Though movie magnate Boaz Davidson has moved on from Israeli ethnic comedies, his films could still be called exploitational
Since the starts of the millennium, independent producer Boaz Davidson's slate of B-level creature features - many of them intended to fill the voracious maws of cable TV's Sci-Fi Channel - has increasingly fed off of ostensibly deep-rooted societal anxieties generated, he believes, by human tampering with nature.
In 2000 alone, the Israeli-born Davidson's production company, L.A.-based Nu Image/Millennium Films, released "Spiders," based on his story about an arachnid injected with alien DNA, "Octopus," Davidson's take on a nuclear sub-harassing cephalopod, and "Crocodile," about a houseboat high school reunion crashed by a giant crock eager to party. Not surprisingly, some of these films have spawned sequels, such as "Crocodile 2: Death Swamp," "Octopus 2: River of Fear" and "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon." Davidson's current slate, moreover, includes a standing order from the channel for bio-horror hybrids tentatively called "Sharkman," "Snakeman" and - if that other Israeli Hollywood denizen Haim Saban, of Power Rangers fame, doesn't object - "Morphman."
Sporting longish salt-and-pepper hair, and modestly dressed in slacks and shirt, the 59-year-old Davidson appears inured, if not allergic, to the gloss and glitz of Hollywood. Soft-spoken, quick to smile, Davidson keeps the doors to his office open, and staffers enter at will. Davidson does not like airs, not in stars, he says, certainly not in himself or his colleagues. The limos and power lunches are for others - he just wants to make movies.
An Israeli-born version of Roger Corman (the Los Angeles-born Jewish filmmaker renowned - and reviled - as the "King of the Bs"), Davidson is an unapologetic purveyor of action, horror and science-fiction exploitation movies, that genre of low-budget pictures that take a dangerous or taboo subject and deal with it in a lurid and exciting fashion.
Like Corman, who gave a first chance to such directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and actors like Robert De Niro and Charles Bronson, Davidson has proved eager to mentor newly minted screenwriters, filmmakers and actors, some of whom are already well on their way toward achieving A-list stature. Audrey Wells, who recently directed "Under the Tuscan Sun" for Disney, got her directorial start at Nu Image. Kristanna Loken, the comely blonde robot nemesis, who gives Arnold the runaround in the latest entry in the "Terminator" franchise, made her silver screen debut in a Davidson vehicle, "Air Panic," subsequently released as "Panic." That film was as well-named as it was grimly timely, depicting terrorists propelling airliners into high-rise buildings a full year before September 11, 2001.
"It was just impossible to watch," Davidson told The Report, concurring with one of the film's screenwriters, who, in the wake of 9/11, described "Panic" as "mind-blowingly inappropriate." Obviously "Panic" could not be released as scheduled.
Not without trepidation, Davidson released the movie some eight months later for TV and video, providing critics with reason to decry his apparent embrace of cheap thrills and poor taste. Says Davidson: "Business is business - over time, as people integrated the event in their lives, it seemed less outrageous or inappropriate."
Davidson, 59, has been taking flak throughout his 35 years as a filmmaker. In Israel, where the London Film School graduate claims to have christened the wildly popular ethnic comedies of the 60s and 70s - many of them of his own making - with the term "burekas movies" (a reference to the knish-like pastries introduced to Israel by Sephardi immigrants), Davidson, an Ashkenazi of Polish background, was accused of promoting racist stereotypes. Especially irksome to some was that many of the actors hired to depict Mizrahi characters were not Sephardi themselves, and resorted to exaggerated accents and gestures to convey their ethnicity.
"Of course, you can look back at those days when there was a lot of poverty, and yes, even racism," the Tel Aviv-raised Davidson recalls. "But I grew up in an area, and in an apartment house, with people from almost every part of the world. Rather than inspire dark thoughts, I found the interactions of my neighbors funny and heartwarming. And if I engaged in ethnic stereotypes, no one was spared, least of all my own kind. Today, an Israeli film is considered successful if it brings in 100,000 or 150,000 people. My movies were being seen by a million plus."
Film critics initially hailed him for his early output, much of it made for TV, which was viewed as avant-garde. "People said it reminded them of Czechoslovakian art films," he said. They greeted "Shablul" (Snail, 1970), an irreverent, satirical romp about the making of the record album of the same name, as a landmark modernist film.
With subsequent hits like "Hetzi-Hetzi" (Half-and-Half, 1971), "Charlie Vehetzi" (Charlie-and-a-Half) in 74 and "Snooker" in 75 (the latter about a vegetable seller who enlists his wheeler-dealer twin brother to court the rabbi's daughter he hopes to wed), though, the sheen began to fall from this prolific and otherwise promising wunderkind. The critics could stomach the supposed racism or ridicule they perceived in his burekas movies (despite, or perhaps because of, their being embraced by Mizrahi filmgoers). Less forgivable was his perpetuation of an insufferably lowbrow, and commercially lucrative, genre. But Davidson has always held that movies are meant to entertain. Israel's so-called modernistic filmmakers and wannabe auteurs were not only boring, in his estimation, but unprofessional as well. And the subsequent deluge of films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he says, provided the final kiss of death. In driving audiences away, Davidson told The Report, they did "even more damage to the Israeli film industry than the advent of television."
Davidson's autobiographical and heartfelt 1978 coming-of-age comedy, "Eskimo Limon" (Lemon Popsicle), proved the final betrayal. He found himself accused of producing soft-core porn, because of some bare-breasted scenes. But, "Popsicle" went on to become an international sensation, doing huge business in Japan and Europe, and even the Communist bloc, and in its wake, Davidson found himself standing alongside his co-producer Menachem Golan as one of the country's most prolific and financially solvent filmmakers.
"Popsicle's" unexpected commercial legs, however, demanded an endless string of sequels - not all of them with the word "popsicle" in their title - as many as 12, says Davidson. He did the first four, but eventually burned out on the endeavor. "'Popsicle' was a very personal movie for me," he told The Report, "very pure, in the sense that it addressed some of the issues I faced as a teenager - first love, jealousy, getting dumped - that were still painful in my early 30s. Yes, there was some sexual content, but that was part of growing up. And because I am basically a shy person, I couched those scenes in farce. I couch everything in humor - I just seem to have a capacity to make people laugh.
"I was one of very few people in those days who could make a living strictly by making movies. But sustaining a family - I had two girls and a third on the way - required me to make three or four films a year. It was grueling. So, in 1979, I suggested to my wife that we take a year off with our daughters and relax in Los Angeles."
Davidson left at a propitious time. "Lemon Popsicle" had provided producers Menachem Golan and his cousin, Yoram Globus, with the impetus to try their prospects in the U.S. and Europe. The same year, the two bought a small New York-based production company called Cannon. Within two years, the hitherto debt-ridden company, now relocated to Los Angeles, reported revenues of $ 34.2 million, generated by American-style genre movies geared for a schlock-hungry world marketplace.
Davidson went to work for Cannon a short time later, and remained until shortly before its dissolution, in May, 1994. "In America," he recounts, "it was impossible for me to use my creative strengths, which I usually draw from my surroundings. To me, everything came from Tel Aviv. It's such a small place, you knew everyone, including your audience.
"I couldn't make movies about American life or history the same way I could about Israel. But I could make genre movies, because horror, science fiction, action pictures and thrillers don't have borders. They are universal, and feed off the psychological fears we all share. Ironically, I could never have made these movies at home. Israelis don't like genre movies. They're seen as 'hantarish,' junk."
Davidson created Nu Image/Millennium Films in 1992, with longtime friends, collaborators and fellow Israelis Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort. By 1998, the company had released 78 films budgeted at between two to eight million dollars each. And not all of them can properly be described as hantarish.
"The Last American Virgin," a "Lemon Popsicle" clone he directed in 1982, has been described by DVD News as "quite possibly the best drama-comedy that came out of the 80s." More recently, his lean and spare boxing film "Undisputed" (2002), starring Wesley Snipes and directed by Walter Hill, was described by Variety as boasting "the most physically intense fight sequences since 'Raging Bull.'" Other non-exploitation titles to take their place alongside such sci-fi schlock as "American Cyborg," "Lunar Cop" and "Bridge of Dragons" include "American Perfekt," a psychological thriller with Amanda Plummer and David Thewlis; "Frankie the Fly," starring Dennis Hopper; and "Santa Fe," a dramatic comedy about a man's struggle against religious cults in the Southwest, which actually gained acceptance into the art film competition at Sundance in 1996.
The company produces about a dozen movies a year (for some, it has a distribution deal with Miramax). Davidson says that one of the lessons he learned working at Cannon was not to allow his production plate to become unmanageable. "In one year at Cannon," he recalls, "we did 52 movies. No one can deal with that kind of a load. You can't stay in control, and if you try, you are committing suicide."
Yet Davidson has still not weaned himself from the pleasures of making Israeli movies. One project in particular has continued to tempt him throughout his career - a comedic account of the visit to Uganda by Zionist emissaries sent at the turn of the 20th century to determine whether it might serve as a homeland for the Jews. "I know the effort was seriously intended," says Davidson, "but I can't help but see it as an opportunity for a broad farcical comedy."