Having affectionately satirized American Jews in several films, director Paul Mazursky is hoping his next project will take him to Israel
"NO, I DON'T THINK Marlon Brando is anti-Semitic," says director Paul Mazursky, when asked about the ruckus raised by the actor's recent interview with Larry King. "Brando just said a dumb thing. Where he was totally wrong, though, is when he said that Jews never have bad portraits of Jews (in movies). I think you can make a huge list, and most of it (by) Jews… precisely because they can laugh at themselves."
Any such list would surely have many of Mazursky's movies close to the top.
A number of the 16 feature films he has written and directed over the past three decades ("Down and Out in Beverly Hills," "Next Stop, Greenwich Village," "Scenes from a Mall") have poked fun at Jewish characters, be they humble Brooklynites or nouveau-riche Los Angeles social climbers.
"I do these movies (about Jews) because it's what I know about," says the 66-year-old filmmaker, puffing away on a cigarette in his Beverly Hills office. "Mostly, I suppose, they are satirical pictures. But in every case, I like the people, which is why I feel comfortable satirizing them. They have real hearts that beat. And if you feel the affection toward them that I do, you can satirize them as much as you want, and no one will ever suggest you are mean-spirited or, God forbid, anti-Semitic."
That wasn't a relevant issue with Mazursky's latest film, "Faithful," which was based on a comic play by actor-writer Chazz Palminteri, and also features him as a Mafia hit-man who falls in love with his intended victim (Cher). "Faithful" opened in April to mediocre reviews, failing to provide Mazursky with the kind of box-office hit his career could use nowadays. But he isn't sitting around licking his wounds; in June, he will travel to Israel to serve as a judge for the biannual International Student Film Festival hosted by the cinema department of Tel Aviv University. He also intends to use the visit to research a project he hopes to shoot there. Tentatively titled "My Friend the Messiah," he describes the screenplay as a sort of "Third Man"-type thriller set in Jerusalem and Qumran, the site where most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. The Hollywood vet eran knows, though, that getting such a project off the ground won't be easy.
"American movie companies don't mind making Biblical epics as long as they can shoot them in Morocco or Tunis. But they're nervous about shooting movies in Israel. I would be too - (but) there's no way I could fake the scenes elsewhere. You can't fake Jerusalem. I'd need the Wall, the King David Hotel, Qumran, the Dead Sea. We'd have to take over Masada for a few days… I can tell you right now that getting insurance for the production would be hell."
MAZURSKY WAS BORN AND raised in Brooklyn to American-born parents of Russian-Jewish background. His father worked at a newspaper print plant; he describes his mother as "overbearing" -
a description which will surprise no one who saw his 1976 autobiographical film "Next Stop, Greenwich Village," which features an over-the-top Shelly Winters playing the mother-of-all-Jewish mothers.
"I had a very strong mother who was also very distraught," says Mazursky. "It was difficult for her because I was her only child. But as you can see, I survived." Indeed, critic Pauline Kael characterized Larry Lapinsky, the protagonist of "Next Stop, Greenwich Village," as "rather what young Alex Portnoy might have been if he had recovered from his complaint."
"I tend to think they don't make Jewish mothers that way anymore," says Mazursky, not at all wistfully. "That's from yesterday - at least as far as the movies are concerned. We're all too homogenized now. Today, young Jewish screenwriters are writing movies about growing up with Yuppie parents. Clueless' is the perfect Jewish family picture for the 90s."
Mazursky characterizes his own family, past and present, as "Pesah Jews." Although he "steps forward on certain occasions," he is not a religious man, and he believes that religion tends to cause more harm in the world than good. He was the first in his family to marry a non-Jewish woman, and he scoffs at intimations that intermarriage could wreak demographic havoc with his fellow American Jews.
"The great thing about the Jews," he said, recalling the instance of a cousin who married a black social worker over two decades ago, "is that they can accept reality and assimilate in a way that is profoundly moving." The only one in his family to take Judaism seriously (besides his cousin's husband, who ended up converting) was Mazursky's grandmother.
"She would go to daven on Yom Kippur," he says, "and my grandfather would stay home and eat pickled herring. How could you eat pickled herring on a day like today?!' she'd demand. I was hungry,' he'd tell her."
Mazursky studied literature at Brooklyn College, moved to Greenwich Village and learned acting with Lee Strasberg. During the late 1950s, he eked out a living in New York waiting on tables, teaching drama and appearing intermittently on stage, TV and in movies - including a small role as a high school hood in the 1955 classic "The Blackboard Jungle." Mazursky continues to perform on-screen in bit parts in his own movies, and occasionally takes more substantial supporting roles in other directors' films, such as his turn last year as Sarah Jessica Parker's philandering father in "Miami Rhapsody."
In 1963, after moving to Los Angeles, he formed a comedy-writing partnership with Larry Tucker, contributing material to such television programs as "The Danny Kaye Show." The two scored their first film success in 1968 with an Oscar-nominated screenplay for the hippie cult film, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas," starring Peter Sellers. That success led to Mazursky's successful directing debut the next year with "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," a sharply funny look at the sexual revolution played out in its most extreme Southern California fashion.
Mazursky's next directing effort, "Alex in Wonderland," was an autobiographical look at a creatively stumped Hollywood director clearly inspired by the Fellini classic "81/2."
"Like Alex, I had a wife and two children, I had a big success, and I still didn't know what to do next."
While "Alex" flopped (although it retains a cult following), the filmmaker bounced back strongly during the 70s and 80s, turning out such works as "An Unmarried Woman," "Harry and Tonto," and "Moscow on the Hudson," leading critic Roger Ebert to hail him as "one of the best directors of comedy in Hollywood." Despite all this, Mazursky had a tough time finding bankrollers for one of his pet projects: a screen version of "Enemies: A Love Story," Isaac Bashevis Singer's dark comic novel about the travails of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself bouncing between the beds of his two wives and his mistress.
"This was before Schindler's List,'" recalls Mazursky. "In Hollywood, they never tell you why they're turning you down. But it was pretty obvious they thought no one would ever want to see a picture about Holocaust survivors." Of course the film, which he finally made in 1989, became one of his biggest hits, earned Oscar nominations for himself and actors Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin, and even managed to please the prickly Singer himself.
Still, to hear Mazursky tell it, the older he gets, the harder it is to get a project off the ground. Partly it's a matter of Hollywood's preference for younger talent, but mostly, he says, the problem is that the economics of filmmaking have changed.
"Of the movies I made," he explains, "eight or nine of them cost maybe $ 2 million each. Today, the average cost of a movie is $ 35 million, and producers are more nervous about making something slightly tricky or intelligent. We just don't have witty, sharp, interesting movies anymore in this country. Instead, we have Batman 2,' Die Hard 5,' Flipper 8.' That's just not what I want to do."
MAZURSKY ADDRESSED THIS very situation three years ago with "The Pickle," another satirical look at the film business that starred Danny Aiello as a director who finds himself having to churn out a ridiculous science fiction script. Ironically, Mazursky become so frustrated wrangling with Columbia over the making of "The Pickle" that he ended up putting a fictional name - "Alan Smithee" - in the credits in place of his own. Last year, he again got into another very public row over the final cut of "Faithful" with Robert de Niro, one of its producers.
Both films were flops, and the flaps between Mazursky and the Hollywood powers-that-be over the making of them may have earned him a late-life reputation for being difficult. None of this, though - nor the fact that he is now hoping to film a project in Israel which, by his own admission, is going to be a tough sell to backers - seems to faze him.
"I'm very happy with the career I've had," he says. "I don't analyze it. The past is over. I'm pleased people like some of my work a lot, but I'm really only interested in what I'm doing now."
Graphic
STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN: Director Mazursky is far from down and out in Beverly Hills