Is there a market for an Israeli comedy in the US?
The crowd-pleasing 2008 Israeli film ‘Lost Islands’ was featured over the weekend at the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles.
The comedy, produced by Dudi Zilber and directed by Reshef Levy, is about twin brothers in late-1970s Israel who fall in love with the same girl. And according to Zilber, that light remise might be precisely the reason why the film, the biggest box office hit locally last year, has not yet been able to procure American distribution.
All of the recent Israeli films that have resonated with American viewers have had something to do with the conflict – whether it be directly (“Waltz With Bashir,” “Beaufort”) or indirectly (“The Band’s Visit”).
“It’s a big disappointment,” Zilber told The Los Angeles Times, which ran a feature on the film. “Not even one distributor has given us an offer. No one is interested.”
According to Zilber, when it comes to foreign imports, US distributors are far more interested in serious, art-house dramas than in popular comedies. In fact, being a big comedy hit in Israel probably makes “Lost Islands” a harder sell than if it were a small, thoughtful adult drama.
“The movies that sell well overseas — and this is true if they are from France or Iran as well as from Israel — are the ones that have soft or delicate subject matter, a serious theme that would appeal to the U.S. art-house moviegoer,” says Zilber. “Non-English-speaking films are geared to a very specific audience in the U.S. — the cinephiles, the people who want serious drama. So actually, the more commercial the movie is in Israel, the less commercial it would be in America.”
However, even though nobody may want the rights to “Lost Islands”, they are interested in the story. Zilber told The Times that he’s in negotiations with several US-based film companies for the American remake rights to the film.
If remade, it would also join a trend of US adaptions of Israeli productions, ranging from HBO’s In Treatment to:
– Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi, – a 2003 Shemi Zarhin comedy being remade as Diego Ascending, by actress Salma Hayek’s production company about an underappreciated 16-year-old boy charged with taking care of his eccentric family.
- Wristcutters, the 2006 film adaption by director Goran Dukic of Etgar Keret’s short story Kneller’s Happy Campers.
– Colombian Love, a 2004 comedy by Shai Kannot about modern romance, acquired by a Hollywood production company that intends to remake it in an American setting.
So, remember, just because an Israeli film doesn’t have any soldiers in it or bombs going off, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not bound for the bright lights of Hollywood.
YouTube creates another Israeli star
Oren Lavie
The playwright turned singer/songwriter from Tel Aviv is enjoying a new-found noteriety in the US and around the world, appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel show, signing licensing deals with Chevrolet for his song to appear in an ad for the Chevy Malibu, and with the producers of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
And you may just be one of the four and a half million YouTube viewers who watched the video to his song “Her Morning Elegance” from his debut album The Opposite Side of the Sea.
The inventive stop motion-style video has become somewhat of a sensation, and propelled Lavie from anonymity into a kind of cyber celebrity anonymity.
A strong booster in influential indie-based Los Angeles radio station KCRW helped Lavie’s music get heard by the suits, resulting in the licensing deals which enabled him to launch his own label to release the album and produce the video.
The video – produced with Tel Aviv-based husband-and-wife team of Yuval and Merav Nathan – animates the fantastic dream of a sleeping woman without ever leaving her bedroom, using her mattress as the canvas of the dream and her bed frame as the dolly of her journey.
Last month, Lavie performed “Her Morning Elegance” on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, accompanied by a life-size, Muppet-like puppet nuzzling him throughout the song, a move that Lavie described as an attempt to break out of any pre-conceived mold that listeners might have that he was just another humorless singer-songwriter.
Despite living now in LA and not having had an address in Israel for a number of years, Lavie still considers Tel Aviv his home, returning regularly to visit family and friends. And here, he’s also still anonymous, able to walk down the streets without being recognized. But that might be for long.
Time doesn’t pay
In a bizarre tale involving old time pieces, a notorious super-thief, a former queen of France and an Israeli woman living in LA, The Associated Press recently published a report on the recovery of items stolen in Israel’s most damaging heist ever in terms of value. As far as intrigue goes, the story may rival the news from July about Kafka’s lost writings possibly being horded in a cat- and mildew-filled Tel Aviv apartment.
So here’s the deal. A collection of 106 clocks was stolen from Jerusalem’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art back in 1983. One of the pieces in the collection, a gold and rock crystal pocket watch made by renowned watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet for French queen Marie Antoinette (pictured), was worth over $30 million alone.
And the authorities were stumped – until 2006, when the museum told investigators that they’d bought back some of the collection from an anonymous American woman. After some digging, the trail led to Los Angeles resident Nili Shamrat, the widow of one Naaman Diller, a criminal, watch-loving mastermind who stole much high-profile contraband in Israel over the years before passing away in the US four years ago. When local police went to Shamrat’s home to interview her, they saw some of the clocks from the collection around her house. A confession that Diller had told Shamrat about the heist on his deathbed soon followed, and now a media gag order has been lifted.
Investigator Oded Yaniv seems honored to have been involved, expressing admiration for Diller:
“He was a legendary robber. He was very different, very intelligent, and had a unique style,” Yaniv said. “We are all disappointed that we don’t have the chance to sit and talk to him and investigate him. We feel like we missed out on that.”
Ah, if only….
Nostalgia Sunday – 1967
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday
Perhaps the most genius service of the century is Scan Cafe, which takes those crates and crates of slides so many families have lying around the house — the slide projectors having died years ago — and puts them into digital format.
We must have had thousands of slides, carefully organized in slide trays (kids, ask your parents about these), which gathered dust for years in Newton, Massachusetts, until my Dad moved to Los Angeles in 1998 so that they could continue to gather dust in California. After my dad passed away, my sisters took charge of the monumental task of going through his crap – and there was plenty of it. That’s when they found Scan Cafe, which allowed us to finally see pictures of our childhood that we hadn’t seen since… er… well, since our childhood.
We came to visit Israel in June 1967. The trip had been planned months before, as my Israeli mother wanted to visit family and have them meet her husband and children. We arrived a few days after school — and the war — ended. And so, our family outing photos have some historical merit. I’ve selected a few from a trip my parents took to an outpost at the former Jordanian border. Then, as now, it starts by heading towards the Dead Sea:
And here’s the border crossing:
There was plenty of gear for the grown-ups to examine.
And you’ve gotta love my Dad’s eternal fascination with office equipment!
Links to previous posts
Nostalgia Sunday -Simchat Torah flags
Nostalgia Sunday – Heaters
Nostalgia Sunday – Yom Kippur
Nostalgia Sunday – Rosh HaShana
Nostalgia Sunday – Old Coins
Nostalgia Sunday – Historic Homepages
Nostalgia Sunday – Tango
Nostalgia Sunday – Tel Aviv Night Run
Nostalgia Sunday – Missing Dad
Nostalgia Sunday – Clique HaClick
Nostalgia Sunday – Tel Aviv 100
Nostalgia Sunday – Eurovision
Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeliana
Nostalgia Sunday – Classic Movie: The Blaumilch Canal
Nostalgia Sunday – Plaid Bedroom Slippers
Nostalgia Sunday – Historic Photo Shop Shuts Its Doors
Nostalgia Sunday – New Israeliana
Nostalgia Sunday – High Windows
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