Scion of a distinguished Zionist family, Jonathan Lynn has moved from skewering British politics with Yes Prime Minister' to directing Hollywood comedies like My Cousin Vinny' and Greedy' Los Angeles As the nephew of Abba Eban and occasional frequenter of the Cambridge Union, an august body of British student debaters, Jonathan Lynn might well have followed in his illustrious uncle's footsteps and chosen a career in politics. Instead, the 50-year-old playwright and director of film, TV and theater made his name in the early 80s satirizing British politics with his hit BBC comedy series "Yes Minister" and its successor "Yes Prime Minister." Today, Lynn has moved on to directing Hollywood comedies like "My Cousin Vinny," "The Distinguished Gentleman," the recently released "Greedy," and an upcoming big-screen version of the 50s TV sitcom "Sgt. Bilko" starring Steve Martin.
"Politics was always part of the family currency," recounts the genial Lynn in the office bungalow he occupies on the 20th Century-Fox lot in Los Angeles. "My grandmother, Alida Eban, translated (into French and Russian) the Balfour Declaration for Chaim Weizmann, and, of course, there was my uncle. So when I went to Cambridge I thought I would go into politics.
"After attending three or four debates at the Cambridge Union, though, I decided these were just the most self-important 20-year-olds I had ever clamped eyes on. They were behaving like 45-year-old cabinet ministers, and they ob- viously thought they were going to run the country one day. I found them intolerably pompous and stupid and this was in no way mitigated by the fact that they did, indeed, become the people who are now running the country. It became clear to me then that the only way I could ever be involved in politics was to make fun of it."
Lynn and co-writer Anthony Jay did this brilliantly with "Yes Minister," which chronicled the inspired maneuverings of stasis-minded civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby and his effusively dim political boss, Jim Hacker. The show garnered admirers the world over, including politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. In fact, when Lynn paid his first and only visit to Israel in the early 80s, and Abba Eban threw a party for him, a large number of uninvited Knesset members who were fans of the program crashed the festivities.
A few years ago Lynn met with a Hollywood TV executive who wanted to explore adapting "Yes Minister" by then a best-selling set of books many believe were even better political satire than the TV series into an American sitcom. The meeting went swimmingly until the exec asked Lynn whether there might be room in the pilot for a child. And if not a child, maybe a dog.
While those suggestions may have killed Lynn's enthusiasm for an Americanized "Yes Minister," he has managed to find a home in Los Angeles as a highly valued director of comedy films. His first Hollywood effort in 1985, an ill-considered multi-ended adaptation of the Parker Bros. board game "Clue," was a critical and commercial bomb. But he bounced back in 1990 with the droll "Nuns on the Run," which starred his fellow Cambridge Review alumnus and ex-Monty Python player Eric Idle as a man who hides under a habit from pursuing gangsters.
The next year Lynn scored big at the box office with "My Cousin Vinny," featuring a hilarious Joe Pesci as a streetwise New Yorker with a fresh night-school law degree navigating the labyrinth of Southern-fried jurisprudence. In 1992 he returned to political satire with one of the better Eddie Murphy vehicles in years, "The Distinguished Gentleman," about a con artist who succeeds in winning a seat to an even more corrupt House of Repre- sentatives.
Lynn's latest feature, "Greedy," stars Kirk Douglas in a comedic turn as a crotchety old Croesus gleefully tormenting his money-grubbing relatives, including one played by Michael J. Fox, as well as a loyal British butler portrayed by Lynn himself. This acidly cynical farce opened late winter to mixed reviews and has since failed to score big at the box office.
" Greedy' really splits audiences and critics," says Lynn. "The movie has a dichotomy in the writing. It's got a family broadly written and played relatives who want to inherit Kirk's money. And it has another story line, more sensitive and real, about the nephew," played by Fox. "What's happened is the reviewers either liked one part of the movie or the other. None quite seemed to like it as a whole.
"The movie asks, where will you draw the line in your quest to get rich? Everyone in it draws the line in a different place in terms of how far they will go to humiliate themselves. Michael's character, though Kirk's nephew thinks he is different. He arrives on the scene with a complete moral stance, thinking he's not corruptible. In the course of the film, though, without realizing it, because he can rationalize everything that happens to him along the way, he becomes profoundly corrupt." The poster for "Greedy" is one of Hollywood's best: "Oh sure, they're two-faced, back-stabbing, money-grubbing, buck-chasing, brown-nosing, sniveling weasels. But hey… they're family."
Oddly, apart from references to his grandmother, uncle and wife, Lynn seems profoundly reticent to discuss his own family background. He was born in Bath, studied law at Cambridge where he performed with Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman.
His parents and siblings, he says, are more intensely Jewish than he is. "They are very traditional, very involved. And it was very important to them that we marry Jews. I, of course, did not."
Lynn has not raised his own two children now attending American universities as Jews, and will only identify himself as a Jew because "I don't want to say that I am not. I am an atheist who, culturally and historically, is Jewish.
"I suppose, however, that you could call me a Zionist, if by that you mean that I sympathize with the Jewish state. On the other hand, I am simply shocked at what has been going on there since the Begin era. And I will be amazed if any government led by Rabin understands what concessions are genuinely needed to make peace. But I may be wrong because I am an outsider, one who has never wished to be an insider."
Though Lithuanian gentile, Lynn's wife, Rita, a psychotherapist, spent two years as a child in a Nazi concentration camp. In his eyes, that experience makes her "more authentically Jewish' than any of the Jews I have ever met in Hollywood." Lynn finds himself constantly amazed, and sometimes apalled, at what he sees as the bogus quality of Jewish identity among film-industry types in Los Angeles.
"American Jews," he insists, "are so insistent about Jewishness only because they are not very Jewish at all. The only glue that holds them together the vast majority anyway seems to be the guilt of having not been involved in the Holocaust. You don't see that in Britain.
"Hollywood in particular is very puzzling. They all talk about how Jewish they are, but they don't seem to know anything about Judaism or Jewish history at all.
I have been to Seder nights here where no one even knew what the story was that was being celebrated."
He would not, however, say the same of Kirk Douglas, who to his mind epitomizes all that is wonderful both among Jews and within Hollywood.
"This is a remarkable man. He came from nowhere. He was born to Jewish immigrant parents who were illiterate, but he's highly educated, multilingual just an astonishing collection of talents. And with all of that, is gentlemanly and agreeable and, as I was to discover, very very funny. That's rather unusual in Hollywood. You hear funny anecdotes here, but rarely do you encounter any genuine wit." That's one charge which can hardly be leveled at Lynn, whose work is distinguished by its clever, biting cynicism. But the director clearly sees himself in a different light.
"Sir Humphrey once said that cynic' is the word that an idealist uses to describe a realist," observes Lynn. "I think I am the opposite (of a cynic). I think I am a moralist. It is true that everything I do is in one way or another about corruption. That is because corruption still shocks me. I seem to have a limitless capacity for being shocked, and this tells me I'm not a cynic." Lynn on the set: A limitless capacity for being shocked' Kirk Douglas and Lynn in Greedy': The movie asks where you draw the line in getting rich'