The Man Who Made A Man Of The World

The Man Who Made A Man Of The World

This isn’t about American history or my journalism. Since I posted my short film on You Tube (A Man Of The World.mov), a little liner note action is appropriate.

                                                                     John MacDonald and Some Strange Guy

There’s a big church on the corner of Franklin and Highland in Hollywood. I pass it on my habitual walks through the neighborhood, and frequently noticed a curious man, his arms loaded with papers, his glasses toggled onto his head, scurrying through the doors. Sometimes these impressions stay with you until they become obsessive. You either act on them or you write about it. This time, I acted.

     I followed him into the church to see what goes on. My instinct told me it was not just about praising Jesus (nothing wrong with that).

    He squirreled up a winding staircase and into a dank, poorly lit corridor, treading over cat-decorated carpeting and passing an out of tune piano. The hand written sign on the warped door through which he stumbled read, “First Stage.” From the piles of headshots and well-worn scripts cluttering the hall, I realized this was a theater group.

    When I knocked on the open door, John MacDonald peered up at me like I was the last line on an eye chart. “Can I be of some help to you?” he asked in his lilting Irish brogue before consenting to read a few pages I had scribbled.

   Thus I joined First Stage, a theatrical company with an impressive board of directors that included the late Paul Newman and Ed Asner.

    I had belonged to a similar group in New York, and had productions in the Lamb’s Theater and other prominent venues. However, the one negative review damned the positive when my writing was accused of being so abstract it gave the listener a headache.

    Wanting to do damage to hearts as well, I fine-tuned into several stories my mother’s mother had told me about her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. I had spent a lot of time on the Italian side of my family because the German Jewish side was, to be honest, too overwhelmingly sad. This story as it coalesced in my mind, however, had to be told. That is how Leo Brunn came into being. I think of him as the grandfather I never knew, and when I dug up the courage to ask him about the Holocaust, the play was born.

      A successful performance at First Stage prompted John to corner me in the wings of the stage. “I’ve got to make a movie of this,” he said.

      “Great,” I said. “How?”

      “I’ll get Ed Asner to star in it.”

    Wow, I thought. I loved Asner as the morally conflicted slave ship captain in Roots, the old man in Pixar’s Up, and as Lou Grant in that sitcom with Mary Who Turned The World On With Her Smile. He’s won about eight Emmys. “Do you know him?”

     I never got a clear answer, but after John and I re-visioned the play as a movie, John stalked Ed, who was appearing as Franklin Roosevelt in another theater. Taking a page from the Busby Berkley Hollywood Success Story, John showed up every night and waited backstage for Ed, who politely ignored him. Until one night when Ed confronted him with something like, “Who the hell are you?”

      John handed him my script.

      Ed called John the next day. “I have to do this,” he said.

     A few weeks later, we hired the lovely Anna Lodj, an actual Polish lady, to play the Polish lady who meets Ed’s character in Breslau on the eve of Kristallnacht, 1938, and the multi-talented Michael Perri to play a much nicer version of “me,” the son about to go to Vietnam who wants to know how his father survived the Holocaust. Instead of a tale of death camps, he gets an extraordinary love story.

     John lined up the film guru Alain Silver to produce and the brilliant cinematographer and editor Paolo Durazzo to lovingly handcraft what I think is a tender and bittersweet interpretation of my play.

     Working with Ed Asner was an experience worthy of a separate story. Let’s just say he’s as crusty and loveable as Lou Grant, but with a lot more dirty jokes. The filming, done on the hospital set used by E.R., Supernatural, and other shows, was fraught with the typical and a few atypical dramas, including 80-year-old Ed’s working two twelve-hour days in a row in his pajamas, but that any movie ever gets made is something of a miracle.

       Take a look for yourself: A Man Of The World.mov

       When I followed John into his rabbit hole, I never thought that he would get me to pop out of mine even for a little while. That, too, was a miracle.