DECEMBER 14, 2001
How a Nice Boy From Queens Became a Jewish Star of Sorts
Adult-Film Lead Ron Jeremy Wanted Bar Mitzvah
By BRANDON JUDELL
There are awards nowadays for everything in the Jewish community. Best knishes. Most fashionable yarmulkes. Last year the National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored Joyce Sloane for her “contributions to comedy in Chicago.” This past March, the Jewish Theological Seminary honored 51 rabbis “who sowed spiritual oats during the turbulent ’60s.” But no Jewish organization has ever honored Ron Jeremy, despite the fact that he may be the most famous man in his industry, for sowing a whole different kind of oats — and then sowing some more.
Mr. Jeremy, the hirsute and rotund Jewish “thespian,” may be the best-known living heterosexual male porn star. With more than 1,600 sex films to his credit, 100 of which he has directed, Mr. Jeremy is a legend. And once you’ve seen him up close, which this reporter did during a recent interview at the Krispy Kreme shop on West 23rd Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, you’ll realize this is quite an achievement for a man who looks like your cousin Bruce in the midst of a lactose intolerance attack.
A newly released documentary, “Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy” (Maelstrom Entertainment), chronicles the life of Mr. Jeremy, who belongs to a pack of Jews who have made an outsized impact on the adult-entertainment industry, including Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein and pornography gossip-monger Luke Ford. Born Ronald Jeremy Hyatt in Flushing, Queens, Mr. Jeremy is the son of a physicist father and a former Army cryptographer mother. “I was kind of a nonconformist in those days,” Mr. Jeremy recalls of his youth, “always trying to be the class clown, although with my clothes on.”
Nonconformity didn’t prevent the future porn star, who did not attend synagogue regularly as a child, from becoming a bar mitzvah on his own initiative. “I approached [my mother] one day and said, ‘Listen! All the kids in school say you’re not a real Jew unless you get bar mitzvahed,'” Mr. Jeremy, 48, recalled. “She was ecstatic. She was so glad I wanted to do it. It made her day. She wrote [in her diary] that I did phenomenally, that being at my bar mitzvah made up for the years of struggle it took to raise me.” And, Mr. Jeremy added, “I made out well. Lots of Jewish gelt.” His mother died of Parkinson’s disease soon after.
After graduating from high school, Mr. Jeremy attended Queens College, where he earned a master’s degree in special education. “I did teach for two years at the Association for the Advancement of the Blind and Retarded,” Mr. Jeremy said. “I taught disturbed children, autistic kids, childhood schizophrenics. It was such torture because I knew I was not living my dream.”
His dream was acting, and so Mr. Jeremy began appearing in small productions off-off-Broadway and in children’s theater. Then a girlfriend sent a nude photo of him to Playgirl for their section “The Boy Next Door.” The editors must have liked something about it, because the snapshot was published. Instantly, women began calling him up from across the country, although they reached Mr. Jeremy’s grandmother, as his number was unlisted. A porn-film director phoned, too, and made an offer. Mr. Jeremy asked his father for permission to take the assignment. In a moment of weakness, Mr. Hyatt advised, “Only if you use it as a means to an end,” Mr. Jeremy recalled. Thus began the rise to fame of one nebbishy, but well-endowed, Jew from Queens.
Over the years, Mr. Jeremy has fashioned a brand of virility, albeit one that is sexy in an unconventional way. “No one finds me sexy,” Mr. Jeremy laughs. “I’m right smack in that stereotype. I’m a character actor. As in the case of mainstream movies, you have your romantic lead and you have your character actor. So I’m the pizza-delivery man, the plumber, the guy next door, the older brother.” Not surprisingly, one of the highlights of Mr. Jeremy’s career was playing a rabbi. “Yes,” he said. “In a non-sex role. They never, ever, ever, ever mix religion and porno because the films won’t get distribution.” Not that he hasn’t tried.
“Me and Al Goldstein … wanted to make a film with the four or five girls in the business that really are Jewish. We were going to call it ‘Juicy Jews.’ Al wanted to call it ‘Kinky Kikes.’ I said, ‘You cannot do that, Al, because that’s derogatory, and a lot of distributors are Jewish and they’re not going to sell it.’ We were going to stamp the box ‘100% Kosher.’ We were talked out of it by the distributors who said, ‘People don’t want to think about God while they’re watching an X-rated [film]. It just takes away the fun of it.’ ”
Mr. Judell is a film critic for indieWire.com.
Director Tries To Explain — not Justify — England’s Flirtation With Fascism
By BRANDON JUDELL
‘Listen, I clearly know nothing about being Jewish!” British director Stephen Frears, 60, recently told this visitor to his Soho Grand hotel room. That declaration would probably surprise anyone who knows that Mr. Frears’s forthcoming film, “Liam,” explores the making of an anti-Semite. Even more so if they knew that this director was in his late 20s when he first learned he was Jewish.
Around the time of this self-discovery, Mr. Frears was paying his dues as an assistant director on such 1960s classics as “Charlie Bubbles” and “If….”
In 1972, he directed his first feature, the moderately successful “Gumshoe,” which starred Albert Finney as a bingo-parlor owner who daydreams he’s a Bogart-like private eye. Instead of building on his acclaim, Mr. Frears shied away from the big screen for the next 13 years, preferring to stick to the BBC, often directing the work of such playwrights as David Hare (“Saigon: Year of the Cat,” 1983) and Alan Bennett (“Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” 1978).
Then came the acclaimed film noir “The Hit” in 1985, followed by three movies that cemented Mr. Frears’s reputation as an incisive social commentator with a biting wit: “Prick Up Your Ears” (1987), a biopic of the cheeky gay playwright Joe Orton; “My Beautiful Launderette” (1985), about a gay interracial affair played out amid washing machines, plus “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), a title that caused great discomfort to The New York Times. Here a British woman and her East Indian spouse find their life complicated when her father-in-law, who tortured more than a few people in the old country, moves into their already crowded apartment.
From that point, Mr. Frears had some major hits (“Dangerous Liaisons,” 1988, and “The Grifters,” 1990); a few art-house successes (such as “The Snapper,” 1993), and some major flops, including “Mary Reilly,” the dismal reworking of “Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde” that displayed Julia Roberts at her worst as the warped physician’s maid.
Now with “Liam,” Mr. Frears is back in the milieu he’s most successful with — the British working class and its adversities. He utilizes an autobiographical screenplay written by Jimmy McGovern, a highly regarded, soul-searching TV writer who last got the church up in arms over his “Priest” (1995), a little angst-maker of a film about a gay priest whose preference is not for little boys but for male adults.
The locale of “Liam” is impoverished 1920s Liverpool. The title character (Anthony Borrows) is a 7-year-old stutterer enrolled in a severely rigid Catholic school where he and his mates are taught that for every one of their sins, the nails in Christ’s limbs will cause their Savior more pain. Subsequently, when the lad accidentally sees his mother naked as she’s preparing for a bath (also a primal scene in Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep”), he’s sure he’s going straight to hell.
As for Liam’s father (Ian Hart), he just lost his job when the local shipyard was shuttered by its Jewish owner. Liam’s sister Teresa (Megan Burns) denies being Catholic to get a job as a maid in a Jewish household run by a Jewish adulteress. Once Teresa learns of her affair, the stylish employer starts giving the maid her own daughter’s used clothing to buy her silence. The other Jews on the scene are a pawnbroker who wants to stiff Liam when he brings in a coat to sell and a door-to-door moneylender who refuses to accept money from Liam’s mother for the boy’s confirmation suit. No wonder his father joins the fascists, dons a black shirt and becomes a raging anti-Semite.
So the question that cried out to be asked in the Soho Grand was this: “Why the not-exactly-flattering portrayals, Mr. Frears?”
The director looked out the hotel window, shut his Apple Powerbook, and responded, “Well, if you think about it, if you’re making a film about a man who ends up as a Black Shirt, I guess you’re really talking about a person who has a very limited view of the Jewish community. A very idiotic and a completely stereotypical view of Jewish people. So when a fascist comes along and says, ‘The Jews are responsible for you being unemployed,’ it made sense to him.”
Checking out the vista again, Mr. Frears continued, “If he had been surrounded by Danny Kaye or Zero Mostel, I guess you wouldn’t end up with a Black Shirt because he’d know that Jewish people are like everybody else. Some are nice, and some are not nice. So I suppose if you’re a member of the Liverpool Catholic working class, that was your experience. The shipbuilders were largely Jewish families. I can see it’s conventional that pawnbrokers were Jewish, but it may well have been. And the man who came around and lent the money, the usurer, was Jewish. So it presented a very limited, microscopic view of Jews, which is why Liam’s dad is able to reach such an idiotic conclusion.”
What about Mr. Frears’s reasons for making this film now? He had made “My Beautiful Launderette” in response to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s snubbing of the poor and immigrants.
“As was with almost every other film I’ve made, it was given to me,” the director said. “That’s the way I prefer it. I have no talent for initiating things. I like being brought things, then I can simply react to them. I do have some talent for reading a script and saying, ‘I think this will make a good film.’ By the way, I prefer making films about things I know nothing about. With ‘Liam,’ Jimmy McGovern is a very good writer whom I admire, and the screenplay reminded me of my own childhood. I mean it’s the first time I’ve made a film that deals with Jewish matters that mattered to me. Since I’ve never dealt with it at all, not even a little bit, I’m putting one foot in the water. Also the account of the rise of fascism, I thought it was very important. ”
Mr. Frears protested, however, that the film’s importance to himself has nothing to do with discovering he was Jewish at such a late age. “How I learned the fact was rather strange. I had married a Jewish woman, and on my grandmother’s 90th birthday, my brother told me how pleased she was that I had married a Jewish woman. My mother was Jewish, but why she never told me, I never asked. Maybe she was rebelling against her parents.”
“I’m guessing,” he continued. “Disowning her Jewishness would definitely have been a form of rebellion. She also concealed her German name: Danziger. Maybe that was somehow involved. She was a progressive woman, though, so you’d think the idea of hiding things would be rather alien to her. Then I came along, and my mother used to go to church every Sunday.
“When I started coming to America, I ran into Jewish persons, so I started to know people who were identifiably Jewish. You know, anti-Semitism in England is so silent.”
I mentioned how it wasn’t always so: The myth that Jews ritually murdered Christian children began in England, in 1144.
“I wasn’t around then, but I’m sorry,” Mr. Frears said with a laugh. “I apologize. I apologize for much of English history. But you know, growing up I just didn’t know Jewish people. I remember in boarding school, I was 13, and that was the first time I was aware of being in the presence of someone Jewish. Of course, every time I looked in the mirror I was in the presence of someone Jewish, but I didn’t know that.”
So how does he feel about synagogue now that the cat’s out of the bag?
“I haven’t been in a temple in my life,” Mr. Frears said. “I have no curiosity about that. I mean, I’m not religious anyway, so I don’t know anything about it.
“Let me explain something,” he continued. “There is a much crueler irony to this whole thing. I married a Jewish woman and, in fact, we had a son with a defective gene, familial dysautonomia [from a gene carried by one in 30 Ashkenazi Jews], so we have a disabled son. So if I don’t ask more questions about my past, you can understand why. You certainly won’t be seeing this 60-year-old getting bar mitzvahed.”
Even so, Mr. Frears’s face suddenly lit up when Israel became the topic. “‘Liam’ played in Jerusalem 10 days ago, and I wasn’t thrown out of the country,” he said. “I wasn’t booed.” Then he said he’d love to film “The Producers,” with its many Jewish in-jokes. He pointed out that he had insisted that Jewish actors play the Jewish parts in “Liam.” Over the next half-hour, Mr. Frears bounced from how he’s not religious to how he doesn’t want to know more about Judaism to how ludicrous he finds anti-Semitism to be. So what difference does it make that, despite distancing himself from his ancestors’ beliefs, he continues to make films that focus on the politically, culturally and economically disenfranchised? You can take the man out of the minyan, it seems, but it’s infinitely harder to take the minyan out of the man.
Mr. Judell, a former host of WBAI-FM’s “Arts Magazine,” is a film critic for indieWire.com and Detour Magazine.
