I met Bergstein at a screening of Dirty Dancing, the seminal coming-of-age film that is actually much, much more than that, organized by the website Jezebel to benefit the New York Abortion Access Fund, which drew a packed house at a downtown movie theater. An illegal abortion (and its botched, back-alley consequences) shape much of the plot, making the 1987 film about summer in 1963 far ahead of its time. Bergstein, in a pre-screening discussion with Jezebel’s Irin Carmon (who last year wrote the definitive piece on Dirty Dancing, and who posted video of last week’s event), said she was adamant as a producer that the abortion remain in the film, since, she had presciently argued, the battle for reproductive rights still hadn’t been won.

Calling Dirty Dancing “a very American film,” Bergstein described it as the story of a young girl who took her life in her hands and ran with it, no matter what it cost her. (As Carmon helpfully contextualized long before the screening, “The daughter of the first generation of American Jews to read widespread upper-middle class prosperity, if not elite cultural acceptance, she is swathed in a pre-Kennedy assassination liberalism.”) I counted enough male attendees to abandon my tally of how many might actually show up as the lights went down and the instantly recognizable opening notes of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” filtered through the sound system.

For those of you unfamiliar (shame, shame), the film centers around Frances Houseman, a 17-year-old (Jewish) New Yorker whom everyone calls Baby, who is spending the summer with her family in the Catskills at Kellerman’s resort. Heading to Mount Holyoke in the fall to study economics of underdeveloped countries, the idealistic Baby—portrayed perfectly by a pre-plastic surgery Jennifer Grey—intervenes to help get Penny, a dance instructor at the resort, the money she needs for an abortion. Sheltered enough to not realize exactly how dangerously makeshift that procedure might be, but insistent on helping and convinced she can, Baby also fills in for Penny and dances with Johnny, the male dance instructor played by the delightfully swoon-worthy Patrick Swayze, for the pair’s annual gig at the nearby Sheldrake resort.

Returning to find Penny in alarmingly bad shape after the primitive, unsanitary abortion, Baby calls upon her father, a doctor, for help. Jerry Orbach saves the day, as usual, though he is horrified at what his daughter has become a party to. Though Dr. Houseman expressly forbids Baby from seeing Johnny, mistakenly believing he is responsible for what is euphemistically referred to throughout the film only as getting Penny in trouble, she sneaks out to see him for, as Carmon convincingly argues, “the greatest love scene of all time.” Class tensions and scheduled activities resume, while Baby is forced to deal with her changing relationship both to Johnny and her father, challenging each man with her resolute determination (and, dare I say, complete stubbornness).

The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities. Referring back to Carmon’s description of Baby in the artificial environment at Kellerman’s,

Told her whole life that she could do anything and change the world, she’s faced with the hypocrisy of a long-shunned minority enacting its own unexamined exclusion, this time on class grounds. The guests at Kellerman’s look comfortable, but they were raised in the Depression and traumatized by World War II.

After the screening, I sat on the sticky movie theater steps with the energetic and eccentric Bergstein, who told me how grateful she felt seeing young people who so clearly love the film, and said it had been years since she’d seen it in a theater. I, for one, was certain I never noticed how insanely skinny the female leads were. Or, I suppose, how Jewish some of them were. Did I mention they’re coming out with a remake?

How To Say “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner” in German [Jezebel]
Eleanor Bergstein, Screenwriter, Talks Dirty Dancing [Village Voice]
Dirty Dancing is the Greatest Movie of All Time [Jezebel]
Do ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Thelma and Louise’ Still Matter? [WSJ]

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson’s hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been “How Not to Make a Jewish Movie” gives a hint of what to expect.

By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He’d received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn’t quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie. Lillian Ross’s Picture and John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio had already given readers vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood filmmaking, but Shavelson pulled the curtain back firsthand and revealed, humorously and memorably, the industry’s machinations, long before the public became well-versed in box office figures and books like You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again shot up the best-seller list.

How to Make a Jewish Movie is primarily a chronicle of everything that can go wrong in the creation of a big-budget film, from rights acquisition to the ad campaign. But Shavelson, who was born in Brooklyn, opens with a confession: “I have never entered a synagogue of my own free will, except for the ceremonies attendant on birth, death, or marriage.”

So how does a comedy writer—especially one who says he was “ashamed” of being Jewish—wind up making an earnest biopic about the founding of Israel? At the suggestion of a friend at MGM, he reads Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (MGM had just dropped its option on the book, so his friend called to say it was up for grabs), and something is awakened in him:

After reading Ted Berkman’s book I knew I had to make that movie if it killed me. . . . I literally ran to Paramount’s front office and pantingly laid this hot project on the desk of the head man. Would Paramount buy it for me? 

He was kindly, intelligent, shrewd, and went to Temple regularly every Rosh Hashonah. Who, he asked me, would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?

Since, at the moment—and ever since—I couldn’t think of an answer, I decided to buy the rights to the book myself.

The story of David “Mickey” Marcus is indeed awe-inspiring. He was a Brooklyn-born West Point graduate who served as an infantry lieutenant in the ’20s, then returned to New York City to become a gangbusting U.S. attorney and Commissioner of Correction. At the outbreak of World War II he rejoined the army. According to Shavelson’s screen treatment (which he prints in full in the book) Marcus wrote Army training manuals, made his first parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, drafted the terms of surrender for Italy and Germany, and “was at Roosevelt’s side at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta.” In Germany, General Patton appointed him liaison officer with liberated concentration camp survivors. He was made second-in-command in occupied Berlin, and organized the Nuremberg trials and Japanese war crimes trials. In 1947, having returned to New York to work as a lawyer, Marcus was quietly asked to guide the untrained and ill-equipped Jewish troops of Palestine in their fight for independence. He did it under an assumed name, with the secret blessing of the Pentagon. Against all odds he led Israel’s army to victory upon the nation’s birth—and was mistakenly killed by an Israeli sentry just a few hours before a truce was declared.

Shavelson’s own story of putting together Cast a Giant Shadow is heroic, too, in its way: he’s a mensch in the face of disaster. He makes the film sound like the most troubled shoot since Cleopatra, but does it in an avuncular, anecdotal way that anticipates Sidney Lumet’s 1995 book, Making Movies. Needing the involvement of a star—preferably a non-Jewish one—to make his project viable, whom does Shavelson go to first? The least Jewish man in Hollywood, John Wayne. Shavelson had co-written a movie for Wayne in the past, but they had squabbled on the set. Undeterred, he pitches Marcus’s story, ending by reading a eulogistic telegram to Marcus’s widow from David Ben Gurion. Wayne (known to all as Duke) lights a cigarette and says:

“That’s the most American story I ever heard.” 

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly. Ben Gurion had signed that telegram—not Ben Franklin.

“Everybody’s knockin’ the United States today,” Duke said, pacing the floor and covering half an acre of carpet with each stride. “Claiming we’re sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we’ve got no right to be. They’ve forgotten who were are and what we’ve done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.”

“Mickey was Jewish,” I insisted on reminding him.

“Don’t gimme that crap,” said Duke, “Jesus Christ was Jewish, too, and he didn’t even go to West Point.”

So, in a gesture of grand patriotism, Wayne agreed to appear in the picture. Not as Marcus—that role would go to Douglas, an actual Jew—but as a Patton-like general whom Shavelson would insert into his as-yet-unwritten script. Shavelson then took his pitch to the Mirisch brothers, Harold, Walter, and Marvin, “collectively the world’s largest independent producer of films,” and a deal was made. Soon after, in a location scouting trip to Israel, Shavelson got an early warning of the difficulties to come: The army’s commander-in-chief—none other than Yitzhak Rabin—demanded script approval. And, “in the event that the script should be approved, he went on to say, all film shot in Israel would have to be reviewed by the military authorities before being shipped out of the country.”

Luther Adler and Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow

In 1965 filming got under way in Tel Aviv with 125 crew members, 800 Israeli soldiers, and a thousand extras. The problems began immediately: During a shot, Israeli tanks left abruptly when the army learned that Syria had invaded; nearly all the trucks in another shot stalled when the desert temperature hit 126 degrees; the two technical advisors provided by the army clashed over key details; Israel’s Communist Party dropped leaflets from a roof into the middle of a crowd scene. Along the way, Brynner went unrecognized by Ben Gurion (“The King and I. . . which one were you?”), and Shavelson and Douglas bickered repeatedly over the script. On the last day of filming in Israel, 200 extras shot half of a scene, disappeared while the next shot was set up, and sent in a representative to proclaim that they had united as the Israel Screen Extras Guild and would not return until their salaries were tripled. After examining the footage, the Israeli Defense Forces sent a detailed critique, which included: “In Scene 327, the girl with a flowery skirt doing the Hora is completely out of step. Change this.”

When Cast a Giant Shadow was released in 1966 the question “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?” loomed over the national advertising campaign, which lacked, Shavelson writes, “all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.” Relating this fact, he seems understandably peeved. What he doesn’t say (perhaps it was a sore point) is that Otto Preminger’s Exodus, which also concerned the founding of Israel, was the fourth-biggest box-office draw of 1960. Cast a Giant Shadow didn’t earn back the cost of its negative.

So, how’s the movie? Kitschy. Its dialogue sounds, not coincidentally, like the work of a comedy writer. When Marcus tells Ben Gurion (played by Luther Adler, in a ridiculous white wig that makes him look more like Martin Van Buren) that Jerusalem has no strategic value, and that trying to save it doesn’t make sense, Ben Gurion says, “Did it make sense for a fellow with a nice, steady job building pyramids to march his friends into the Red Sea?” When it’s serious, it’s worse. A didactic argument between Marcus and Wayne’s American general about Israel’s future ends with Wayne—John Wayne!—raising his glass and declaring, “L’chaim.” (He pronounces it “la kime.”) Sinatra is amusing as a New Jersey pilot who drops seltzer bottles on the Arabs when the Israelis run out of bombs. Douglas is suitably rugged, and Brynner pontificates impressively. But Shavelson himself calls it “a not-very-good movie.” Pauline Kael’s assessment was more blunt: “Even those willing to accept the hours of incoherence and banality may recoil at the obscenity of being asked to experience the horrors of Dachau as reflected in John Wayne’s bleary eyes.”

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas still sounds disappointed when he writes of Shavelson: “Though Mel was Jewish, he was not Jewish enough. The movie needed to be done by someone with deep conviction.” If he didn’t have conviction when he started the picture, Shavelson says he did by the end. Like his film’s protagonist, he comes to find Israel’s stubborn citizens exasperating but admirable, and his months among them turn him into something of a Zionist. Halfway through the book, at a seder, he has an epiphany: “The escape had taken place, not in some mythical land with an impossible alphabet no one could ever learn, but only a few miles from here, across the desert where tanks had recently rumbled out of that same land of Egypt, only to be turned back in defeat by the descendants of those who had written the very songs the children were singing.” He’s finally proud to be Jewish, proud to have made a movie about Jewish pride. The fun of the best making-of movie books, such as Final Cut (about Heaven’s Gate) and The Devil’s Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities), often comes from schadenfreude—the pleasure of witnessing the payback for megalomania and excess. But you feel for Shavelson, because his intentions are so pure, and because he seems like such a nice guy. He also seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.

Shavelson continued making movies into the 1970s—comedies, mostly. In 1990, more than 50 years after he began writing for Bob Hope, they wrote a bestselling book together, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. Now 90, Shavelson is finishing up a memoir, which he’s calling How to Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can’t. Asked over email about How to Make a Jewish Movie, he pooh-poohed the idea of it being a literary milestone: “I wrote it in part to counter all the negative reviews the film inspired, and to show how a bad film can be explained by circumstances, as well as lack of talent….My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate.”

Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD. How to Make a Jewish Movie is long out of print.

Of course, there’s no reason Gere and Binoche couldn’t inhabit Jewish characters. Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood did it in Marjorie Morningstar half a century ago, when American-Jewish life was much more of a mystery to mainstream America. But in the screen adaptation of Bee Season, out tomorrow, the characters themselves are no longer very Jewish.

Myla Goldberg’s 2000 novel was mainly about families, their myths of harmony, and what happens when those fantasies unravel. In the book, Eliza, the family underachiever, wins her school spelling bee, revealing an aptitude for a heightened experience of language described by Jewish mystics as a path to God. Saul, a lifelong student of mysticism who never discovered such a capacity within himself, begins to train her, unwittingly neglecting his once-favored son Aaron. Meanwhile, Miriam, who steals trinkets from random homes in an abstract effort to restore a world shattered by her parents’ early deaths, begins to lose interest in concealing her habit. Saul is as oblivious to her deterioration as he is to his son’s resentment.

The context for this story of family dysfunction was explicitly Jewish. Saul was a slightly disheveled hippie-turned-cantor at a suburban synagogue, his congregation consisting of the Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzes who rush the oneg tables at such places. Saul, we learned, had had a convoluted journey to his calling, from early years as the son of a deracinated Jewish father to college experiments with acid to the rejection of drugs for the levitations of Jewish mysticism.

In the film, Saul becomes a polished religious-studies professor and Miriam a convert from Catholicism. Though screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel retain the book’s enchantment with Jewish mysticism, they have leached it almost entirely of its context. “We didn’t want the religious side of Judaism to overwhelm the spiritual side of the story,” the directors told me before the film’s release. In the film’s production notes, they explain, “We wanted to explore a more universal and accessible vision of what an internal spiritual quest of any kind might be like.”

For those who have read Bee Season, the resulting film may recall an earlier era when Jewish source materials made for distinctly non-Jewish films, when Jewish writers and producers shied away from overtly Jewish content either as a bid for assimilation or to avoid antagonizing isolationists in the World War II era. This is how both The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) proceeded without references to the protagonist’s Jewish identity or to the fate of European Jewry, respectively; how The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which focuses on Alfred Dreyfus’ trial for treason, managed to fail to mention the Frenchman’s religion.

The directors of Bee Season suggest that this kind of cinematic departure may mean something different today. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t tell this story this way,” Siegel says. “You couldn’t call attention to Judaism without being focused on the Jewish identity of the characters.” For Siegel and McGehee, America’s acceptance of Jews has turned them into such an unexceptional ingredients in the melting pot that artistic works no longer carry the obligation to double as referenda on what it means to be Jewish in America.

Indeed, the Jewish relationship with America has never seemed as symbiotic as it has in recent years, and the only seeming challenge to Jewish films these days is how busy Steven Spielberg and Mel Brooks are. On the other hand, when was the last time Hollywood gave us a film that truly engaged with what it means to be an American Jew today, a “Jewish” film that is neither a Holocaust drama nor a coy, loving send-up of ethnic stereotype? When Peter Riegert, the respected actor who appeared in Crossing Delancey, adapted a short story from Gerald Shapiro’s collection Bad Jews into the 2004 film King of the Corner (featuring Isabellla Rossellini, Eli Wallach, and Eric Bogosian), the film garnered more attention for Riegert having to take it to theaters across the country himself rather than for its sensitive portrayal of a secular Jewish family.

Gyllenhaal, Siegel, and McGehee claim to have made changes for no reason other than to amplify the story, and many are imaginative. For instance, the novel comes to suggest that Saul never developed his daughter’s mystical gift because he perceives the world with his head instead of his heart. “Saul’s transformation into a professor—which was Naomi’s idea—made sense because he has this very intellectual relationship with religion,” Siegel says. For similar reasons, Miriam, who has restrained herself to allow Saul to feel like the leader of the family, has been made a convert. “It’s a nice shorthand for how she gave up something to be with Saul,” Siegel explains.

On the other hand, these alterations leave the Naumanns’ preoccupations without persuasive antecedents. When Aaron, who in the novel would “enter the synagogue at his father’s side feeling like a prince beholding the kingdom he stood to inherit,” rebels against his father, his defiance—a tour of other faiths that culminates in a fascination with Hare Krishna—makes sense only as a reaction to the communal Jewish life his cantor father had imposed. For viewers who haven’t read the book, Aaron’s spiritual sampling will seem like generic adolescent defiance.

Similarly, in the book, Saul’s stewardship of an ordinary congregation implicitly explained his obsession with mysticism; in the film, the avocation comes across as random and weird. These are certainly spiritual times in America, but it may be premature to assume that kabbalist aspirations require no more explanation than a gardening habit. A more specifically Jewish setting might have had a clarifying effect, making the material easier to relate to for non-Jews. Indeed, if Siegel and McGehee are right and Jews have become thoroughly integrated, non-Jews shouldn’t find that backstory too difficult to absorb.

The film does pose an intriguing, if inadvertent, question absent from Goldberg’s novel: Does anything indivisibly Jewish remain after the traditional markers of American “Jewishness”—the stock characters, the rituals of the shul—have been removed? Is there something uniquely Jewish about this story, or is the Jewish teaching it portrays so universally applicable because it’s so unspecific? As American culture performs on Jewish tradition the loving evisceration to which it subjects other cultures before they can join its mainstream, what remains?

A film hardly requires explicit Jewish content to become a compelling portrayal of the Jewish experience. The principals in King of the Corner are only nominally Jewish; their humorous but despairing preoccupations with family and death are not. Sometimes, there are no Jews in the film at all; arguably, one of the most “Jewish” films of recent years was Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog (based on the Andre Dubus III novel), about a family of Iranian immigrants destroyed by exile and family catastrophe.

This was the sense of what it meant to be Jewish that invisibly pollinated those early Hollywood films, films that Jewish studio heads assiduously kept free of explicit references to Jewishness. There is little of this diffuse, emotional sense in Bee Season. The argument has been made that early Hollywood birthed the very idea of the American dream by withholding ethnically specific context while imparting abstract Jewish values. Bee Season withholds both.