TAKE THIS JEWISH FILM, PLEASE! : Could a Movie Like ‘Mr. Schwartz Goes to Washington’ Get Made Today?

It all started when I began to notice that Woody Allen and Neil Simon found different solutions to their “Jewish problem,” as reflected in “Radio Days” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” respectively. There were also other films bent on transforming leading characters from everyday urban Jews into generic WASP models.

Thinking about it raised my conscientious-objector consciousness. After all, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, right here in Los Angeles, has had to install a bomb detector. A kosher meat market in Munich--today--bears no sign advertising its wares. Somehow, seeing Jews go underground doesn’t strike me as a healthy state of affairs--anymore than do other kinds of social hypocrisy that can lead to minority scapegoating.

It certainly shouldn’t be happening in Hollywood, a place full of liberal thinking and Jews. So a few months ago I wrote about the strange discrepancy in these pages.

The response--mostly pro and some con--included an intriguing note about a bravely funny venture, a movie that could possibly be called “Mr. Schwartz Goes to Washington.” Could it happen in Hollywood today?

The enterprising young producer who wrote thinks so. Not to mention novelist Joseph Heller of “Catch-22” fame, and assorted others struggling to win backing for their project.

But persuading a production organization to support a film about a Jew who would be secretary of state isn’t what they call a piece of cake, even though the property has been adapted from Heller’s 1979 best seller, “Good as Gold,” which was a black comedy that turns the hypocritical shenanigans of the Beltway into a free-for-all.

According to comic/satirist/director David Steinberg, a one-time rabbinical student who is slated to direct the movie, Jewish Hollywood executives are among the most resistant to approving stories that put identifiable Jews into leading roles. He agrees, for example, that it was easy to sell a TV detective series built around an Italian--”Colombo.” But if the show had been called “Greenburg,” the prospects wouldn’t have seemed so good.

“They just haven’t worked it out yet,” said Steinberg, speaking about the industry’s reluctance to let down these particular ethnic barriers.

“Jews in this country still believe a stigma exists. It’s the old melting-pot mentality. Everyone is supposed to lose his cultural identity in exchange for some concept of elegance based on mock-English. And I think Jews are the most susceptible of all to wanting that kind of generic cover. Just look at the wholesale name-changing that goes on.”

Producer Gary Rubin, who gave up developing youth-comedy movies for Showtime in order “to work on something I really cared about, ‘Good as Gold,’ for starters,” said the Jewish element is only an additional problem, perhaps not the central one.

Even a director with hits such as Paul Mazursky (“An Unmarried Woman,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”) has encountered skepticism among potential financial backers for “Enemies,” a black comedy based on an I. B. Singer story about a Holocaust survivor in New York during the 1940s with three wives.

The reputations of Mazursky and actor Richard Dreyfuss, who has expressed interest in the project that he hopes to film next year, have helped “only slightly” in negotiations with backers, the director said. “I didn’t expect to have trouble getting money at this point in my career, especially after just doing a massive hit (“Down and Out in Beverly Hills”).”

“What distributors want are home runs,” said Rubin, “not singles or even doubles. A picture that grosses $100 million is a home run.

“Anyway, that was the answer given when studios were asked why they passed up ‘A Room With a View,’ ” a necessarily independent venture that turned out to be a box-office and critical bonanza.

Nevertheless, he said the comments he has gotten from prospective backers of “Good as Gold” all hit on the script as being “too Jewish, too talky, too ethnic, too literary.” But he plans to stay with it.

“The script deals with a guy making a choice between the potential seduction of a lifetime and doing the right thing. It’s a political morality piece done a la ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ‘70s edition.”

Rubin said he is clear-eyed about the obstacles. He pointed out that “Goodbye Columbus”--the Philip Roth novella, adapted to the screen with its upper-middle-class Jews intact--probably wouldn’t materialize today. He acknowledged a whole different Hollywood, one geared to commercial concerns above all.

So much for the Jewish issue. Beyond that, Rubin sees “Being There” as another movie that would go by the boards now: “Too much political satire even though it’s done in a whimsical vein. And the same goes for ‘Network’ because media exposes are considered chancy, too.”

Heller, who said he likes the “Good as Gold” script, wasn’t so quick to point the finger at Hollywood’s self-conscious Jews, however. “If the right director and actor pick it up--powerful people, in other words--there won’t be an obstacle to producing it. On the other hand, maybe a Streisand and Hoffman shy away because the central character, Bruce Gold, is Jewish.

“On top of that, Bruce Gold is not a good Jew. He’s sort of a fool, an academic little man lured into Washington politics. Of all my books, this one represents the most antagonistic and polemical.”

While the screen version of his best-known novel, “Catch-22,” did poorly at the box office, Heller discounted that factor as possibly dampening interest in “Gold.” He regarded the issue as moot because “there have been four generations of studio execs since 1970.”

Moreover, he claimed not to care about the final result. “All I have is an intellectual curiosity. Since I’ve waived rights of approval and signed over all legal and ethical authority, there’s nothing for me but to sit back and observe impartially.

“In line with that, I have no hopes of what will come across in the movie version. My work is writing novels. When friends ask me, ‘Which actor fits the part?,’ I say, ‘None.’ Bruce Gold is whole and real on the pages of my book.”

Scriptwriter Stephen Geller, who also adapted Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” and “The Valachi Papers” for the screen, has a strong concept of the character and does not want to see it compromised.

“One of the themes,” he said, “follows the maxim Heller set forth: ‘If you ever forget you’re a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.’ But, curiously, the producers who waved us away didn’t object to the caricatures of bigotry. What they protested were the earthy family scenes, the in-talk and a few references to Jewish holidays.”

In one hyper-realistic vignette, Gold has a go-around with his shiksa girlfriend’s anti-Semitic father, Conover. An arch Republican and heavyweight politician, Conover mocks the lowly college professor with malice, variously calling him Goldstein, Weissman, Goldblatt, Freedman, Goldberg and Lipschitz. He tops this with a nursery rhyme about “ikey-kikey riding a bikey.”

But none of it proved bothersome, according to Geller. Rather, he said, studio heads shrugged off the script with “It won’t play in Peoria.”

“A myth,” he said, of the prognosis. “Nothing more than a cynical, self-serving myth. I would guess people in Peoria--whatever the hell that is--are smart and even still know how to read, which is more than you can say about Hollywoodites. It’s my idea that Jewish studio heads would make great publicists for the Third Reich. Confronting themselves in a script is just too painful.

“So what do they do? Give big donations to the United Jewish Appeal and reject any property based on Jewish material.”

In legitimate theater, Geller sees this kind of closet Jewry as a counterpart to homophobia, a linking of the gold star to the pink triangle. He pointed out that Edward Albee, with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and Neil Simon with “Come Blow Your Horn” both disguised their subjects in order to pass before the public.

“It was no accident that they broke into the theater at the same time. Albee’s play was really about two bitchy queens and Simon’s was arch-Jewish with all the clues removed.”

Geller is willing to concede, however, that practically nothing gets an automatic contract these days, estimating that only one out of 36 optioned scripts gets produced.

“With Hollywood’s dollars-and-cents attitude it’s hard to simply make movies about people,” he said. “A picture like ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ is wonderful because it portrays specific people, in this case a Pakistani family. If the Jewishness of ‘Gold’ is a stumbling block, it has to be a reflection of self-hatred, not just a money matter.”

Producer Rubin plans to shoot his picture in Canada, where “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” was made. “Jews have a better feeling about themselves there,” he said. “And nothing loosens a bankroll better than positivism.”