8/12/23
Newsletter #425
The Crack of Dawn
When David Letterman first started, he had a running gag of calling an info line. He called in one night and asked, “What are the films of Neil Diamond?” The recorded female voice replied, “The films of Neil Diamond: The Jazz Singer, 1980. The Jazz Singer, 1980. The Jazz Singer, 1980 . . .”
I saw The Jazz Singer (1980) with my Hungarian grandmother, Olga. When we came out of the theater at the end she said with her thick Hungarian accent, “Whoever played his father is Hungarian.” I said, “Grandma, his father was played by the famous British actor, Laurence Olivier.” She nodded knowingly and said, “He’s Hungarian, you take my word for it.” What do I know? Maybe Olivier’s parents were Hungarian.
Grandma Olga was born outside Budapest in 1902. She immigrated to America by herself in 1923, then begrudgingly lived to be 96. She was the matriarch of our family, but not happily so. She said to me once, “I’ve had good times, I’ve had bad times, but mainly bad times.” She was an inspiration. My cousin Eric who is the same age as me stuttered as a kid. He worked hard and over the course of 20 years he overcame the speech impediment. Eric decided to go to law school and become a lawyer. He told Grandma Olga and she said, “Don’t, you’ll fail.” Well, Eric not only became a lawyer, he became a litigator. He did anything but fail. If Olga wanted to make me really fucking mad – to prove I loved her, I suppose – she could do it any time she wanted. One night I was driving her home and I would guess I was about 35 years old. Out of nowhere she suddenly said. “Go back to college. Get a degree. Get a good job.” I’d already written and directed two feature films and thought I was doing pretty well. My completely irrational response was to scream as loud as I could and drive off the road.
In 1992 in a spectacular display of courage and fortitude, I told L.A. to fuck itself for the third or fourth time, tucked my tail firmly between my legs, and moved back to Detroit. My mother and sister had both moved to Florida. For two years I worked as a furniture salesman and had dinner with Grandma Olga every night. Cooking for me gave her something to do all day long, unlike all the other old people in the Jewish Federation senior apartments. Of course, there was only me and she cooked for eight people. Then she would stand beside me with her arms crossed, not eating, and watch me eat, urging me on. “Eat!”
In 1995 I moved back to L.A., only this time I actually had a job in the movie and TV business directing Hercules and Xena. Except that left nobody back in Detroit with Grandma Olga, who was now in her 90s and failing. As Olga kept taking yet another turn for the worse, my mother and I switched off flying back to Michigan to take care of her. She finally entered the chronic, stuck-in-the-hospital stage.
This is how the universe works. We had shot the first “Season” of Hercules, which was really five feature-length movies, and I was all over those. I was the 2nd unit director on two of them, I wrote the story and directed the fifth film, then I came back as 2nd unit director and cleaned up all five films. During the course of a year and a half of making these five films, a fellow named John Mahaffie operated the Steadicam on the movie that I directed, Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur (1994). The movie’s big finale is in the minotaur’s cavern. We had a big cool set, with stalactites and stalagmites, arranged on two levels with ramps. I covered everything with a moving Steadicam, and John Mahaffie did a great job. A lot of that movie I can live without, but I really like that scene.
Hercules the five movies got picked up as the TV series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and John Mahaffie got the job as the director of photography. It’s a good-looking show, just like all the stuff that’s shot in New Zealand. Most of the DPs in NZ are very good, though everything does look like Lord of the Rings. Anyway, for some reason I was not getting hired on the Hercules show. After ten episodes or so, I asked Rob Tapert, the executive producer, “Why aren’t you hiring me?” Rob said, “You and Mahaffie won’t get along.” I said, “He did a great job with the Steadicam on Minotaur and we got along fine. I like him a lot.” Rob said, “He’s a slow DP. You two won’t get along.” In truth, I had heard, particularly from Bruce, that Mahaffie was indeed slow. I thought, “Well, fuck, being a fast director is now being used against me? I can slow down.”
Oddly, the universe doesn’t give a shit about my career. Grandma Olga got sick again. I flew back to Michigan, and lucky for me I didn’t have a pesky job getting in my way. I moved Grandma Olga into Sinai Hospital (where I was born), in Detroit. This is where she began her final losing battle, at the age of 95, and mentally, she was completely with it. It appeared that this was going to take a few weeks, possibly a month, so I got a crappy weekly room at a little motel, the Sunshine Inn, not far from where I grew up, although it was entirely surrounded by other motels, car dealerships, and the freeway.
For about a month I went every day to Sinai Hospital and sat with Grandma Olga as her kidneys failed. She was reasonably calm about the whole thing. Her orneriness had finally been kicked out of her. I bought her a stuffed elephant in the hospital gift shop. She couldn’t grasp the idea that I would get her an elephant – of all things – and it happened to be a word she could not say. She said, “Ef-a-lant.”
So why is Josh telling the story about taking care of his dying grandmother? Is this “virtue signaling”? Are we all supposed to think he’s a terrific guy, a mensch, for taking care of his beloved old grandmother?
No. It’s worse than that. It’s all about movie trivia, and worse still, I already told this story about 300 newsletters ago. But it’s a highlight in my life.
The Jewish Federation has elderly workers who come to the hospital and tend to anyone and everyone. They find out whatever the patients need or want and get it for them. So an old Jewish guy about 80 in a white coat came to my grandma’s room. He wore a black name tag on his chest that said, “Pasternak.” The most famous Pasternak I know of is Boris Pasternak, who wrote the book, Doctor Zhivago. So, of course, I asked, “Are you related to Boris Pasternak?” and he said no. I’m sure that’s where the conversation generally ended with most people. Not me. I asked, “Are you related to the movie producer, Joe Pasternak?” He looked at me with a level of astonishment that bordered on fear. How the fuck did I know that? He said, “Yes. He was my uncle.” I said, “He never made a movie that didn’t make money. He was second-in-command to Arthur Freed. He produced all of the Esther Williams and Deanna Durbin movies. I read his autobiography, Easy the Hard Way, which was very good.” I sort of frightened him.
I ran into this guy several more times after that. I forget, Shemp Pasternak, or whatever, but he really had no idea what his uncle had accomplished.
To be clear, and get out of this, Joseph Pasternak was more important than his nephew had any idea. He produced Judy Garland and Gene Kelly’s earliest movies – and Judy’s last MGM movie, Summer Stock (1950) – as well as the classic film, Destry Rides Again (1939), with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.
Dawn has arrived. Again. Why, it’s almost like clockwork.