INDEX: MEDIA PLAYS (film, TV, Radio)

SCREENPLAYS, TELEPLAYS, RADIO PLAYS

BOOKWORM! (short horror-comedy, 1988)
(co-written with Al Hunter)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-FQ

EXTRA (short comedy, 1987)
(conceived by Zvi Arav, based on a short story by Ephraim Kishon)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-Gf

MUDDY
1983 (short comedy. Synopsis: A spoof of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, wherein (ugly) boy meets (homely) girl)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-Ha

REAL TO REEL
1983 (short comic radio play. Synopsis: Unscrupulous TV reporter covers a fire)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-HL

THE SECOND COMING OF MICHAEL ZIVITZ (screenplay treatment, dark comedy, 1983)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-KZ

SEPARATING (short drama, 1983)
(adapted from John Updike short story)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-Lp

TOFU LIZARD MAMA (short comedy, 1984)
(co-written by Philip Halprin)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-1Ee
{produced 1985; directed by Philip Halprin. (watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_nHbpOaYME)

UP WITH THE JONESES
1985 (short screenplay. Synopsis: A perfect American family has its Walpurgistag)
—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-Id

Read Full Post »

NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #107 (9/21/14) – GWYNETH

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #107 (9/21/2014): Gwyneth

aired Sept. 20, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF1GwetYq3E, AUDIO: https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27564

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 21, 2014.

Over this summer, I had my beefs with celebrities – some Jewish, some not – and their bashing of Israel over the Gaza War. Celebrities who are either misinformed or simply too damn dumb to know who their friends are in this world, versus who the enemies are. Who is creating a climate of death and destruction versus who is just trying to live without being hit by rockets every day? So fie on Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem and Rihanna and that putz from Pink Floyd Roger Waters, and Chuck D, who’s been salting his lyrics with anti-Semitic slurs since day one. You wanna know what a Terrordome is, Chuck? Go live in Israel and be forced to live under an iron terrordome so that Hamas rockets don’t fall on your black ass. Why don’t you do that, Chuck D-spicable?

Meanwhile, other famous folk have been fabulous! Howard Stern, Bill Maher, Joan Rivers – she should rest in peace – Woody Allen, who gave a wonderful, insightful interview about the situation. He was the first one to say that if, back in 1948, the Arabs had treated Israel like a friendly neighbor instead of hornets’ nest, everything would be different. Notice: it’s all the funny people, the comedians, who see through the Palestinian PR poppycock. I guess it takes a humorist to shoot the arrows of logic through balloons filled with hot-air. Or, in the Arabs’ case, airplanes filled with terrorists. Thank God the funny people get it, because all these self-inflated “serious” actors and musical artistes – they look in the mirror and see Felix Frankfurter staring back at them – instead of the hot dogs they really are.

Even so, I come today not to vilify my enemies but to glorify my brethren and, in this case, sistren. In celebrity news last week, it was revealed that the Jewish people will be gaining a notable. The decades since World War II have seen our numbers chopped by the Holocaust, by assimilation, by intermarriage, by – you should pardon the expression – conversion (ptooey!). Now, the Orthodox are doing their best to reverse the trend. They’re shtupping and shtupping and being fruitful and multiplying, which has been heavenly to the cause, even as it’s been hell on the welfare rolls.

But we cannot rely merely on the horniness of our most devout cohorts to bolster our population. It is a delight, therefore, to report that yes, we’re getting one back. Someone who, if nothing else, raises the overall good-looks quotient of our nation by at least a percent or two.

Gwyneth Paltrow, a shikseh goddess if there ever was one – tall, blonde, willowy, pretty as a picture and pretty in motion pictures – Gwyneth Paltrow is converting to Judaism. Now, to be clear, she’s already halfway there. Her father was television producer Bruce Paltrow, a proud member of the tribe. Her mother, however, is the lovely non-Jewish actress Blythe Danner. She’s the one on TV commercials hawking Prolia, a pharmaceutical that helps weak bones, which is ironic because you don’t get nicer bones than Blythe Danner or her kid.

Little Gwyneth was raised in a home with both religions, which she found very nice. But in recent years, she’s been studying Kabbalah, which is a weird, mystical occult offshoot of Judaism. Kind of liked dungeons and dragons, only the dungeons are synagogues and the dragons have big noses and law degrees.

But Paltrow is not just being swayed by a cultish micro-sect. She’s done her homework. In 2011, she appeared on that TV show that delves into your genealogical history. She went into the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side and looked at pictures of her father’s father’s father – a great Rabbi. And his father, also a Kabbalistic Rebbe of note. With people like that in your lineage, what are you gonna be, a Presbyterian?

And Ms. Paltrow has said that she wants to bring her children up, quote, “in a Jewish environment.” Well, she’s in Hollywood, so she’s already there. But she’s got one kid named Moses – so come on, she might as well have named him Jewy Jewberg – and the other child she famously named Apple. Well, is there a more Jewish fruit? From Eve in the garden to the treat we dip in honey for a sweet New Year, the apple is a treasured food for our people – and it doesn’t clog up your tuchas like matzoh.

And speaking of eating, Paltrow has said that she loves to cook and feed people, making her a Jewish mother, and she has amazing genes, making her a Jewish princess. And hey, considering all the macrobiotic laboratory crap she eats, she’s a Jewish doctor, too!

Now, all of this could just be a star’s fad, or Paltrow trying to find herself after consciously uncoupling from her shaygitz husband of more than a decade. Whatever the reason, I hope it takes. I hope she finds in Judaism a beautiful way of life – not from all the rules, not from the mystical narishkeit, but from fully joining a people that has survived the worst the universe can throw at them and still turn to each other and say, “Really? Those shoes with that shirt?” 

Welcome, Golden Gwyneth, to the fold, and when your kids turn 12, look me up. I can have them chanting the Haftorah like Yossele Rosenblatt in three months flat, or your money back. Well, some of your money back.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

(c) 2014 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.

—> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27564

–> https://wp.me/pzvIo-22O

Read Full Post »

NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #62 (4/7/2013): ROGER EBERT

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #62 (4/7/2013): Roger Ebert

Aired April 7, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAn_bgyfJ7s

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of April 7th, 2013.

Hail and farewell to the respected, prolific and popular film critic, Roger Ebert. On Thursday April 4th, two days after saying he wanted to take things a little slower, he instead came to a complete halt, with cancer doing him in at age 70.

Anyone who loves movies is going to miss Roger Ebert, not just because he warned you what was a stinker before you laid down your six dollars. And then $10. And now $19, or 25 if you throw in popcorn. And not just because Roger could talk intelligently without being patronizing – something I haven’t mastered in 53 years. And not just because Roger’s love for good movies came through even when he pooped on bad ones. The biggest legacy of Roger Ebert – and Gene Siskel – was in remaking the idea of “what is a critic?” Admit it. Before those two, you probably thought of a movie or theater critic as this dreary, sepulchral, Ichabod Crane type, with a Bostonian accent, his nose in the air and his pen in someone’s back. He was better than you, and he sure let you know it. Or he talked so far over your head, sparrows would crash into his verbs on their way to Capistrano.

But not Roger and Gene. Of course they were smart, but they were next-door-neighbor smart, not nuclear physicist smart. And when they explained why Blake Edwards was a genius and dead teenager films are a scourge – even if you didn’t agree, you appreciated their conviction and knew they were treating you like a grownup. Roger may have won a Pulitzer, but he never came off like a pudknocker.

Oh sure, Ebert’s weight made him an easy target for many years. At one point, he was so out of shape, it seemed a miracle he could even lift his thumb. And then, he had to give up TV because of the Big C. The first time I saw a picture of him after all those operations, my jaw dropped. Well, not as low as his, but it was still a shock. And yet, he continued to write. A man who came of age in a time of typewriters and telexes kept himself relevant in our age of tweets and tablets. In fact, he posted more movie reviews last year than he did any year before that. If I had to give that many sermons in a year, my brain would turn to gefilte fish.

And if my cranium did become an amalgam of whitefish, pike, sawdust and carp, would I have the guts Roger Ebert had in being so visible? Of going on Oprah with his new voice or on the internet with his fake chin? If I get a pimple on my nose, I hide for three days.

Among the many quotable quotes of Roger Ebert, he once said that “your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.” Well, I may not be able to follow another Charlie Kaufman movie, but I’m sad that we lost Roger Ebert. I think of Gene Siskel in heaven, waiting all these years for the day he could go, “Awright. No cameras. No censors. Rog, let’s really talk about `Cop and a Half’” Go at it guys; no one did it better.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

(c) 2013 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.

—> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=28994

–> https://wp.me/pzvIo-2ba

Read Full Post »

REVIEW – FILM: Much Ado About Nothing (1993 Branagh)

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: Thoughts about Two Characters and the Plot of Kenneth Branagh’s film

((c)1993 David Lefkowitz.

BENEDICK & DOGBERRY

How does Kenneth Branagh, merrily thrusting his squat frame, pinched blue eyes, and pasty features into camera range at every opportunity, belie his roundish, slightly unformed features to create a commanding Benedick? By chiseling his face with a trim, flattering beard. By speaking with crunchingly precise diction. By taking Benedick from stentorian narcissism through childlike confusion to a nobility shaped by romantic love.  

At first we wonder if the one-note boorishness of Branagh’s Benedick could ever be worthy of Emma Thompson’s layered and wounded Beatrice. Branagh, who doesn’t work in layers but tackles each moment frontally and then shifts position as events dictate, gives us a Benedick who will never have Beatrice’s depth but will do just fine matching her at her highest points of rage, sorrow, and exultation.

Who knew that under all Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice make-up lay a game, if ultimately unconvincing, Dogberry? It’s really the same character with worse teeth, an Irish brogue modulating the growl, and a different sense of vanity – Beetlejuice prided himself on his grossly outrageous sorcery; Dogberry, bowing and scraping before royalty and pasting his hair down with spit, displays an exaggerated sense of personal honor.  Still, if Keaton’s comic business is resourceful enough to shake off his previous movie, it doesn’t quite stick to this one. Galloping in like a horseless refugee from “Monty Python And The Holy Grail,” Keaton’s Dogberry is just too weird for this sunny “Much Ado,” and after he cruelly head-butts a henchman, we wonder if this greasy gangleader made a wrong turn on the way to “Oliver!” 

PLOT: 

In comedy, when one character loves only himself and the other is convinced she can love no one at all, we know they’re both destined for each other. So do the townfolk of “Much Ado About Nothing,” who devise a simple ruse involving hearsay to push haughty Benedick and prickly Beatrice together. Things are not so simple for childlike Claudio and his Hero, whose wedding plans are shattered when the evil Don John launches his own scheme to dishonor Hero and thereby destroy Claudio. To the rescue gallops grubby entrepreneur and sycophant, Dogberry. His henchmen trap the villains, and romantic harmony is restored to the kingdom. 

—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-2JH

****************************

NOTES & BACKSTORY: 

[June 2023] I wrote this piece to fulfill an assignment when I was a critic fellow of the National Critics Institute of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT. Though nearly all our activities and homework dealt with live theater, we venture to the just-released “Much Ado” at the local movie theater. Rather than write a full review, our mentor that day (who might have been Dan Sullivan, or maybe it was Jay Novick) asked us to concentrate just on a couple of specific aspects of the movie—hence the disjointed format of the above three paragraphs.  

Read Full Post »

FILM REVIEW: Camille Claudel

CAMILLE CLAUDEL

**3/4

(reviewed 1990 by David Lefkowitz. This review was first published in the Jan. 30-Feb. 13, 1990 issue of Good Times magazine)

In his directorial debut, acclaimed French cinematographer Bruno Nuytten has seized some of the madness, the irrational life force that drives and often destroys great artists. One can only assume that in doing so, Nuytten also captured the soul of his subject, late 19th century sculptress Camille Claudel. Notorious in her time, noted but not legendary now, Claudel remains always, as she was in life, under the shadow of her mentor, Auguste Rodin.

The opening shots of Camille Claudel set the tone for all that follows. In a grey, pounding rain we see Camille (Isabelle Adjani) fervidly scooping wet clay out of a ditch and into her suitcase. Back in her studio, she molds that common street mud into sculptures. Camille’s American roommate convinces the great Auguste Rodin (Gerard Depardieu) to pay a visit to their humble flat. Though not blown away by the untrained Camille’s talent, Rodin is sufficiently impressed to offer her a hunk of fine carving marble. Camille’s exceptional sculpture of a human foot convinces Rodin to let her join his busy workshop and help construct his colossal “Gates of Hell.

Despite numerous setbacks and warnings of Rodin’s reputation as a seducer, Camille develops a rich, professional relationship with her teacher. Each influences the other’s art—Rodin with craft, Claudel with feeling. Such artistic kinship can lead only to love, and that’s when the trouble starts. Though responsible for Camille’s pregnancy, Rodin finds himself unable to leave his sheltered life of family and wife.

Rodin’s conduct may be indefensible, but it’s apparent a man of such capacities and appetites could never give himself wholly to anyone, a lesson his spouse learned early but Camille never understands. Thus, in subsequent years, Rodin tries to make amends to his mistress by promoting her artwork, but Camille will have none of it. Sensitive by nature, Claudel’s psyche slowly shifts from creative madness to genuine mental disorder. Paranoia grips Camille as she imagines Rodin systematically wrecking her life and career. Camille smashes all her works rather than share them with an unsympathetic world, at which point her harsh mother and beloved brother commit her to an asylum where she spends the last 40 years of her life.

Though undeniably calamitous, Claudel’s story misses real tragedy since, unlike Peter Shaffer’s conception of a Mozart who is done in by a deceitful master and ignorant court, Camille subverts herself with her own sick mind. Yes, Rodin was a heel, and yes, critics at the time were more inclined to snicker than gape. But there was no conspiracy against her, no reason to play the part of a harlequin whore each time her career was offered a boost. As much as Camille’s mother is shown to be a loathsome, pitiable creature, it’s almost impossible to blame her for locking away a daughter who has become dementedly self-destructive.

If Camille Claudel’s deliberate pace and infuriating central character sometimes exhaust our patience, Bruno Nuytten compensates with more tricks than many far-more-experienced directors accumulate in a lifetime. To express the artistic process, Nuytten employs jumpcuts, 360-degree camera pans, complex sound design (Guillaume Sciama), swooping turns, and soaring angles. None of this would astonish of the film weren’t so gorgeous.

Isabelle Adjani, drawn to the lead role because of its portrayal of a talented, artistically passionate woman (though not a strong one—Camille collapses because of that oldest story in the book, the love of an unworthy man), tears into into Camille with ferocity and necessary empathy. There’s much pain in her performance, but no falsity or commercial softening. And Depardieu, long a French national treasure, quietly draws an unforgettable Rodin—earthy, lustful, unexpectedly timid, and not a little sad.

Were it not for the intense frequently ugly emotions at its core. Camille Claudel might have been just another coffee-table movie: lush, sweeping, and large. Instead, Bruno Nuytten, Isabelle Adjani, and Gerard Depardieu combine to create a work of art, a film as tantalizingly close to greatness as its tormented subject.

*

(Directed by Bruno Nuytten, Camille Claudel was released Dec. 7, 1988.)

Read Full Post »

NON-FICTION – ESSAY: A Sensible Solution

A SENSIBLE SOLUTION

((c)1989 David Lefkowitz. This article was first published in the July 28, 1989 issue of The Long Island Examiner newspaper.)

Congratulations to Congress for arriving at a sensible solution to the raging controversy involving protection of important films. Though arbitrarily limited in scope, the newly passed National Film Preservation Act should assuage the auteurs as it mollifies the mavericks.

Quite simply, the Preservation Act calls for a committee to choose 25 classics of American cinema to be officially designated as “treasures.” Any time these treasures are cut, censored, colorized, or otherwise changed from their original form, the film must carry a conspicuous label warning prospective viewers. Among the first batch of movies ripe for canonization are The Grapes of Wrath and It’s a Wonderful Life — the latter a holiday television fixture now generally shown in computerized color. 

It was, in fact, populist vulgarian Ted Turner and his digital fingerpaint that prompted the Director’s Guild of America to seek protective legislation in the first place. “If Frank Capra didn’t shoot his Wonderful Life in color,” they argue, “what right has Ted Turner to impose a rosy-cheeked James Stewart on the world?” Mr. Turner invariably counters that the only reason films in the 30s and 40s were shot in black and white was because color was unavailable. That may be true, but his thesis only confirms that those directors were forced to think in black and white; their cameramen and lighting designers composing their frames as a delicate balance of light and shadow.

The art vs. commerce controversy really heated up when Turner, feeling extra pugnacious, cracked that he was going back on his promise and would colorize Citizen Kane. Splashing video eyewash on low-budget Tarzan serials is one thing; altering the look of Hollywood’s greatest technical achievement is another. The mortified Director’s Guild took their complaint to Congress and, contrary to the House of Representatives’s abysmal recent record on arts issues, Congress chose aesthetics over cosmetics.

It now falls to members of the writers, artists, and directors guilds, NYU and UCLA film departments, and other respected motion-picture organizations to select 25 films worthy of landmark status. I, for one, wish them luck, since some of their probable choices make my all-time keeper list, as well (City Lights, To Kill a Mockingbird). 

But fussy cineaste that I am, I can’t help but wonder whether 25 films per year is sufficient. Video distributors may groan, but why not protect ALL movies? Prohibitive costs might limit restoration of film negatives to masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia or Napoleon, but how much trouble is it to label a video box, “computer colorized” or “recorded at slow speed”? How much effort would it be for a syndicated TV station to run a crawl before its screenings: “Language and adult situations edited for television. Contains footage not shown in theaters but seven minutes removed to make room for commercials. An announcer will talk loudly over the closing credits.”?

I exaggerate the particulars, but requiring networks to be upfront about their programming is no more unreasonable than asking for ingredients, instructions, and warnings on any other consumer item. And we rightly demand proper labeling on all these products, not just the expensive or popular ones.

Using the same logic, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather saga (a shoo-in for “treasure” status) may be a masterpiece, but is it any more deserving of special treatment than his less mainstream The Conversation or Apocalypse Now? And just suppose Mr. Coppola has a soft spot in his heart for his critical duds One from the Heart and Rumble Fish, both highly dependent on mood and visual style. As director, isn’t he entitled to safeguard the content of his own work?

Roddy McDowell, representing the Screen Actors Guild on the film-selection committee, pointed out that It’s a Wonderful Life was unappreciated in its time. As he told the New York Times, “Everything has historical value. A film that was thought to be kitsch or that was ignored can seem different decades later… As far as I’m concerned, every film is a national monument.”

By treating all movies as something to be cherished, we ennoble the art form and preserve the specialness of film for future generations. As long as complete, pure prints are readily available — and the differences are clearly noted — film enthusiasts should be willing to compromise on the exhibition of bastardized copies. We can’t stop our children from being served their movies sliced, diced, and spliced, but at least they’ll know that wasn’t the way those films were originally conceived.

So many mass-marketed movies have by now lost their copyrights, and the people who made them are no longer with us. Perhaps these craftsmen, plagued by undercranking projectionists, bad pianists, and reels out of sequence, would not have minded commercials and colorization, but to make such sweeping assumptions about all artists is to insult their collective memory. Ted Turner paid good money for his vault of movies, and it’s his legal privilege to dye them, blip them, or run them upside down and backwards if he so desires. All Congress can do is require that he warn us beforehand. It’s a courtesy to viewers who care and a sign of respect to the artists who dreamed.

→ https://wp.me/pzvIo-1Ls <–

Read Full Post »