Back in Action
“All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that's why it takes so long”
- Steven Spielberg
Being a director is so much more than calling “Action!” or “Cut!” It’s about having a vision to tell a story that has the ability to reach, move and inspire audiences both visually and emotionally. After I finished my last short film, TZEVA ADOM:COLOR RED, I had no idea what I would follow it up with, what story would I come up with or inspire me. I found that story ironically on September 11th of 2019, and it was the true story of a man named Danny Lewin, a leader in big tech during the Internet boom of the late 90’s. There was a connection to TZEVA ADOM, ironically because Mr. Lewin (though born in the US), lived part of his life in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. And it should be noted, that he served in one of the highest counter-terrorist units, Sayeret Matkal. Imagine the most elite team of Navy Seals, that’s the kind of unit he was in. But his story took off much later when he moved his family back to the states so he could enroll in MIT in Boston. To make a long story short, Danny Lewin and his cohorts from MIT created the algorithms that gave birth to high speed internet and eventually the streaming technology we all use today. He was on his way to become the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but it was all cut short on September 11th, 2001. Danny was on American Airlines flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center. For one more compelling twist, and remember this was a man who served in the most elite combat unit of the Israeli Army, it is rumored that he attempted to stop the hijacking of flight 11, only to be killed in action.
Hell of a story, isn’t? That’s what I thought.
I tracked down the author of the book who had chronicled his story and option the book with the goal of turning it into another short film, a proof of concept for a feature or possibly a series. But it seems fate has a way of intervening because the very same weekend I was schedule to fly to Boston with my producer and meet Danny Lewin’s former business partners, my dad went into the hospital, for what apparently was going to be his final time.
I canceled the trip obviously and life changed for the surreal after my dad passed away. I did eventually make the trip to Boston later in the summer with my producer, but it turns out that making this film was not meant to be because and to our complete surprise, there were some people did not want this story told. We ended up selling our option and moving on. It hurt because I really wanted to make that film. I saw it as big ticket opportunity that just didn’t go our way, but sometimes as they say, when one door closes, others open. I also got a serious crash course in strategic business negotiations, so there’s an upside to everything.
With the Danny Lewin project over before it could even begin, I turned to what I would do next. The hole left in me from my dad’s absence seemed to be growing and causing more challenges. I really needed him in this difficult time, and he wasn’t there. I started to write again, I went back to the familiarity of my short, TZEVA ADOM: COLOR RED. Israelis and Palestinians is a subject matter that fascinates me and so I wrote a pilot script based off the short in hopes that one day it might get made by Netflix or HBO. (More on that another time). So something was still missing, besides my dad of course. And that’s when I randomly remembered several years prior hearing stories of all this debris and personal items washing up on the beaches of the West coast around 2012. It turns out, these items had floated across the ocean after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. I couldn’t imagine the amount of loss that occurred with that disaster. And somehow I started to draw a line between that event and what I was experiencing in my own grief. Turns out grief is very universal, no matter what country we are from or what language we speak.
My dad instilled in me a love of baseball, we are lifelong Los Angeles Dodgers fans. We went to the World Series in 1988 and saw the famous Kirk Gibson home run in the bottom of the 9th inning. We’ve attended countless games over the years. The rehearsal dinner for my wedding was held at the Stadium Club at Dodger Stadium. The wheels in my head started to turn and I began researching Japanese culture, specifically in connection with death, loss and grief. Also, baseball is sacred in Japan and has a long rich history and tradition. I started writing a story and I learned the Japanese word for grief - Kanashimi. Suddenly it all just clicked. It’s not an easy topic by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way it felt cathartic to write down my feelings, channeling them into a character who was essentially a shadow of me. The Japanese element gave the story something interesting and unexpected and for the baseball aspects I certainly channeled FIELD OF DREAMS - one of my dad’s favorite movies. Several drafts later and the input of my fearless producer, KANASHIMI was no longer just random thoughts and ideas in my head, it was a script ready to be born into a film.
To Be Continued…..