Tommywood

Steven Spielberg dreams anew

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:41:38 -0800

Over the last two weeks, lost amid Wall Street's financial turmoil, came the announcement that Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks was leaving Paramount, having found financing from The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group ("Reliance"), one of India's largest private companies.

What does the fact that no American studio or financier made a better offer say about Spielberg, his dream company and the state of the movie business today?

What does it mean that Spielberg's other founding partners, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, are no longer with the company?

We should consider this to be like one of those Hollywood sequels, where a brand name franchise is given a new, albeit different, lease on life. Call it "DreamWorks II: Spielberg Home Alone."

When I last wrote about Dreamworks in 2005, rumors abounded that it would be selling its movie studio to NBC-Universal. Here's what I wrote: "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."

Before I bloviate about the meaning of it all, let's begin by considering the storied history of DreamWorks. Once upon a time, more than a decade ago, the three amigos -- Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg -- sought to create a modern movie studio in Playa Vista (and even looked at locating it in the hangar where Howard Hughes' folly the Spruce Goose resided). Over the next few years, they abandoned the ambition and expense of creating a state-of-the-art studio lot, and, in quick succession, launched then folded a television department, a record label and a games division to focus on films and animation.

These growing pains were costly, and a decade after their launch, DreamWorks' investors, most notably Paul Allen, asked for some payback. In 2005, the animation unit spun off and went public, with Katzenberg at the helm. Then DreamWorks decided to sell its film unit, too.

A deal with Universal seemed the likely choice, given Spielberg's long relationship there (he continued to maintain his production offices there). But when Universal's financial people tried to drive a bargain, DreamWorks' partners found another buyer in Paramount. For Brad Grey, who had recently taken the reins there, this seemed a coup. To further spite Universal, DreamWorks poached Stacey Snider, Universal's former chair. It all seemed very smart. Sharp, shrewd, killer dealmakers -- just some of the words that came to mind at the time.

Fiasco and disaster should also have been on that list. The honeymoon was short-lived. Sumner Redstone, Viacom's majority shareholder, a man who does not easily give up what he believes is his (just ask his children), found himself at odds with Geffen, a man who is often paid very handsomely to give up what is his. It seems DreamWorks thought itself an independent studio serviced by Paramount, while Redstone thought he owned the studio. Although in public they fought and made up, in the end one could say they agreed to disagree.

When DreamWorks sold to Paramount, the deal also included its film library, which Paramount in turn sold to investors. By contrast, when DreamWorks sold to Reliance, Paramount announced that DreamWorks was free to take its executives and producer deals, but Paramount would hold on to an estimated 200 projects developed on its watch. What's more, Geffen announced he would not be part of the new enterprise. Snider became Spielberg's sole partner, even as Spielberg also remains free to direct projects at other studios, as has always been his deal.

Update:
According to reports in the New York Times and Variety, the Dreamworks executives and Paramount spent the first weekend in October finalizing the details of their separation.

There are still 200 Dreamworks projects developed while at Paramount; reports indicated 15 to 20 will go with Dreamworks, 15 to 20 are projects they will continue to work on jointly, and the rest will remain at Paramount with no Dreamworks participation.

Executives from both sides declined to say which projects fall into which categories.

The new DreamWorks faces a very changed movie environment. We are at a moment when it is less risky to make a $200 million movie than it is to make a $10 million one (and the return is potentially greater); when indie dramas -- well-meaning, well-made, well-acted serious dramas -- fail because no one goes to see them, and when no one wants to see movies with subtitles.

The studios, for the most part, have become marketing machines for films that fall into recognizable categories: comic books, sequels, graphic novels, mid-priced comedies, broad family movies, animation and the occasional romance and/or romantic comedy (all with high-concept, easily marketable hooks).

For me, and many of my fellow producers, the business has become much more difficult. In 1997, when I was an executive at a production company on the Universal lot, there were more than 350 production deals at studios. Today there are fewer than 174 deals (and there will be even fewer than that when DreamWorks thins out their ranks).

I can't tell you that the movies produced then are better than what is on screen today. But they certainly are not worse. The net effect is that for many producers and executives, a whole middle swath of the film business is gone.

At the same time, the barrier to entry for independent (non-studio financed) movie making has become ridiculously low -- and the unexpected result is not that more good movies are being made, but that so many, many, many movies are being made -- thousands and thousands submitted to film festivals -- that there is a glut, and many movies, even good ones, go unreleased. In this era, the big studio film is more powerful than ever.

Which tells you something about this new incarnation of DreamWorks.

The new DreamWorks will, I'm guessing, remain among the upper-tier of producing entities. It will attract talent because of Spielberg and Snider, and because it can write checks. But should Snider fail in some way, or should the relationship with Reliance sour, Spielberg can continue to be, well, Spielberg. That is the point.

I did wonder for a moment why Spielberg even bothered to continue on with DreamWorks without his original partners. My best guess is that having his own studio allows him the best way to be creative with the least interference in a multiplicity of ways, to support and mentor others and to exercise his proven money-making talent for developing commercial ideas and properties. It's the best of all worlds: He is an owner who has delegated management, leaving him free to pursue his own projects.

If DreamWorks has not become a well-defined brand in the marketplace, Spielberg remains one. If the new DreamWorks is no more than a supersized production company of a supersized talent, financed by a global powerhouse in India that is seeking Hollywood cred, so be it. So we will stay tuned for this sequel.

DreamWorks stands a long way from what its name once implied -- a place to reinvent the creative model in the movie business. DreamWorks no longer represents the dream of what Hollywood could be, it's just another example of what Hollywood has become.

Defender of Faith

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:21:39 -0800

If the bestseller charts are any indication, it's become popular to condemn religion.

Books such as Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation" and "The End of Faith," Richard Dawson's "The God Delusion," Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great" and Bill Maher's soon-to-be-released film, "Religulous," would have us see faith as antiquated, illogical and dangerous.

And let's face it, the arguments they make are not without merit: In the shadow of Sept. 11, religion seems at the root of much hatred and violence the world over. The announcement of a financial, sexual or political scandal involving a religious official -- whether we cringe or feel some secret schadenfreude -- no longer shocks us. At the same time, in this country as in others, it seems like religion is increasingly seeking to take on public and political dimensions, reaching into education, medicine, science and social programs.

In a world where religion is the cause of so much folly, it becomes harder to defend faith, which makes Rabbi David Wolpe's new book, "Why Faith Matters" (HarperOne), all the more important.

"Why Faith Matters" is not a book that will convince anyone who doesn't already believe in God -- nor is it meant to. Yet believer and nonbeliever alike should find "Why Faith Matters" thought-provoking and challenging.

What the book does well, in short, succinct chapters, is address some of the more popularly held charges leveled against religion, such as "religion causes violence" or "science and religion are at odds." And it does so in a readable and erudite way, quoting from sources as diverse as Tacitus, Heinrich Heine, Nietzsche and Rabbi Hayyim of Zans.

More importantly, it makes the case for the seldom-acknowledged benefits of faith, such as community and charity, and elucidates how religion and religious practice can enhance the lives even of those who don't and will never believe in God. Wolpe also hopes the book will give comfort to those who have faith.

"It's not only written for those who doubt," Wolpe said recently, "but to settle the souls of people who believe."

Wolpe is turning 50 this Friday, Sept. 19, and has been the rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles for the past 11 years. "Why Faith Matters" is his sixth book, and he wrote it not as a polemic response to the "New Atheists," but as a personal book about his own journey.

He was born in Harrisburg, Pa., where his father, Gerald Wolpe, was a Conservative rabbi. When David was 10, the family moved to Philadelphia, when Wolpe's father became the rabbi of Har Zion, a large Conservative synagogue on the city's Main Line.

Stephen Fried's "The New Rabbi" (Bantam 2002) chronicled the search to find a replacement for Wolpe's father when he retired. A New York Times' article about the book describes Wolpe's relationship with his father as "wonderfully complicated."

In "Why Faith Matters," Wolpe explains that as a teenager, after seeing the vivid documentary footage about the Holocaust in Alain Resnais' "Night and Fog," he became an atheist, embracing Bertrand Russell as one of his sages. Wolpe said he is attempting in this book to speak to his younger self. Yet, to a great extent, Wolpe now regards atheism as a failure of the imagination.

His central argument boils down to a rejection of the notion that "the only thing that is real is what you see or measure." Faith, he argues, adds another dimension to our experience of the world.

To Wolpe, religious faith is "an orientation of the universe," a way to invest all we do and all we experience with wonder and with meaning. When Peggy Lee asks: "Is that all there is?" Wolpe answers, "No."

This reminded me of an incident that occurred when my daughter was very young. She went through a phase, as all children do, of looking at the world around her, full of questions.

One night she asked me who made the stars in the sky. I replied, "God did," as much to come up with a quick and final answer as to avoid giving a more complicated scientific one.

A few weeks later, coming home late, as my wife, daughter and I stood at the front door, and as I fumbled to find my keys, my daughter said: "Listen." I listened and didn't hear anything.

"What?" I asked. She pointed upward and said, "It's The God. The God is everywhere."

Many people don't see or hear God's presence at all. And some feel that believing is childish.

Wolpe believes, however, that "there are things we outgrow and things we grow into." That struck me. What we dismiss as young people (like the value of having a job with a health care plan or retirement fund), we might revisit as we grow older.

Wolpe's own journey led him after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania from teenage atheist to studying to become a rabbi at the University of Judaism (UJ) in Los Angeles (now American Jewish University). He spent a year in Israel and was ordained in 1987 at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, where he wrote his first book, "The Healer of Shattered Hearts" (Henry Holt & Company).

Over the next few years, Wolpe bounced back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, serving as director of UJ's library and assistant to the chancellor of JTS before returning finally to Los Angeles to serve as rabbi at Sinai Temple. Although Wolpe has been Sinai's rabbi for the last 11 years, he has performed High Holy Day services at Sinai since he was a student 25 years ago.

His tenure has not been without controversy. Whether it's been making peace among his diverse congregants or addressing the allegorical nature of Scripture or encouraging "rock" services, such as Craig Taubman's "Friday Night Live" (which can draw as many as 1,000 attendees to services with gospel, hip-hop or rock music and speakers from Elie Wiesel to writer David Kohan of "Will & Grace"), Wolpe's tenure has been marked by a certain fearlessness.

He brings the same approach to his brief in defense of faith, embracing the objections others avoid. For Wolpe, the notion that religious ritual is primitive or some form of magical thinking misses the point.

"Ancient can be venerable and cherished," he told me. "Religious practice can't always be explained in a utilitarian fashion. Sometimes, religious practice is its own reward."

Similarly, Wolpe feels that study of Scripture offers its own pleasures at every stage of life that we encounter it. For him, it is not the literal words alone, as much as the experience we garner from studying Scripture that faith adds to our lives. Not unlike a psychiatrist interpreting a dream, we may care less about whether it's true than what we can learn from it.

As to the charge that religion causes violence, Wolpe answers simply that "the feeling of certain groups that they are better or exempt is ... an ugly side of human nature. It's not specific to religion."

Without minimizing the deaths caused in the name of religion, Wolpe asks us to consider the historical record that demonstrates that the toll of war has been great or greater in those periods when religion was suppressed. We need only consider the millions of victims of the anti-religious regimes of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

Monotheism, Wolpe said, is based on "not how you treat God, but how you treat others" -- and in that respect, religion may be seen as a brake on human nature's more evil inclinations.

Faith can also be a salve, or as Simon and Garfunkel put it, "a bridge over troubled waters."

I can report that my daughter no longer asks the same questions she once did. (Now they begin with, "Why can't I?"). Neither do I.

As we get older, we no longer ask so many questions aloud. Our questions become more private: Why? Why are we on this earth? Events occur, and we ask: Why me? Or, why not me? These questions fill us not so much with wonder but attack us in moments of despair.

Wolpe knows these questions well, not only as a rabbi but from personal experience. His wife is a cancer survivor, and Wolpe himself has had neurosurgery for a benign brain tumor, as well as chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer that remains incurable, but for which he is now in remission. Wolpe told me that it was on the day he finished chemotherapy that he decided to write "Why Faith Matters."

In "Why Faith Matters" he does not suggest that faith can provide specific answers to our existential questions, so much as that it offers ways for us to look at those questions and the universe differently -- and that doing so provides each of us with ways to address those questions.

While writing this article, I happened to have lunch with two friends who both have been diagnosed with cancer, one of whom is still undergoing treatment. When I asked them whether their cancer experiences had impacted their faith, both said it had, but in ways they would not have predicted.

Neither said it made them more observant, but both remarked on how much they appreciated the hospital visits or phone calls they received from their clergy and fellow congregants, and how moved they were upon hearing that others were praying for them. They felt that those aspects of faith helped them endure. Those are elements of faith that don't get mentioned enough.

Religion for Wolpe "is a complex of things, rather than an abstract set of beliefs." What Wolpe feels is lost in the discussion of religion by "the new atheists" is the positive benefits of religion, such as community, a sense of social responsibility, a commitment to charity and charitable acts and of believing that there is something larger than oneself, having boundaries, submitting to a "higher power."

By contrast, faith, Wolpe said, can also make a "disturbance" of life, making life more difficult. As Wolpe put it, the sense that you are put on this earth for a reason carries with it responsibilities and challenges to meet a higher standard. Speaking with Wolpe, you get a sense that this is particularly true for him; that he is a person who is always pushing himself.

In honor of Wolpe's 50th birthday, Sinai Temple is hosting a dinner on Sept. 21, at which time he will formally announce the creation of an Israel Center at the temple.

He is creating what he believes to be the first independent center in the United States to promote Israel. Recognizing that a connection to Israel enhances one's Jewish identity, Wolpe wants to deepen that relationship. He wants families to travel there, to offer specialized tours tailored to specific interests, to be able to teach about Israel better, not only in terms of its history, but also its culture, to invite Israeli artists, writers and performers. He envisions perhaps even having a program for an Israeli artist in residence.

"I'm very excited about the possibility" Wolpe said, adding that he hoped that the center would be offering its first programs a year from now, "if not before."

The center is still in its formative stage. Eventually, Wolpe hopes to hire a full-time director for the Israel Center and determine a place for the center to be housed (whether in the synagogue or elsewhere). Wolpe believes that the community has shown great support for Israel and is ready to sustain a dedicated independent Israel Center. A center that, Wolpe asserts, "is not political." He wants each congregant to find their own connection to Israel -- whatever their political and personal interests.

Similarly, in "Why Faith Matters," Wolpe suggests that faith, religion and religious practice are to be valued -- if not for what they offer us then for the benefits they offer our children by learning to look beyond themselves, to be charitable, to treat others as they would like to be treated.

Clearly, you don't need religion to teach these ideals, but these are aspects of religion that rarely receive recognition from its critics. Faith, Wolpe believes, offers us a chance to give our children a way to suffuse their own lives with meaning and better prepare them for the challenges they will encounter.

Recently, I went to see the Coen brothers' comedy, "Burn After Reading," which I enjoyed very much. However, as I remarked on my blog, someone viewing the film from a purely moral perspective would say that the world the Coens present on screen is a faithless, nihilistic one: The characters curse with abandon. Marital vows mean nothing; adultery is rampant. Crimes are committed without much thought. Life isn't valued; murder isn't so much a crime as an annoyance. People are motivated by narcissism, greed, lust, revenge. People don't so much care about their jobs as care about keeping them. Life has no greater meaning or purpose.

The movie is very entertaining, but it reminded me that Wolpe's point is well taken: Life without the benefits of faith is the poorer for it.

The objective narrative of our lives is mundane and prosaic: We are born; we live; we die. It is the subjective that colors and enriches our experience. We all know the power of music or art, of laughter and love to transport us. Why then, not add faith to the list? And what of the connection between the two?

My freshman year of college, I met a woman who told me, "Al Green is God." Now, whenever the first chords of "Love and Happiness" play on my iPod, I know she was right.

Which brings me back to Wolpe the writer -- not the rabbi.

It is also worth noting that "Why Faith Matters" is a book meant to settle the soul of David Wolpe, given that his first impulse when concluding chemotherapy was to write a book.

"I love literature," Wolpe said. "I have always found consolation in words, in both reading them and also writing them and speaking them. One of the really great gifts of being a rabbi is that you are expected to translate your experience into something that other people can understand and benefit from. That forces you to reflect on it and create some kind of mosaic out of the jagged pieces of a life. And that's really a great lesson."

Wolpe elaborated: "A teacher of mine, Simon Greenberg, once said that the best sermons are always delivered to yourself. And I would say that's true of the best books, too. The best books are written to yourself. If you don't write something that means something to you, it's unlikely to touch anyone else."

And so, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Wolpe has given us -- and himself -- a memorable gift.

Santa Monica Rising (The Broad Stage)

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:09:02 -0800

Located at the intersection of 11th St. and Santa Monica Blvd., a striking modern building designed by Santa Monica architect Renzo Zecchetto sits on the site of a former elementary school playground and looks to have risen out of the ground sui generis, almost as if the Starship Enterprise had decided to dock in the middle of a residential city block.

It didn't.

This is the remarkable new Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, comprised of the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, a 499-seat state-of-the art theater, and the Edye Second Space, a 99-seat "black box" theater. The new center, generally known as, simply, the Broad Stage, will debut with a gala opening on Sept. 20 celebrating the life, career and music of Barbara Cook, the incomparable interpreter of the American Songbook (KCRW-FM 89.9 will air a one hour documentary about Barbara Cook produced by Sarah Spitz on 9/16 at 2 and again at 7PM in honor of the gala).

For the theater-bereft Westside, whose residents once could only hope to see major theatrical productions by traveling downtown -- often in rush hour -- this is a big step up culturally. And it has been in development for a very long time -- each detail dissected, discussed and considered.

The story goes that about 10 years ago, Dale Franzen, an opera singer and, at the time, a member of Santa Monica College's music faculty, found herself at a dinner party with Dustin Hoffman, who once upon a time attended SMC. They met at the home of Piedad Robertson, then SMC's president, and talked about how great it would be if the Westside had a world-class performing arts center. So they sketched out a plan on a napkin. In time, as their vision took flight, Franzen took on the role of artistic director (she is now director), and Hoffman, who chaired the building committee, became chair of the Broad Stage's artistic advisory board.

Over the ensuing decade, a whole host of notables were consulted on making the dream a reality, including professionals associated with the Los Angeles Opera, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Wiltern Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza and California Institute of the Arts. The old joke would have you believe that a donkey is a horse built by committee, yet in the case of the Santa Monica Performing Arts Center, Franzen managed to birth a butterfly from a silkworm (and I now officially have run out of species clichés).

Recently, Denise Leader Stoeber, associate director of the Broad Stage, gave me a tour of the facility as workers were putting on the finishing touches.

The Broad Stage was designed to be performer and audience friendly; the 499-seat theater space has a bright and clean design, yet feels intimate. Every seat affords clear sight lines meant to allow eye contact with the performers, and the seats themselves, imported from Italy, are firm and comfortable with good legroom (I tested them).

The stage was conceived to accommodate drama, dance and musical performances. Accordingly, there are 37 fly lines, allowing for complex changes of scenery. There's also an orchestra pit, and the stage can accommodate a 45-piece orchestra. A 9-foot concert Steinway piano, stored in its own specially designed cupboard, was a gift from donors Eva and Marc Stern. The stage flooring is partially sprung, so has a very good surface for dance, added to which a professional dance floor has been fashioned to be placed on top for performances.

Of course, the audience will see only a small part of the story. There is ample wing space, a comfortable green room, dressing rooms for solo performers as well as for a company of as many as 14. There's an orchestra lift and a trap pit that allows the stage to open from almost anywhere, and both the backstage and below-stage areas are handicap accessible. The Broad Stage also has a state-of-the-art sound system and state-of-the-art performance lighting (with two lighting bridges and follow spot room). It can accommodate filming as well as live broadcasts. As for screening movies or events -- such as high-definition transmissions of live opera -- the stage has both the sound system and the screen, though it still lacks the projector (donation, please?).

Finally, the acoustics were designed by Mark Holden of Jaffe-Holden Acoustics, who has worked with both the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln Center in New York. A motorized variable acoustic drapery system allows the room to accommodate the sounds of different artistic performances and disciplines.

And for my green-conscious friends, eco-warriors please note: The theater was built with Honduran mahogany, a renewable resource, and the heating and cooling systems are beneath the floor and vent beneath the seats, rather than from above, while the lobby has been configured to be naturally vented, all for maximum efficiency.

Last, but by no means least, for those patrons who have had the experience of missing part of a performance because they were waiting in line outside a restroom, the good news is there are four public restrooms, and the main women's restroom includes a lounge and double capacity facilities.

The Edye Second Space, which is adjacent to the Broad Stage, is a 99-seat theater, with its own lighting grid and the ability to show video. It is intended to showcase a wider range of more experimental works, including readings, plays and interdisciplinary productions.

For both the Broad Stage and the Edye, Stoeber said, the ambition is to be a place where artists used to performing before large audiences can perform in a more intimate setting, where new work can be incubated, and where new artists can be presented. To that end, for example, on Oct. 11 the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade will perform Mozart, Bernstein and Poulenc, as well as new works composed for her by composer and accompanist Jake Heggie.

Just to give you a sense of what architect Renzo Zecchetto has accomplished, in its technical abilities the Broad Stage is at the same level as UCLA's Royce Hall, yet Royce can hold an audience three times as large. The combination of the intimacy of the Broad and the technical virtuosity is unparalleled here.

What is remarkable, when you think about it, is that until now, no such performing arts center for music, dance, and theater has existed west of the 405 Freeway. That is not to say that the Westside has been without temples of culture: The Getty Center and the Getty Center Malibu have staged theater events, readings and happenings, as has the Hammer Museum in Westwood, and there have been events at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica; the relatively new Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City (an outpost of the downtown Center Theatre Group), has mounted significant theater productions; as has the Miles Playhouse in Reed Park. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium hosts the occasional concert, and the Skirball has, among other offerings, a thriving world music program. Nonetheless, despite these and many other performance spaces, the Westside has never had a dedicated stage of this caliber to attract world-class artists.

To ensure that Los Angeles denizens can enjoy their evening, the Broad Stage parking lot can accommodate 289 cars, in addition to valet parking, fitting, since as David Mamet reportedly said of the new venue, "the only thing more important than a forum where the community can go hear the truth is a forum where the community can go to hear the truth with adequate parking."

What then, you may ask, is the price tag for a world-class arts center? More than you might imagine: $45 million. And if you are a resident of Santa Monica or Malibu, you can thank yourself for making all this possible: In 2004 Santa Monica and Malibu passed a $35 million bond measure to support the project; $5 million came from other government agencies and individual donors, along with additional funds from a 2002 bond measure passed to finance improvements to Santa Monica College.

This marriage of public and private funds and of a community college and a performing arts center with world-class ambitions required a fair amount of creative collaboration and innovation in of itself.

"Embedded in the original Santa Monica College charter is the call for a performing arts center, so the stage fulfills our mandate and our traditions," said Chui. L. Tsang, the current president of Santa Monica College. One can also point to KCRW-FM, the nationally renowned radio station that broadcasts from the SMC campus, as an analogous "community service" of SMC.

In practice, what this means is that the college will use the space for rehearsing its orchestra, college band and chorus (which can include as many as 100 people), and for performances associated with those groups. The Madison Building behind the center is available for classes and for rehearsals, as is the Edye Second Space.

Both the Broad Stage and the Edye will plan their programming around the college's use. At the same time, the Madison Group, a nonprofit organization created to stand at arms-length from the college, will lease the space and administer other programming for the center while raising money for what Stoeber called "this world-class programming in a world-class building." Memberships are available, and the inaugural season package has a five-ticket-for-the-price-of-four deal.

The inaugural season offers evenings of song, dance, music and theater from a diverse group of artists, ranging from mezzo-soprano Von Stade on opening night (Oct. 11) to jazz artist Theo Bleckmann, cajun ensemble The Pine Leaf Boys and a cappella group Chanticleer, to dance companies such as Lulu Washington and Diavolo, musicians Lee Ritenour and Dave Grusin, as well as conductor Kent Nagano leading soloists from the Montreal Symphony (for a full schedule of events go to www.TheBroadStage.com).

The first season, impressive as it is, is still somewhat of a "soft launch," as they call it in the Internet world. Given that the opening is about a year behind schedule, the artists for the first season needed a certain flexibility to accommodate the Broad Stage. As Franzen has noted, the first season performances "allow us to test how the room and our systems perform in staging music, oratory, song and drama." The second season is already being scheduled, and there is talk of including more ethnic dance and more family offerings. Hoffman has been working on theater offerings to launch next year.

To support the programming as well as arts education, Eli and Edythe Broad donated $10 million to create an endowment. At a press conference earlier this year to announce the gift, Broad proclaimed: "We have the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles and now the Westside will have its own premier performing arts venue."

That the Broads have become our modern Medicis was not lost on Hoffman, who lauded them: "Without people like the Broads, we wouldn't have commissioned work of Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and so many of the great painters. How they use their capital is commendable."

Initially the Broads had urged that the theater be named after Hoffman, but they were ultimately persuaded otherwise. "Edye loves the theater" press materials quote Broad as saying, "and after 53 years of marriage, I wanted to honor her by naming the second space "The Edye.'"

As for Hoffman, during the planning of the Broad Stage, one of his suggestions was to have a restroom just off-stage for performers -- apparently his many years in the theater have taught him that such a contrivance would be invaluable. The restroom is now there, and Hoffman has asked that a plaque noting his contributions to the Broad Stage be placed there.

Something about that just tickles me. The Broads may have their names on the front of the building, but Hoffman has created his own rung on Rambam's ladder: the ironic acknowledgement.

The Broad Stage, as it goes forward, will no doubt evolve. As part of Santa Monica College and as part of the Santa Monica community, it has a rare opportunity to make its "global theater" locally relevant. The degree to which it becomes integral to the community and to Los Angeles as a whole will depend on both the quality and choice of the offerings, as well as its responsiveness to the audience. A task that poses as many questions as it does challenges.

For example, given that Emeritus College is also part of Santa Monica College, serving the senior community, will the Broad Stage create programs suited to senior schedules when the facility is otherwise not in use? Similarly, what about family programs? Will there be the equivalent of "early bird specials"? Weekend afternoon shows at family-friendly hours? Will they hew to the classic, or tilt to the new, or provide both? And how will the audience respond? (And who will they be?) All this remains to be seen.

For now, let us rejoice in the fall harvest of riches in Santa Monica: from newly opened restaurants, such as R+D Kitchen on Montana and Anisette just off the Third Street Promenade, to the forthcoming relocation of Santa Monica Seafood and the café and oyster bar they intend to open, to the imminent arrival of Diesel Bookstore in the Country Mart, and to this new starship that docked on 11th Street (with ample parking), ready to take all who enter on voyages of the heart, mind, soul and spirit.

THE IMMORTAL MR. GOLD

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:04:33 -0800

August 12, 2008

Herb Gold, elder statesman of the Beat Generation, writes on

By Tom Teicholz

"Still Alive! (A Temporary Condition)" by Herbert Gold (Arcade, $25).

Herbert Gold, who at 84 is among the elder statesmen of the Beat Generation, has a new book out, his 28th, a memoir titled "Still Alive! (A Temporary Condition)."

It is not an autobiography so much as a series of recollections of encounters with people who have been part of his life

-- neighbors, friends, family, lovers.

"I didn't really want to write my history." Gold said recently. "What impelled this book -- what I wanted to do -- was a meditation on age and the changes that happen and memories that happened."

What I found striking about "Still Alive" is that Gold often writes about people whom it is clear he didn't like much.

"People who have an impact on your life are often people you don't like," Gold told me when I mentioned this.

Fair enough. So we proceeded to talk about Gold's life and some of the people he has known along the way, as well as the books he has written.

Gold was born in 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio, a city he often calls, "The Paris of Northeastern Ohio," and he was raised in Lakewood, a suburb where his next-door neighbor gave him his first taste of anti-Semitism. Not that the observance of Judaism interested him. Although Gold went to synagogue, he didn't like the rabbi and never became a bar mitzvah. After graduating high school, he spent a year hitchhiking around the country, taking odd jobs, writing poems. His parents wanted him to stay in Cleveland and attend college there and then go on to medical school. Instead, he was accepted at Columbia College in New York, where he went with the ambition of being a writer.

It was at college that he first met Allen Ginsberg.

"He was 17. He was a bit crazy, and he was more eccentric than I was," Gold said.

They became friends, and Ginsberg soon surrounded himself with what would become known as The Beat Generation. Gold disagreed with Ginsberg about two things: one was Ginsberg's conviction that Gold should become a homosexual ("Ginsberg was a proselytizer," Gold said), and the other was Jack Kerouac, who was a football player then -- not a writer. Gold did not like him.

"I crossed the street to avoid him," Gold said.

He also said that he knew even then that Kerouac was an anti-Semite (as Kerouac revealed himself to be in his last days), and he cites Ginsberg's affection for Kerouac as an example of Ginsberg's ability "to forgive people's sins."

A Fulbright Fellowship sent Gold to Paris, where he finished his first novel, launched his literary career and became friends with Saul Bellow.

In "Still Alive!" Gold draws an amusing and insightful portrait of the pleasures and difficulty of friendship with Bellow, young and old.

When Gold's first marriage, to Edith Zubrin, ended in divorce, he found himself in tough economic straits, he recalled. In our conversation, Gold said that although his first wife "was not a good person," he still felt terribly bereft when he recently learned that she had died.

To pay child support (they had two daughters, Ann and Judith), he became "the writing factory."

Gold wrote for Playboy and its imitators, publications with names such as Dude, Gent, Nugget and Coronet -- not always using his real name. As he recalled, Playboy paid well -- "with a feature inside the magazine, you could buy a VW, and with a lead feature you could buy a VW convertible."

He moved around the country, spending the winter in Florida -- "you could rent an apartment in South Beach on Collins for $2 a week; $2.50 with air conditioning." He spent time in South Carolina, in New York, even back in Cleveland, where he edited a listings publication titled "What, Where, When." He took odd jobs; he taught at colleges and universities. Eventually, he said, "I was able to dig myself out of that hole."

Gold settled in San Francisco just in time for a front-porch view of the '60s.

"I had a wonderful time," Gold recalled of the era. "There was a loosening of the barrier between the sexes, which has endured. Popular music became more interesting. There was a lot of fun being had. And fun is not to be derogated."

Gold explained that part of why hippie culture flourished "was economic. People could really make out without much."

But in "Still Alive!" Gold casts a jaundiced eye at some of what he calls "the nutty" aspects of the times, such as "the idiot radicals, those who thought the Cultural Revolution in China was a great thing."

In the book, Gold speaks of one friend explaining that it couldn't be bad, given that "it's Culture and it's a Revolution."

One of the reasons that Gold has tremendous affection for the '60s is because that was when he met his second wife, Melissa Dilworth, just around the time "Fathers," his most successful novel, was published ("Fathers" finally afforded Gold some measure of financial security).

Gold writes very movingly of Melissa, the mother of his children Nina, Ari and Ethan. She is very present in "Still Alive" and his love for her still feels keen.

In the book, however, Gold describes how one couple kept encouraging Melissa to leave him to forge her own identity. Gold describes how all the marriages around them came apart, with the women running off, until their own marriage, like the last in a series of dominoes, fell.

"The idea that friends of ours could propagandize for our divorce" still rankles Gold.

Yet in our conversation, Gold also spoke of his wife's "restlessness" as being the chief cause of their marriage's dissolution.

Whatever the reason, he remained close with her and had made plans for them to have lunch for her birthday in 1991, when he learned that she had died in a helicopter crash with the man she was going to marry, concert promoter Bill Graham, whose foundation she had run.

The other great love of Gold's life has been Haiti, which he has traveled to on and off over the last five decades -- a heartbreaking story that Gold told me "just gets worse and worse."

Strangely enough it was in Haiti that an Israeli, Shimon Tal, made it a Jewish place for him.

Gold's Jewish adventures in Haiti are described in his book "My Last Two Thousand Years," which I also read in preparation for meeting Gold. It is a wonderful, moving book that describes the journey by which he embraced his Jewish identity, a book he told me he wanted to call "Being and Becoming." Gold speaks movingly about the anti-Semitism he encountered as a child in Lakewood and in his early professional life; about the way people danced on the streets of the Upper West Side the night Israel became a State (although he and his first wife, being "internationalists," didn't see the point of creating new countries), and how he changed his mind and embraced the Jewish state in visits to Israel in 1958, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, and shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967.

Gold has been a prolific writer of novels, short stories and nonfiction. In addition to "Fathers," his novels include "Salt," "She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me," "The Man Who Was Not With It" and, one of my favorites, "A Girl of Forty," which I recently re-read.

"A Girl of Forty" holds up, but like many a novel one returns to, I found reading it now a different experience. Originally I was entranced by the portrait of Suki, the free-spirited woman at the center of the novel. Today, I read the novel more as a cautionary tale of the checks that became due after the '60s, and about coming to peace with the casualties caused.

Gold's reportage has included books on Biafra ("Biafra Goodbye"); his book on Haiti ("Best Nightmare on Earth"); and that republic of the soul, Bohemia and its earthly manifestations as chronicled by Gold ("Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet").

Over the years, as "writer in residue," as Gold calls it, at several colleges he has known or befriended many other writers of note. At Cornell he taught and knew Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon. At SUNY Binghamton he was a teaching colleague of a young Richard Price. Although he is no name-dropper, the list of writers Gold has known is as wide as it is varied. During our conversation, there were few names that came up that Gold did not have an anecdote about (and usually a good one).

Gold is fit, spry and looks younger than his 84 years; he spoke with me at his son Ari's apartment. Gold may be an "old guy" (his term) but he remains as much a bohemian and a beatnik as he was when those terms were batted around more regularly.

As our time together ran out, I reminded Gold that "Fathers" told the story of an 80-year-old father visiting his son, a father who declares that he's "still alive" -- and here was Gold, at 84, at the home of one of his sons, having written a memoir by the same name. What perspective did he now enjoy that he didn't then?

He said that back then, he regarded his father as old, in a way that his children didn't with him, in part because of his good health, but also because he had stuck to a bohemian way of dress and life. Also his father wasn't so supportive of Gold's artistic ambitions, while he fully supports the aspirations of his children, mentioning that his sons, Ari and Ethan, are both artists. (Ari and Ethan are in a band, The Honey Brothers, which also features Entourage star Adrian Grenier on drums; and Ari is the producer, director and star of the independent feature, "The Adventures of Power," which, based on its trailer, appears to be a "Napoleon Dynamite"-ish tale of an air-drumming competition).

In the afterword to "Still Alive!" Gold writes, "these pages are about love and memory, about why both are blessings and sorrows and a form of immortality."

At the start of our conversation, Gold had said to me that the concept of an afterlife "is very weak among Jews. We must make our heaven on our earth."

Immortality, Gold said, comes in the form of our children and our children's children. And for writers, in wanting their books to last. By all those standards, Herbert Gold is not only "Still Alive!" -- he's immortal.

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.

Waxing Roth

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:27:42 -0800

The movie, "Elegy," which opens Aug. 8 and stars Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penelope Cruz as the object of his desire, is the latest film to be adapted from the writings of Philip Roth. This one is based on his novella, "The Dying Animal."

Despite Roth's long, successful career in American letters, his track record on film has been far spottier. Yet "Elegy," directed by Isabel Coixet, who is Spanish, has created a certain buzz: Could it be that a woman, a European -- albeit working in English -- is what it takes to successfully translate Roth's work to film?

Let me get back to you on that. First, to set "Elegy" in context, I decided to watch every film adapted from Roth's work.

My mission started simply enough: a quick search on imdb.com turned up a succinct list of eight works on film and TV, stretching back to the 1950s.

Some had never been released on video, some are only in VHS, some were available at the local video store, some had to be tracked down in specialty shops or in university or museum archives. My quest led me across Los Angeles and afforded me the pleasure of visiting some of the city's most beautiful libraries and research facilities, as well as some of its best-stocked video stores.

In 1960, Roger Corman produced "The Battle of Blood Island," which was adapted from a 1958 short story that ran in Esquire titled, "Expect the Vandals." Shot in black and white and only 64 minutes long, "Blood Island" is part of a trilogy of films Corman made in Puerto Rico.

Netflix carries this film as a DVD double feature, paired with a non-Roth film called, "Shell Shock" (that has nothing to do with Roth). Locally, "Blood Island" can't be found at Blockbuster, the Santa Monica or Los Angeles public libraries or such local rare video sources as CineFile or Vidiots.

So, I turned to my video store of last resort, Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee on Tujunga Avenue in North Hollywood, a shop whose eccentric and extensive film collection rarely disappoints.

It was there that I found one lonely DVD of the film. The story is set on an island in the South Pacific, where two American soldiers, Moe and Ken, are the only survivors of an attack on Japanese forces and are forced to hide out and get along. Moe is a 35-year-old Jewish accountant, with a wife and kids back home, who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions. Ken, who was injured in the attack and whom Moe must take care of (but resents doing so) is a younger, more naive, all-American kid. Moe is not very likeable, but we understand his predicament. At one point, Ken, pushed to the end of his rope, makes an anti-Semitic jab at Moe. We know Ken didn't really mean it, but Moe feels Ken's comment justifies his worldview.

In the end, the two are rescued -- just before the island is to be used as a nuclear test site. The film is more a character study than anything else, and our feelings about Moe are left unresolved. Nonetheless, Moe represents an early proto-Roth protagonist, one who has not yet moved beyond ethnic identity, but remains plenty angry.

Roth's next adaptation to film appeared in October 1960, when "The Contest for Aaron Gold," originally published in 1955 as a short story in EPOCH, appeared as an episode of the television series, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

I first turned to the Paley Center for Media's library, but they did not have a copy. They directed me to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which had a copy that I was allowed to screen only in the media lab of UCLA's Powell Library. The special treat here was Powell Library, which stands across from Royce Hall on the UCLA campus and is worth visiting just for the beauty of its main reading room. "The Contest for Aaron Gold" is noteworthy because its Philip Roth-esque lead is played by the recently deceased Sydney Pollack, who turns in a credible performance as a sculptor who has taken a job as the ceramics instructor at a summer camp. In the film, all the characters have Jewish last names, but there is no mention of the place being a Jewish summer camp, or of the campers or the counselors being Jewish. But there is some tension here between the lead character trying to stand up for his artistic beliefs and not cave in to the pressures of the man running the place -- some of the issues around money and career that arise later in "Goodbye, Columbus." "The Contest" ends with a twist suitable for Alfred Hitchcock. As a one-hour episodic TV drama, albeit a slightly obvious and gimmicky one, I found it satisfying and enjoyable.

Almost a decade passed before the next Roth work turned up on the screen. By the time it did, Roth had become celebrated, and somewhat notorious, for both his first collection of short stories, "Goodbye, Columbus," which came out in 1959, and for "Portnoy's Complaint," published in 1968. Both were made into films, and both star Richard Benjamin.

"Goodbye, Columbus," released in 1969, launched the careers of both Benjamin and Ali McGraw. This film was easy to find; a copy was readily available at the Santa Monica Public library.

Watching "Goodbye, Columbus" at half a century's remove from the short story's original publication is a strange experience. I found myself as ambivalent about Benjamin's Neil Klugman as he was about the Patimkin family. To me, the Klugmans and the Patimkins each seemed to be playing out their own strategy for rising above their immigrant backgrounds: One sought insulation from the evils of the world in books, the others in business and material goods. I found it hard to be judgmental, because I found them so much more alike than different.

McGraw's Brenda Patimkin was a far more sympathetic character than I recalled. Klugman, by contrast, never really seemed to care for Brenda beyond his desire for her (a trait common to Roth characters that would be examined in greater detail in "Portnoy"). In the original reviews, the film was praised for its naturalism and its humor, but from the 21st century perspective, I found it a less than satisfying experience.

"Portnoy's Complaint" was published in 1968 to huge acclaim. The 1972 film, written, produced and directed by Ernest Lehman, was considered a huge failure. Lehman was the screenwriter of such classics as "North by Northwest," "Sweet Smell of Success," "West Side Story," "The Sound of Music," "Sabrina" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" -- "Portnoy" is the only film he ever directed.

Watching the movie today, it struck me as yes, failed, but better than its reputation. Lehman chose to take what was in essence a comic monologue and set it as both a story of a love affair and of one man's attempt to heal himself via analysis of that relationship and his prior ones. At the same time, Lehman attempted to show the freedom that the sexual revolution inspired and the consequences of that freedom. Karen Black gives a very strong performance as "the monkey," and Richard Benjamin delivers a more nuanced performance than he gave in "Goodbye, Columbus."

Another 12 years passed before PBS offered up a version of Roth's "The Ghost Writer" as part of its American Masters series in 1984. As far as I can tell, this is the only production for which Roth is credited with collaborating on the script. That may have something to do with the fact that Claire Bloom, whom Roth was then involved with, plays a role in the production.

I had imagined that a copy of this would be at UCLA or available on DVD or VHS, or even offered at Eddie Brandt. But it wasn't. Luckily, it was in the collection of the Paley Center, and I was able to screen it in their library.

Mark Linn-Baker, best known as Benjy Stone in "My Favorite Year" (and who would later gain a measure of cultural currency on the sitcom, "Perfect Strangers") plays the young Nathan Zuckerman, a writer at the start of his career visiting Lonoff, a famous older writer, at Lonoff's country home on the very occasion when Lonoff's wife (Claire Bloom) leaves, and a much younger woman, his former student, urges Lonoff to run off with her. Zuckerman, whose parents and rabbi have rebuked him for the way he portrays Jews in his work, imagines the young woman to be Anne Frank, an Anne who survived the war and is now going to marry him.

Although tension-filled, "The Ghost Writer" unfolds at a somewhat leisurely pace, making the film perhaps not the most exciting adaptation of Roth's work, though certainly one of the most successful, conveying a measure of his writing's literary texture.

Twenty years passed after the PBS version of "The Ghost Writer" before another Roth novel made it to the screen. In the interim, Roth experienced a second wind as a novelist unparalleled in American letters, during which he won almost every major prize and award available to him, including the National Book Critics Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen Faulkner award, among many others. If he were an athlete, you would have him checked for steroids. In this new era, almost everything he wrote was optioned, including "The Human Stain."

"The Human Stain" (2003), which stars Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, was the easiest of Roth's films I sought out -- Blockbuster had many copies -- but it is probably the least successful adaptation of his work.

I will offer here that I once tried to option "The Human Stain" myself, but was outbid. My thought was to treat it as a murder mystery in which the detective uncovers a secret he had not bargained for. The hoped-for casting was Paul Newman (his agent when approached said, "Bring me an offer") and Ellen Barkin. So perhaps I am biased, but I believe that "The Human Stain" is a miss -- whether you blame it on the casting or for being too faithful to the novel's exposition, the story just doesn't work on screen. The most poignant moments of the novel do not resonate.

Still, watching "The Human Stain" the other night, I was struck by how Roth weaved elements of the personal dramas of Anatole Broyard, who like Roth's hero, reached great heights while leaving his African American heritage behind, and R. B. Kitaj, who blamed his wife's death on those who attacked him -- all the while setting this against the backdrop of the Monica Lewinski affair and the Clinton impeachment investigation.

Which brings us up to "Elegy." David Kepesh, played by Ben Kingsley, is a teacher, a public intellectual. The movie opens with his appearance on Charlie Rose, and he is set up as a man beyond romantic love, an intellectual's Hef, who finds his romance in promiscuity. So, naturally, he is caught off-guard when he falls in love with one of his students, Consuela, a woman 30 years his junior. And when he does, he becomes so obsessively convinced that he will lose her, sooner or later, that he sabotages the relationship. There is also a further irony, an inside joke, almost, for those who know Roth's work, because Kepesh, who venerates Consuela's breasts, is also the protagonist of an earlier Roth work, "The Breast."

Cruz is shot so lovingly in this film, it is hard to believe that she would not entrance anyone. Her work in the films of Pedro Almodóvar have demonstrated her incredible range and talents as an actress, but Coixet provides Cruz her greatest acting opportunity thus far in an English-language film (at least, that is, until Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona").

Coixet also manages to soften the hard edge of Kepesh's narcissism, that same edge that one feels in other films made from Roth's work, such as "Portnoy." Here, we understand how a man of a certain position, of a certain age, manages his private life with both a woman with whom he has had a long affair (played by Patricia Clarkson) and a younger woman.

I will not reveal the twist in the plot, and the denouement of the relationship, but intellectually it is powerful. Unfortunately, it is not as powerful on screen.

In the end, "Elegy" likely will not stand as the best adaptation of Roth's work. Roth's work continues to appeal because of the restless desire of his protagonists and the way he sets their stories against the backdrops of a given time and a given moment in his protagonist's life, as well as the way his character's sex drive acts as his life force. Roth continues to ask: If none of us get out alive, how do we go forward? And when we do, what do we make of this life and our loves?

As I write this, several of Roth's other works remain under option, including "American Pastoral," as well as his forthcoming novel, "Indignation," to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin. Perhaps one of them will transcend its provenance, to be remembered as a great film. But for that, we must still wait -- and watch.

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.

Bela & The Benz

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:52:38 -0800

Hatschek Bela.

The very sound of my great-grandfather's name brings a smile to my face.

In Hungarian, last names go first, so although Bela was his first name, he has always been Hatschek Bela to me -- all one name -- a legendary figure in our family, a celebrated forebear about whom my mother and grandmother told stories.

He was famous for being the first man in Hungary to own a car, and my grandmother kept a clipping from the Royal Hungarian Automobile Society with a picture of him seated at the controls of his Benz with a little girl on the rear rumble seat. Beneath the photo was the caption in Hungarian, German and French, proclaiming "Hatsek Bela le premier automobiliste Hongrois sur son voiture Benz en 1895."

The picture always fascinated me. My great-grandfather sits at the control of his open-air Benz looking, with his dark beard and mustache, like Sigmund Freud, smoking a cigar and wearing his homburg tilted at a rakish angle, as well as a suit -- perfectly tailored to show his starched white cuffs. I also loved looking at the little girl sitting at the rear of the vehicle, gazing at the camera like a little doll in her pinafore and large hat -- that was my grandmother, Adrienne, whom I only knew as an old woman.

Hatschek Bela had a Benz before Mercedes did. That was way cool.

My grandmother and mother used to tell stories about Hatschek Bela. From their stories, I took him to be debonair, slightly eccentric, with a healthy sense of humor.

Regarding the famous Benz, the story told in our family is that, one day, Hatschek Bela left on a trip. He disappeared for a few weeks, without anyone really knowing why or where he was going. When he returned, he did so with the vehicle -- transported on a train in its own car. But wait -- there's more: Hatschek did not return alone. He brought back a mechanic from Germany, as well, to care for it.

The car was a curiosity in Budapest. The most famous apocryphal story about Hatschek Bela and the car involves no less grand a personage than Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. As the story goes, the emperor was visiting Budapest. He was standing on a balcony reviewing a parade when he heard a loud explosion -- he hit the deck, fearing it was an assassination attempt. But someone said, "Don't worry, that's just Hatschek Bela in his car."

I once tried to research this story. All that I could confirm was that the Emperor Franz Joseph did visit Budapest as part of the 1896 celebration of 1,000 years of Hungary's nationhood. However, it does seem possible that the emperor would be reviewing crowds, and that there would be a parade, and that the car would be shown off in some fashion.

Apocryphal or not, Hatschek and the emperor remain a good story, and who knows, it might even be true.

Hatschek Bela died when my mother was just a child. But she remembered him as handsome, always well dressed. And he was vain. He was interested in new inventions. He was fond of having family portraits taken -- there is a story that he gave one to my grandmother. Inscribed on the back, it said: Who are these people?

My grandmother, Adrienne Hatschek Saar Morvai Bogner (she married several times), was the family archivist. She kept a leather portfolio filled with yellowing documents that held the birth, marriage and death records of her family. When she died, it passed to my mother, who really wasn't all that interested. But I was. So the portfolio came into my possession.

Here's where my research began. One day, several years ago, I sat down to sort through the documents that charted our family tree. >From the crumbling yellow pages with handwritten entries, the story of my family emerged.

I learned that Hatschek Bela was born Oct. 25, 1858, in Budapest, the son of Max (Miksa) Hatschek and Julia Boscovitz Hatschek. His father, Max, was a medical doctor, an optician. They lived at 13, Palatinus, in Pest -- an address in the center of the city.

On July 4, 1886, a 28-year-old Hatschek, who by then had become an optician like his father, was married to Gizella Back. She was just 17, according the marriage certificate, the daughter of Fulop Back and Jeannette Reitzer Back. They were married at the Dohány Temple in Budapest (Budapest's largest temple, akin to Temple Emmanuel in New York, or Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles).

My mother always claimed that her great-grandfather, Fulop Back, had been rashe kol (head of the Jewish community in Budapest), and that he was a great rabbi. However, when I visited the Jewish Community Center in 2003, a list of Budapest's rashim kol does not include a Fulop Back. Furthermore, on Hatschek Bela's wedding certificate Fulop Back is listed as a merchant.

I found two possible explanations: The list of rashim kol in Budapest's Jewish Community Center does list a Jozef Boscovitz, who was president of the Jewish community between 1851 and 1858. As Hatschek Bela's mother's maiden name was Boscovitz, perhaps her father was rashe kol and my mother got the sides of the family wrong.

Another is that Fulop was related to Joseph Bach (1784-1866), an important Talmud teacher from Old Buda. He was the first preacher of the Jewish community of Pest, and the first to preach sermons in German rather than Yiddish.

In any event, this was the marriage of two members of Budapest's rising Jewish middle class. The evidence is that Dr. Mayer Kayserling married them at the Dohány Temple.

"Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History" (Central European University Press, 1999), explains that the Dohány Temple, which had been consecrated in 1859, a year after Hatschek's birth, was symbolic of the rise and self-importance of Pest's Jewish community and their intention to be fully integrated members of the Hungarian nation. The Dohány is a magnificent Moorish-style edifice that can hold 3,000 visitors, where Budapest's version of Reform Judaism, called Neolog, was observed. Although the Dohány had a rabbi, Samuel Kohn, who delivered sermons in Hungarian, they also had Kayserling, who joined the temple in 1879 and was a German Jewish scholar. As subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the majority of the congregation still preferred their sermons in German. Kayserling remained with the Dohány until his death in 1905 -- long enough to see Hatschek Bela in his automobile.

The documents reveal that both Bela and his father, Max, were opticians, a fact that intrigued me. Turning again to "Jewish Budapest," I learned that one of the important early prominent figures in Budapest's Jewish history is Ignac Hirschler (1823-1891), a famous ophthalmologist. He was elected president of the Hungarian Jewish Congress in 1868-1869, was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a member of Hungary's Upper House of Government and president of the Jewish community.

What direct or indirect influence Hirschler had on the Hatschek family is not known. But I wonder if it is just a coincidence that Max and Bela were opticians, too? Could they be related? Could Hatschek be a Hungarian (Magyarized) version of Hirschler? These are all questions I hope to further research one day.

Regardless, Hatschek Bela was not an eye doctor as much as a businessman. His stationery, a copy of which was sent to me by Hungarian journalist Pal Negyesi, indicates that he owned the "first Hungarian glass eye factory."

Although this may sound a bit odd today, eye injuries and lost eyes were much more common in the age of the sword fight, particularly before eye surgery and repair became more sophisticated. It was also an enterprise in which artistry was valued.

My mother recalled being taken to her grandfather's factory, which her Uncle Hugo ran. A sign with a giant eye hung outside, and my mother recalls finding it frightening -- and memorable.

I also discovered that Hatschek Bela, or at least his factory, also made ocular equipment, such as binoculars. About three years ago, I received an e-mail out of the blue from a man who had purchased a pair on eBay. Upon Googling "Hatschek Bela" he had come across an article I had written and e-mailed me to ask for further details.

While writing this article, I decided to e-mail the man, and ask if he would consider selling me the binoculars. I can report that I am now the proud owner of a pair of World War I-era binoculars. They work, and they came with leather case lined with red silk. Stamped on the case's cover in bold gold letters is "Hatschek Bela," along with the address of his company store, located at 2 Vaci Utca (Budapest's most elegant shopping street -- akin to Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue).

Hatschek Bela died on Oct. 23, 1922 (his wife, Gizella Hatschek, died five years later). He had two children, Adrienne (my grandmother), born in 1892, and Hugo, born in 1895. He lived long enough to see Adrienne appear on stage, see her marry and to see his grandchild, Eva (my mother). He lived long enough to see Hugo become an optician and to know that his son would carry on his business. Adrienne lived in the family home and factory at 4 Munkas St. until her own marriage in 1915; Hugo continued to live there until it was taken over by the German SS in 1944.

In 2003, when I visited Budapest, I discovered that -- in the records of the Jewish Community Center at 12 Sip Utca -- Hatschek Bela and Gizella are listed as having been buried at the Kozma Street Jewish cemetery. However, when I visited the cemetery, I could not find their graves. Someone suggested that perhaps someone else had been buried above them. That, too, is a mystery I hope to solve one day (I did find Hugo's grave in the Kozma Street cemetery).

At the same time, I also discovered that my great-great-grandmother, Jeannette Reitzer, Hatschek's mother-in-law, was born in 1849 in Altofen (Old Buda) and died in 1891 in Budapest. Like Dr. Kayserling and other members of the 19th century Budapest bourgeoisie, she is buried in the Salgótarjáni Utca Cemetery. When I visited the cemetery in 2003, I found her grave marker -- a striking black obelisk.

To be able to trace my family's roots in Budapest back to 1849 was very meaningful. To imagine where their lives played out across centuries, to walk down those streets, to see buildings and synagogues and to be able to say my family walked these streets, my family members lived here, they were married in this place and buried here, it gives one a feeling that is larger than one's self -- a connection between present and past, a feeling of history.

As for Hatschek Bela owning Hungary's first automobile, Pal Negyesi, a Hungarian freelance journalist who writes about automobile history, published an article in 2007 that tried to find a definitive answer to who had the first car in history. He could not confirm anything.

As part of my own research, I e-mailed the picture of my great-grandfather in the Benz to Mercedes' own historians in Germany. They confirmed that it was a 1894 "Velo."

According to their records, in 1894 Benz launched the Velociped model -- nicknamed Velo -- a light vehicle that takes its place in history as the first small car and the first series-automobile in the world. The Velo had an engine that produced 1.5 horsepower at 450 revolutions per minute (according to their records, the engine's performance could be improved to 3.5 horsepower at 800 revolutions per minute). The Velo cost 2,000 marks in 1894.

However, Mercedes had no records of Hatschek Bela purchasing a Velo. Their records do indicate that in 1896, a year after the picture was taken, a Benz No. 375 was delivered to Hungary. No recipient is listed.

However, as our family lore has it, Hatschek traveled out of the country and returned with the car. Negyesi in his research turns up newspaper accounts from 1921 and 1967 anointing Hatschek as the first Hungarian automobilist, stating that "Hatschek learnt to drive a bit in Mannheim, Germany and Benz dispatched a ' driver' to Budapest, in order to help Hatschek learn how to properly drive and maintain his car."

This sounds very close to what I heard as a child and also leaves open the possibility that Hatschek purchased his car abroad from a dealer or a private party and then brought it home.

One can certainly question who had the first car, but there is no doubt that Hatschek owned a Benz Velo, and that alone was a pretty remarkable occurrence at that time for anyone -- but certainly for a Jewish citizen of Hungary (although who knows, he may have been dismissed by some as just another of the "nouveau riche" Jewish merchants corrupting Hungary with new ideas).

For me, I look at the picture of Hatschek Bela sitting in his Benz, his calm authority, his debonair charm, his comfort in being modern, his style, and imagine all that as part of my DNA.

Then, as if by magic, it happens again: I start to smile.

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.

Making Book on LA

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:10:30 -0800

BookExpo, the annual convention of booksellers and book publishers that took place in Los Angeles one recent weekend, is the book industry's annual get-together, alternating among the publishing hub of New York and various other cities, such as Miami, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Perhaps it's the state of the book industry, the economy or just the cost of gas, but this year's convention was not as well attended as in past years. The last time BookExpo was in Los Angeles, the convention floor was constantly, overwhelmingly crowded, with so many booths that the author autographing section had to be relegated to a basement hall.

This time, many editors did not even make the trip, and some publishers or imprints decided not to pay for a stand. For example, I was surprised that Bloomsbury USA didn't have one, given that they represent several Los Angeles authors with just-published or forthcoming books, including Seth Greenland ("Shining City"), Rachel Resnick ("Love Junkie") and Mark Sarvas ("Harry, Revised"). Still, the smaller turnout really didn't put a damper on the excitement, the conviviality and the parties, which seemed to take over Los Angeles from downtown to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Santa Monica.

At BookExpo, publishers were not only showcasing current titles, they also were trying to create excitement for books that will come out this summer and fall. Translation: Free books were given out.

Among the those I sought while trolling the aisles were the highly anticipated Salman Rushdie novel, "The Enchantress of Florence" (which is already receiving decidedly mixed reviews), Oscar Hijuelos's "Dark Dude" (Atheneum) and Andre Dubus III's "The Garden of Last Days," which is shaping up to be a novel of major importance.

Among the stacks of desired new books were John LeCarre's "A Most Wanted Man" (Knopf), Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day" (Morrow), Michael Connolly's "The Brass Verdict" (Hachette) and Wally Lamb's "The Hour I First Believed" (HarperCollins). Harper is also pushing Alafair Burke's "Angel's Tip" -- if the name seems familiar, it's because Burke's father, James Lee Burke, writes the Dave Robicheaux series.

Just as from small acorns grow large oak trees, small presses sometimes deliver great novels. Steerforth Press, which published Karoly Pap's "Azarel," an undiscovered gem of a novel of pre-war Hungary, was at the convention with Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even," which Philip Roth has already hailed as: "Among the most original novels I have read in recent years."

This September, Algonquin books will publish Ariel Sabar's "My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq." Sabar is a political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor covering this year's presidential campaign. His father, Yona Sabar, is a UCLA professor. The book tells of their father-and-son journey to today's postwar Iraq to visit Yona's birthplace and to reconcile past and present.

Speaking of fathers and sons, Adam Nimoy, son of you-can-guess-who, has written "My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life," which Simon and Schuster has dubbed a "hilarious anti-memoir" about facing life "as a newly divorced father, a fortysomething in the L.A. dating scene, a recovering user and a former lawyer turned director turned substitute teacher ... in search of his true self."

Among the grand dames signing books were Jackie Collins (I passed) and Barbara Walters (I waited in a long line to get a signed copy of "Audition" [Knopf]).

No one likes the expression "chick lit," but what should we call light reads targeted at the "Sex and the City" audience? Female-driven entertainment? Part of the problem is that this grab-bag term encompasses quasi-literary fiction ("Bridget Jones"), commercial fiction ("The Starter Wife") and a sort of gossipy insider's revenge book ("The Devil Wears Prada").

Call them what you like, but buy them you will. Some female-friendly titles you may spot this summer or in early fall include former E! hostess Jules Asner's "Whacked" (Weinstein Books), Julie Buxbaum's "The Opposite of Love" (Dial Press), Claire Lazebnik's "The Smart One and The Pretty One" (5 Spot), subtitled: "A Novel about Sisters" -- (I happen to know one of the sisters, Nell Scovell, but I'm not saying which one I think she is) -- and Jodi Wing's "The Art of Social War" (HarperCollins), which has already been sold to the movies.

Speaking of politics -- and who isn't these days? -- Public Affairs, a division of Perseus Group, is the publisher of Scott McLellan's book, and it has had no problems getting publicity for the book. It also has a book forthcoming about censorship that should generate some debate called, "Obscene in the Extreme," an account of the burning and banning of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." It's by Rick Wartzman, a senior Irvine Fellow of the New America Foundation and a former Los Angeles Times Magazine editor.

Public Affairs was launched in 1997 by Peter Osnos, my former editor at Times Books, and I was very happy to run into him, looking dapper as ever, at the Hotel Bel Air, where he was hosting a BookExpo party.

That same night, the New York Review of Books also hosted a party at the Bel Air, and it's worth commending it not only for its party-giving skills, but for its publishing program. Recently, the NYRB Classics have brought back into print editions of Vassily Grossman's masterpiece, "Life and Fate," and the Yiddish classic, "The Family Mashber" by Der Nister.

Most recently, it published new editions of Stefan Zweig's final novel, "Chess Game," and his earlier novella, "The Post Office Girl." Zweig, who committed suicide in 1940, was one of the most-published authors of the first half of the 20th century. The NYRB editions are getting rave reviews and returning Zweig to the popular consciousness.

One of the most interesting and companiable hours I spent at the BookExpo was speaking to Nicolas Neumann, a Paris-based art house publisher. Our meeting occurred because, as I was wandering past his booth, I heard him speaking French.

When I looked up to see the name of his booth, Somogyi, I had to stop.

Eva Somogyi was my mother's stage name in Budapest, so I turned to Neumann and asked point blank: Hungarian or French? The answer, not surprisingly, was both -- the original founder, Somogyi, was of Hungarian parentage, but the publishing house is French. Somogyi turns out to be one of the largest publishers of museum exhibition catalogs in France.

Upon learning that my column appears in The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Neumann immediately directed my attention to two of his English-language books. One of them is "Human Expressionism: The Human Figure and the Jewish Experience," the companion book to an exhibition this spring at the Musee Tavet-Delacour in Pontoise, a suburb of Paris. The book illustrates a fantastic and very thought-provoking exhibition featuring works by Soutine, Modigliani, Pissaro, Mane-Katz, Lasar Segall, Kitaj and Serge Strosberg, with a wonderful essay by Eliane Strosberg.

Neumann also showed me a book of the death camp drawings of Shelomo Selinger -- really remarkable, haunting work that deserves an American exhibition (Skirball people, are you listening?).

Speaking of art, but on a definitely lighter note, I was happy to run into the folks from BukAmerica -- Gary Kornblau and Lisa Lyons, whose Hollywood-based publishing house creates $1.49 pamphlets that run the gamut from reprints to original works, from a translation of Baudelaire, to the U.S. Constitution, from Ruth Reichl's "The Queen of Mold" to Richard Grossman's "Glossary of Every Humorous Word in the English Language." (Example: "agnify: to dress up as a sheep.")

Also from the local scene was Ammo, an L.A.-based publisher started by Steve Crist, who does very hip books like "Gonzo," about Hunter Thompson, and a series of books by the designer Todd Oldham, including one about John Waters with an essay by Cindy Sherman.

And if you like local, there's Angel City Press, where Paddy Calisto continues to publish fine volumes on Los Angeles' history and culture. I even met Gidget herself, Kathy Zuckerman, at the Santa Monica Press booth, where she and Dominic Priore were signing posters for "Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom," available in September.

Children's books occupied a fair amount of real estate at BookExpo. One title that particularly appealed to me was "My Name is Gabito (Me Llamo Gabito") an English- and Spanish-language children's book about the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Monica Brown, who asked me, "And how many Latina Jews do you know?" (More than you think, mi amiga).

And as long as we are taking a walk on the Semitic side of the street, I was pleased to stumble on Lerner Publishing Group. It recently acquired Kar-Ben Publishing, "a growing Jewish library for children," which includes everything from Yale Strom's first children's book, "The Wedding That Saved a Town," to biographies, books about Israel, books about Jewish holidays and books about families and friends that encompass many religions.

Meanwhile, over at Matzoh Ball Books (that is their name!), Anne-Marie Baila Asner has just published "Klutzy Boy" (prior titles include "Kvetchy Boy," "Schmutzy Girl," "Noshy Boy" and "Schluffy Girl"). Let the imagination run wild.

Now, if having your child learn a foreign language grabs you, Slangman Publishing has a series for ages 3 and up, where familiar fairy tales, such as "Cinderella," are retold with foreign words to build up a child's vocabulary in a foreign language (there's an audio CD included, as well). Languages include Chinese, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about "Mo's Nose." My daughter's homework folder has recently been covered with stickers about a dog named Mo. I now know why.

Turns out one of my daughter's classmates is the son of Margaret Hyde, the author of children's books such as "Dreadilocks and the Three Slugs" and the "Great Art for Kids" series ("Picasso for Kids," "Matisse for Kids"). Hyde has now launched "Mo's Nose," a series of books for children about a dog named Mo and how although he doesn't see in color, he can smell colors. The books, illustrated by Amanda Giacomini, have an innovative, safe, nontoxic scratch-and-sniff feature.

"Mo Smells Red," the first book in the series, has Mo smelling strawberries, roses and love itself. Cute in the extreme. A portion of the proceeds from the books go to help rescue animals find homes. Mo is going to be a star. Be ready for the appearance of Mo T-shirts in your children's lives.

Graphic novels were another big trend at BookExpo. As I learned, graphic novels are often neither graphic nor novel -- they are adult versions of what we used to call comic books. NBM books was at the convention, along with local author David Seidman, who told me that Los Angeles has become fertile ground for the graphic novel, thanks to the abundance of animators and writers raised on comic books.

These days, comics range from humorous work to art of fantasy and the imagination, from children's comics to illustrated renderings of Proust and Kafka, from political cartooning to subversive alternative lit, from goth to Japanese manga.

Some of the most interesting books these days are being published by university presses, such as the university presses of Indiana, Nebraska, Michigan, Mississippi, Chicago, MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, which publish everything from the hyperlocal, to the serious academic, to the just plain fun from all over the country. As just one example, Yale University is doing a series called American icons with titles such as Joseph Epstein writing about Fred Astaire.

BookExpo, however, was not just about free books. There were also speeches and panels (about books). The New York Times' Thomas Friedman spoke about how "green is the new red, white and blue," which not coincidentally is the title of Friedman's next book. There were author breakfasts with Philippa Gregory, Alec Baldwin, Chris Buckley and Magic Johnson.

There were also panels about film rights, bookselling and climate change, about Google and digital rights and digital editions, social networking, graphic novels, libraries, censorship, the Chinese market and the Chinese audience, the Latino audience and the panel I attended about -- no surprise here -- the Jewish audience.

A panel about the reading habits of Jewish Americans featured Stuart Matlins of Jewish Lights publishing house, Daisy Maryles of Publisher's Weekly and Ruth Ellenson of the best-selling anthology, "The Modern Jewish Girls' Guide to Guilt."

Panelists spoke of the importance of the Jewish Book Council run by Carolyn Starman Hessel, book clubs and synagogue book clubs. Matlins suggested that in his guesstimation, 70 percent of readers and more than 70 percent of book club attendees are women.

Ellenson, who has written for The Jewish Journal and whose book features an essay by Jewish Journal Religion Editor Amy Klein, told many humorous anecdotes about the pressures she faced to make her book less "Jewish." However, what Ellenson discovered was that what perhaps threatened to keep her from a mainstream audience helped her find a very loyal niche audience, Jewish readers who have supported her book in steady numbers since its publication.

No one who was in the room will ever forget when Ellenson told us the more "edgy title" one editor suggested for her book: "Burning Bushes."

At one point, Carla Cohen, owner of Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., bemoaned the fact that there is not a contemporary version of "The Jewish Catalogue." Several audience members then volunteered that they were the authors of soon-to-be-published books hoping to fill the gap, among them "Cool Jew" by Lisa Alcalay Klug (Andrews McNeil).

There was some question of if, and why, Jews buy a disproportionate number of books. Is it just a matter of education?

In some sense, this begged a question that nagged at the whole BookExpo: Whither books?

Is the book industry going the way of the music industry? Or the newspaper industry? Is digital the future? What percentage of the population will read books on their Kindle or other electronic devices or even on their Blackberry? If most nonfiction titles sell only 6,000 copies, how can such small sales support writers, editors, publishing companies?

The answer is, of course, no one knows, but stay tuned -- or more to the point, keep reading.

Matlins had the best precis of the current marketplace: "The people who buy books," he opined, "are the people who buy books."

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.