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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (1332)	8/5/2003 10:35:28 AM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22250

[Definitive Jewish crisis: in Jewish-dominated Holywood it's not kosher to make every film reek with Jewish elements. Someone might notice something. This Jewish effort to hide Jewish dominance in the film world, says our Jewish screenwriter, is a "soft form" of "antisemitism."] To be a Hebrew in Hollywood. Making quality Jewish films in Hollywood is hard. I should know. I've done it, by Roger L. Simon, Jewsweek, July 11, 2003 WRITER BEWARE: "Jewish screenwriter Roger L. Simon warns that Hollywood may not be as Jew-friendly as you think. I am writing this short essay on being a Jewish screenwriter in Hollywood at a desk at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst where I am a speaker at their conference on Jewish Cinema. They are showing a film I wrote back in the late eighties, the adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's brilliant Holocaust black comedy Enemies, A Love Story. This film was a big critical success, was nominated for three Academy Awards (including best adapted screenplay) and won the New York Film Critics prize for its director Paul Mazursky. In Jewish circles (and sometimes by the more artistically minded), I am often asked, "How come you don't do more movies like that?" I wish, I say aloud or to myself. In today's commercial cinema, making this movie would be about as easy as flying to the moon in a Piper Cub. Even then it wasn't simple. Here's a Hollywood story for you: When Paul and I turned the script into Disney Studios (they had optioned the book for Mazursky to direct and had paid me to write), Michael Eisner said, "Fellas, this is a very good screenplay, but..." turning to Paul, "...couldn't you update it like you did Down and Out in Beverly Hills?" "But Michael," said Paul. "The Holocaust took place at a very specific time ... during World War II." "Well, how about another Holocaust. How about the Afghani Holocaust." All I can say is, thank God Isaac Singer wasn't there. But then Singer, who had the most refined sense of irony, might have laughed. Of course, this is almost a parable of making Jewish movies in Hollywood -- a famous Jewish director and a Jewish screenwriter trying to make a film out of a book by a Jewish Nobel prize winner and a Jewish mogul wants us to change the locale, make it not Jewish. Ten years before, when I had been trying to make my own detective novel The Big Fix into a movie, I had frequently met with the request by producers and studio executives that its protagonist, Moses Wine, not be Jewish. Naturally, these same producers and executives were themselves of that background. Is this a form of anti-Semitism? Well, maybe, but it is a soft form. Here is what I think is really going on. You have to start from the basic truth that Jews constitute a very small proportion of the movie-going public ... The major problem of independent filmmaking is not whether or not the content is Jewish; it is whether or not the content is serious. Having Jewish overtones only exacerbates the matter. That is not to say that a strange queasiness does not exist. I am certain that a good many of the Hollywood-types who are Jewish would just as soon not deal with it in their work."