempted suicide of one character and ends with the successful self-inflicted death of another. Between these two events, a science reporter, whose father is a Holocaust survivor succumbing to Alzheimer’s, falls for a young female rabbi who is dealing with her own crisis of faith. It is a love story, but filled with the complications of two people searching for themselves even as they search for each other. A friend of mine, whom I shall refer to as “The Shrink,” describes Rosen’s novel approvingly as “the sexy woman rabbi book.”

Picasso said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” That is particularly true of Rosen’s “Joy.” Rosen, the author of “Eve’s Apple” and “The Talmud and the Internet,” is a friend who was my editor at The Forward. So I know how well he mined the personal raw data of his life — his wife is a rabbi, and his late father was a refugee from Germany — to create altogether fictional characters that read true.

Rosen has charted new territory by writing a serious Jewish American novel (as opposed to an American Jewish novel). This may seem mere semantics, but the difference is evident in what drives the characters. The protagonists in “Joy” are not engaged in a flight from their Jewish forebears, or in a rush to assimilate; nor are they thumbing their noses at an America that does or does not embrace them.

To the contrary, “Joy” concerns young secular Jews engaged in becoming more Jewish. I won’t call it a “Red State” novel, but it is about values, presenting the voice of a generation becoming more traditional not only in politics, but in religion, as well.

In sum: Two novels, very different, but each makes us consider what matters in our lives, and how our inner journeys can transform us and our relationships with those we love.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

According to reports in various newspapers last week, NBC-Universal is contemplating acquiring DreamWorks’ live-action feature-film division, or as it used to be called, their movie studio. Regardless of whether the acquisition is consummated, it reflects a sad truth: Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen’s dream of creating a modern major studio has failed.

When Spielberg & Co. first announced the idea of creating a studio, more than a decade ago, before they had even chosen a company name, their vision included creating a state-of-the-art sound stage and production facility in Playa Vista. That was the first part to be jettisoned like some shuttle booster rocket as it ascended into space.

Next, there was talk about the studio as a creative entity — a place where “dream” projects would get made. United Artists, the company founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford was cited. But United Artists never fulfilled its creators’ aspirations, nor did First Artists, a company created in the 1960s for more contemporary dreamers such as Dustin Hoffman.

I remember a meeting in which I took part shortly after DreamWorks launched, at the Southwestern-style offices that formerly had been Spielberg’s production company, Amblin — or as I used to call it, The Adobe Disneyworld. Speilberg’s Norman Rockwells were still on the walls of the hallway. The executive I met with, to whom I was pitching my own possible projects, has since moved on. But on this occasion, she told me about the freedom they had, and how they were open to all material “of quality.” I left with no clear idea of what a “DreamWorks” movie was, and to this day I still can’t say.

As for Spielberg, when he talked about creative freedom, I don’t think most people understood that he was talking about the freedom to make most of his movies in partnerships with other studios.

Katzenberg, who began at the top of the pyramid, quickly stepped off to become president of production, and then retreated to run the animation division.

As for Geffen,, I’m sure somebody knows what he does all day but it’s not me (my best guess: makes phone calls). Geffen was apparently in charge of strategy of which we are now seeing the fruit.

DreamWorks was intended to be a modern creative hot house — an octopus with tentacles in any area the imagination might foster. That concept, however, falls well short of a viable business model.

DreamWorks launched one entity after another, including a game division that it later shuttered. And a television division it folded and a record label it also, in the end, jettisoned. As time went by, the company decided to focus on the core business: making movies — feature films and animated films.

These movies ran the gamut: good ones that made money, good ones that lost money and bad ones that made money. It was never precisely clear how much money, if any, DreamWorks was able to make. As I understand it, DreamWorks entered into many co-financing, and distribution deals, which make it more difficult to determine when the studio actually made a profit, especially one that would satisfy its investors.

Last fall, DreamWorks spun off its animation unit as a public company. Which meant that finally, billionaire investor Paul Allen could achieve some payback. But going public had other consequences.

For those who followed the Michael Eisner/Michael Ovitz imbroglio, you may recall that Eisner felt Ovitz didn’t understand that behavior at a public company is different than at a private one.

Apparently that’s a lesson that Katzenberg, who has toiled at several public companies, including Disney, forgot. Typical executive behavior — such as hyping upcoming releases or casting financial performance in a too-favorable light — can quickly become the focus of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). And the SEC is looking into DreamWorks Animation.

So why did the dream of creating a modern studio fail?

My theory of what happened begins by looking back to the early years of the industry in the first half of the 20th century. The original creators of the studio were, for the most part, Jewish immigrants possessed with a drive to make a living, filled with a hunger to make movies and also to make a profit. And they embodied, too, a desire to create institutions that survived them. They were dreamers pursuing their own “dreamworks.” And they paid a price for their ambition — their wives, their children, their health suffered. But the studio came first. One can also argue this dynamic also applied to the more recent crop of moguls, such as Lew Wasserman and Rupert Murdoch.

By contrast, it is easy to imagine Spielberg or Geffen saying “Why do I need this hassle?”

They are too successful, too comfortable — they have full lives competing for their attention.

Katzenberg continues to work for the Dream, but it’s more limited, and the longevity of his vision remains to be seen. DreamWorks seems fated to become a label at a studio, like New Line at Warner Bros. Perhaps one day the founders could say as Lord Byron did, “I had a dream which was not all a dream.”

But today we mourn what could have been, even as we announce: Dream over.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.